Hear this episode and find out more information about it at theallusionist.org/yiddishblm.
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, find language attempting to dig a hole to the other side of the world.
In today’s episode, three translators talk about how, a few weeks ago, they set about translating Black Lives Matter into Yiddish. Now, the Yiddish word for ‘black’, shvartse, is in some contexts and uses a slur, so just a heads-up about that. There is also one category B swear.
On with the show.
ANTHONY RUSSELL: "Afroamerikaner Lebns Zenen Vikhtik".
ARUN VISWANATH: "African-American lives are important."
ANTHONY RUSSELL: "Afroamerikaner Lebns Hobn a Vert".
ARUN VISWANATH: "African-American lives have value."
ANTHONY RUSSELL: And "Afroamerikaner Blut iz Nisht Keyn Vaser".
ARUN VISWANATH: "African-American blood is not water."
ANTHONY RUSSELL: My name is Anthony Russell. I perform under the name Anthony Mordechai Tzvi Russell. And I am a vocalist, composer and arranger of music in the Yiddish language.
I'll be quite honest. I had to develop sort of a consciousness around ‘shwartse’ as a pejorative word, because the very first time I ever performed in Yiddish, there was somebody who was there and they emailed somebody - who emailed somebody else, and then it got back to me - a kind of descriptive email about the experience of seeing me sing in Yiddish. And I was described as "the shvartse Anthony Russell mit an earring in eyn aoyer". I was described as "the black Anthony Russell with an earring in one ear". And when I read that, I didn't have enough Yiddish, enough spoken Yiddish, to really describe myself in the language. So I used to say, "I'm Anthony Russell, or as I've been described, the shwartse Anthony Russell mit an earring in eyn aoyer," which people used to laugh, probably because I was calling myself this sort of ambiguous pejorative.
And I think in the beginning I had no idea that that was - I had no real idea that that was the case. And then as it went on, I sort of played it off as, you know, I'm in on the joke. This person said this thing that was problematic in their description of me.
HZ: Were you trying to make people feel comfortable by doing this sort of jokey reference to yourself?
ANTHONY RUSSELL: It's a very good question. I didn't know this was going to be a podcast and therapy, but we can go there. On some level, I probably was whether I whether I knew it or not, because I knew that sort of my appearance as a performer of Yiddish was kind of so anomalous - here was this black guy singing in Yiddish, it's not a common thing - as a performer, I was kind of reaching for anything that would help me sort of establish myself so I could just do what it is that that I do, which is sing in Yiddish. So. If it was a matter of describing myself in a language that I felt like the audience would be familiar with, that would put them at ease, that's something that I think I really was was drawn to because I needed to win them on my side. Yeah, I mean, it's it's complicated, it's complicated. I think it's very, very incisive question because, I mean, I think... Yeah. It was almost like, well if I could describe myself on their terms and maybe that's like that much less amount of work that I have to do, just kind of justify the fact that I'm here doing whatever it is that I'm doing.
HZ: But you were effectively describing yourself with a slur?
ANTHONY RUSSELL: Yeah.
HZ: Is it a word that you use with anyone else?
ANTHONY RUSSELL: No. No.
I feel my sort of outsiderness in the Yiddish language very intensely and it's something that I have to work with on a regular basis, an occupational hazard as a black guy who sings in Yiddish. So it made me nervous, but then I was like: I work in Yiddish, and I live in Yiddish. And my husband and I, we flirt and we joke using words and phrases in Yiddish, because it's a language that's really important to who I am and to what I do and to my own self-expression. So why shouldn't I be able to express the desire for self-determination, the desire to live, in this language, if I'm doing so much living in this language? It's like I really had to take myself out and give myself a talking-to, in Yiddish, as to why even me, little old me, you know, a klanekeit. I'm like, you know, nothing, bupkes, I'm basically goat shit: even little me deserves to be able to say that I matter in the language in which I work.
HZ: Why were you feeling outside of the language before?
ANTHONY RUSSELL: Because I'm a Jew by choice. I didn't grow up Jewish. There aren't a lot of black people in Yiddish-speaking spaces. Probably because on some level, like, I hadn't figured out exactly where I fit in the Yiddish language. I mean, if I don't, if I no longer use maybe the best known word to describe what I am then, then probably - I don't know, I'm probably... on some level I'm going to avoid talking about myself in those sort of direct terms.
HZ: So when it came to rendering ‘Black Lives Matter’ into Yiddish, this group of translators did not want to use the word ‘shvartze’.
ANTHONY RUSSELL: It's a pejorative word, I think, when it is applied to people. And even that being the case, I can still understand where somebody who could speak Yiddish would assume that would be the word that would be used in this case. Except I don't know, if you're the person being described and you know anything about the word 'shvartse', it doesn't strike me as the word I would immediately want to go to just because I know that it has this pejorative meaning.
JONAH BOYARIN: It's Judeo-English that ‘shvartse’ really takes on that that particular nasty pejorative sense.
HZ: Jonah Boyarin is a translator, political writer and anti-racism organiser.
JONAH BOYARIN: For me, when I heard it growing up it was in English, a use of the term and often it was used in a collective way, ‘the shvartses’, which is, I think, an added level of sort of objectification and othering and contempt and fear-mongering.
ARUN VISWANATH: I think one of the ways in which it's effective as a slur in English is you could have said ‘black people’. Or you could have said ‘the blacks’, which is already sounding pretty pejorative. But then you borrowed a word from Yiddish - which in Yiddish may have been neutral - like, why are you using that in English? That, to me, is where there is like sort of an intentionality that comes with using that word in, Jonah, what you described as Judeo-English, which I think is very apt.
HZ: Arun Viswanath is a product analyst in tech, and is also a Yiddish translator - his first language was Yiddish.
ARUN VISWANATH: I grew up speaking Yiddish in the suburbs of New Jersey, so it's my first language. It's true that the word has been historically neutral in Yiddish and it's just been an adjective to describe the colour as well as the person. You can't really ignore the fact that it's been used by so many in English and also a not insignificant number of people in Yiddish in a derogatory way. And you can't really ignore that.
ANTHONY RUSSELL: Yiddish is not the only language that has this issue with words for for people of the African diaspora being pejorative or becoming pejorative or being used pejoratively against people of the African diaspora. There seems to be this very long history of words that are used to describe people from the African diaspora eventually becoming pejorative, because I think it just kind of the mere existence of people of the African diaspora was considered to be pejorative and unruly. So words that were used to describe them eventually became pejorative and unruly as well, because people wanted to solidify where they kind of stood in a hierarchy of skin colour. Which, of course, still exists.
JONAH BOYARIN: And it also brings the problem of asking, well, it's such a self-conscious process, and who is the audience? What are we making really respectful, sharp, diverse, thoughtful kind of lexicon of Black Lives Matter for? And I think part of what I and we wanted to demonstrate in this is that Yiddish has room for this current political moment. Yiddish has room for talking about, writing about, chanting about and taking action for Black Lives Matter. Part of my goal in suggesting this project was as a way of signalling to the Yiddish community or creating a conversation in the Yiddish community that said “Black Lives Matter is of central significance to us”. I really do think that anti-racist Black Lives Matter liberatory work belongs in every sphere of our life, and where it's not happening, probably the opposite, by default, even if even if not through malice, is going to be happening.
ANTHONY RUSSELL: I want to have a vocabulary in order to be able to talk about things that directly affect me as an as an African-American, and as a black Jew, and as a Jew, I should have I should be able to talk about things that affect my life. And the Black Lives Matter movement has affected my life immensely. It was very important for me that this particular sentiment and this particular vocabulary have an inherent dignity, because the things that it was expressing and the things that it was describing and the sentiments that it was expressing were about dignity. And that dignity could only be conveyed as far as I'm concerned, by being grammatically correct. Also, having a word that was already pejorative already moves the potential of the phrase into a space that is not dignified. If I said ‘Black lives matter’ and the word for ‘black’ was pejorative, that already undermines the message of the phrase. Which is why it was really important for me to be working with people who speak Yiddish much better than I do. That absolutely had to be the case. And we were really lucky to have Arun working on this document because of that.
ARUN VISWANATH: Thank you for mentioning the network of people. I was working with a number of other native speakers myself. Yiddish is my native tongue, but I was raised in an English-dominant environment, AKA the suburbs of New Jersey. And so I was working with a number of native Yiddish speakers and Yiddish experts and linguists involved with the League for Yiddish, which is an organisation that I serve on the board of, which also released an English-Yiddish dictionary a few years ago, of which my mother is one of the editors, so she helped a lot here.
HZ: The team came up with several different ways to say ‘Black lives matter’ in Yiddish, both as a sentence and as the name of the movement.
ANTHONY RUSSELL: It was really important to me for some reason, that at least one version of it be a literal transliteration of the phrase in English, because I wanted it to retain a quality of its thrust and its original language. So initially we discussed having it be 'Blek Lives Metter', as it would be somewhat pronounced in Yiddish or by a Yiddish speaker. This was further backed up by, I should say, later backed up by a post that I saw on Facebook about a bunch of Orthodox kids who were yelling "Blek Lives Metter" at cars that were driving through their neighbourhood, exactly the same, there was no translation going on. I look on that as being kind of a proof that the strength of the phrase really is in its original state of the language that it was created in.
HZ: So it's like a loanword?
ANTHONY RUSSELL: A loan word, a loan phrase. I'm not too familiar with Hasidic Yiddish. But somebody told me that that Black has actually already entered Hasidic Yiddish as a word to describe Black people and also possibly pejoratively. I don't know - are either of you familiar with the use of the word 'blek' in Hasidic Yiddish?
JONAH BOYARIN: I've seen it use some. I also, unfortunately, have seen ‘shvartse’ used plenty.
ANTHONY RUSSELL: So, yeah, I discussed that with with Jonah. Jonah was receptive. And what was your what was your thinking behind retaining that - at least initially, at least in some form, retaining the phrase itself in translation? Or not in translation, rather in transliteration.
JONAH BOYARIN: Yeah, I liked it. I just hadn't thought of it until you suggested it, then I was like, oh, God, yeah, this works. And, you know, I can say certainly it works for me also because I'm a native English speaker. So it's very easy for me in Yiddish to say "Blek Lives Metter". And it might actually be a different thing for many of the Yiddish speakers in the world who are not fluent English speakers or are more outside the American context. And, as I thought that through too and you and I talked through, I think you said, Anthony, that this is a movement that comes out of the American context and we actually get to own the specificity of that movement here. And that that's a respectful thing to do. So I liked and still like your solution for those reasons.
ANTHONY RUSSELL: It's interesting because the more that I thought about it, the more I realised that our initial approach was a little bit limited, because Black Lives Matter is now a global movement of realisation that Black lives matter regardless of the country in which they happen to be. So what was interesting, when we started sort of leaking this vocabulary into Yiddish-speaking spaces, was the phenomenon of people who, personally, I don't think were necessarily asking these questions in good faith, who were saying, "Well, why don't you use ‘shvartse’? Shvartse’s already there, why don't we just use this? All of this is needlessly politically correct. And, oh, you're using Afroamerikaner; what if the people who are Black aren't from America, then what are you going to do?" And personally, I had no use for this because these were people who were very accomplished Yiddish speakers who were making these kind of arguments. People who had grown up speaking Yiddish, people whose families had spoken Yiddish. And as people who have a considerable amount of personal life investment in the language, why didn't they suggest what a person of the African diaspora who lived in England or a person of the African diaspora who lived in China - why didn't they suggest what that person should use? Instead, they were obsessed with pointing out about what a bad job we were doing because we hadn't been as inclusive as they wanted it to be. Except I'm not sure they actually wanted it to be inclusive.
And then we actually had people who were wanting to support black people in other countries besides the United States. And they really just did the work themselves. So the day after we sort of leaked the documents, somebody was marching in Vancouver with a sign that said 'Afro-Kanade', 'Black Canadians' - they knew how to do it! This person had the ability to do it. The whole idea is that personally, I think, it's that we put this out there so people could do this work themselves to some degree. This was a starting point, a point of departure.
HZ: So as well as the transliteration, Anthony, Arun and Jonah wanted to translate Black Lives Matter, and came up with several different ways to do it.
ANTHONY RUSSELL: "Afroamerikaner Lebns Zenen Vikhtik".
ARUN VISWANATH: "African-American lives are important."
ANTHONY RUSSELL: "Afroameriker Lebns Hobn a Vert".
ARUN VISWANATH: "African-American lives have value."
ANTHONY RUSSELL: And "Afroamerikaner Blut iz Nisht Keyn Vaser".
ARUN VISWANATH: "African-American blood is not water."
ANTHONY RUSSELL: "Afroameriker Lebns Hobn a Vert". 'Hobn a Vert' was not a turn of phrase I was familiar with. I'm assuming it's almost like ‘has a meaning’ or ‘has a purpose’.
ARUN VISWANATH: Literally means 'has a worth'. Does that work in English, 'has a worth'?
ANTHONY RUSSELL: ‘Is of worth’.
ARUN VISWANATH: It's not quite... It's something more like 'has value'.
JONAH BOYARIN: Or "African-American lives are of equal worth" might be a loose translation.
ARUN VISWANATH: Yes. If you throw in an 'aoykh' in there.
ANTHONY RUSSELL: Oh it’s ‘aoykh a vert’? ‘Aoykh a vert’, actually, great.
ARUN VISWANATH: There is a term in Yiddish, 'hefker', which means not belonging to anybody, anybody does as they will. And so another term which multiple, I think, people converged on some version of this, the one that the League for Yiddish out, is "Afro Lebns Nisht Keyn Hefker", which means "lives of those of African descent, you can't just do whatever you want with them", kind of?
JONAH BOYARIN: They're not disposable.
ARUN VISWANATH: They are not disposable. Yeah.
ANTHONY RUSSELL: "Afroamericakaner Blut iz Nisht Keyn Vaser." “African-American blood is not water.” And if I'm not mistaken, that's a sort of reinterpretation of an existing Yiddish idiom, which kind of gets to the point of the importance of Black lives in a pre-existing idiom. Which to me is like beautiful, what more could I possibly ask for? I'm trying to remember exactly who introduced that - Arun, it was you?
ARUN VISWANATH: I think I came up with it, but then I think also somebody else independently came up with it. So I was one of the people who thought of it. But it must have not been the most innovative because I think it was already on the tip of people's tongues. And in the way I know the idiom, "Blut iz nisht keyn vaser," blood is not water, but specifically meaning “family's family, you don't just leave family out to dry.” And then somebody else posted this, and it seemed like they had come up with that on their own. And I commented on it and I said, "Oh, yeah, it's such a great riff off of this idiom, which means ‘family is important’," and they were like, "No, it means killing is bad." And I was like, well, that is a very convenient double entendre in the same medium; I think both contribute well and work well with the message behind saying that Black Lives Matter.
HZ: Today you heard from: Anthony Mordechai Tzvi Russell, vocalist, composer and arranger of music in the Yiddish language; Jonah Boyarin, writer and organiser; and Arun Viswanath, product analyst and translator. I’ll link to all of them at theallusionist.org/yiddishblm.
And coming up in today’s Minillusionist, Arun talks about another challenge he had with the word ‘shvartse’ in a translation.
MINILLUSIONIST
ARUN VISWANATH: I'm also a Yiddish translator. So I just translated the first book of Harry Potter into Yiddish. And I guess this kind of goes back to what I was saying about the word ‘shvarts’ in my experience having been neutral, was that I actually used the term to describe Dean Thomas, who's explicitly described as being black in chapter seven when they're all being sorted into their houses:
HZ: “‘Thomas, Dean,’ a black boy even taller than Ron, joined Harry at the Gryffindor table. ‘Turpin, Lisa’ became a Ravenclaw and then it was Ron’s turn.” Ron’s sorted into Gryffindor, there’s some rejoicing while the fourth and final person, Zabini, Blaise, is sorted. If this seems like more information than you need... buckle up.
ARUN VISWANATH: And it's so weird because it's almost like a throwaway line; that line is actually not included in certain editions, so I don't know if she took it out in later editions or if she added it in later editions. I'm not sure. So that made it even more complicated.
HZ: Oof. And people thought the different titles of the UK and US editions was the controversial change.
Arun’s right: line is not in the original British version, which says, “And now there were only three people left to be sorted. ‘Turpin, Lisa’ became a Ravenclaw and then it was Ron’s turn” etc etc. From my investigations, I have learned that the line about Dean Thomas has been in the US edition from the book ever since it was first printed in 1998, but never in the British edition, which was released in 1997. In 2004, the absence of Dean Thomas was explained by the author on her own website, I quote: “This was an editorial cut in the British version; my editor thought that chapter was too long and pruned everything that he thought was surplus to requirements.”
You may wonder why Dean Thomas, a recurring character throughout the series, and one of the few specified as a person of colour, would be the character considered ‘surplus to requirements’, rather than, say, Turpin, Lisa who plays no further part in proceedings.
You may wonder why Dean Thomas would be surplus to the British edition but not the US edition.
You may wonder why this is the only difference between the UK and US versions of the story that is a change to the contents rather than just converting British English terms to US English terms.
You may wonder whether it’s a mathematical problem, as the British edition says three people were left to be sorted - Lisa Turpin, Ron Weasley, and Blaise Zabini, - whereas the early US edition also says there were three people left to be sorted then names four: Dean Thomas, Lisa Turpin, Ron Wealey and Blaise Zabini. The ‘three’ has been corrected to ‘four’ in later US editions. The UK edition has remained three and no Dean Thomas.
You may wonder.
Arun’s right, it does make it even more complicated.
ARUN VISWANATH: The reason why I think I described it earlier as throwaway is because it has absolutely no bearing on anything. So I kind of thought like, oh, you know what? Maybe instead of using the word shvarts, I'll just cut out that phrase entirely, because in some editions it's not there. But then I was like, hold on a second. I don't want to delete this guy's race just because I want to avoid using this particular word that seems to be making the problem worse.
And I kind of went back and forth and I sort of felt like, OK, I'm using ‘shvarts’ and not ‘shvartse’, which is just a coincidence that it happened, the declension in that sentence happened to require shvarts and not shvartse or shvartzer. So to my sensibilities, it sort of seemed far away enough from the slur that it wouldn't bring out associations with that. But I think in future editions, I am going to change it to something else, because I don't I don't need to use that word. And if it's going to cause pain to people, there's no need for me to use that. And there are other ways to describe it.
The Allusionist belongs to Radiotopia from PRX, a collective of the best independent podcasts around. Find them all at radiotopia.fm.
Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
fictile, adjective: made of clay by a potter; of or relating to pottery.
Try using it in an email today.
This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman. The music is by Martin Austwick of palebirdmusic.com.
Thanks to Ishbel McFarlane, Matilda Zaltzman, Arlie Adlington, and all you Twitter detectives who sent me pictures of the relevant pages of your copies of the first Harry Potter book.
Find the show on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook @allusionistshow. And if you want to hear all the episodes, or read transcripts thereof, or learn more about the topics therein, visit the show’s forever home theallusionist.org.
