Traducir la posmemoria del HolocaustoGravedad, de Elizabeth Rosner
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Universitat de València
info
ISSN: 2444-7439
Year of publication: 2024
Issue: 10
Pages: 129-139
Type: Article
More publications in: Revista académica liLETRAd
Abstract
Elizabeth Rosner is an American essayist, poet and novelist, born in New York to Holocaust survivors of German and Polish origin. Rosner’s literary production fuses her imagination with the silences and shattered stories that shaped her sense of self growing up in the aftermath of the Holocaust, delving into its ongoing reverberations and into the nature of the inherited, unescapable trauma. This paper explores the challenges of translating postmemorial poetry, drawing on my own experience of turning Gravity, her celebrated poetry collection, from English into Spanish. Merging poetry and prose, the author-persona confides a sustained, intimate exploration of her own identity as a member of the second generation, attempting to work through an event that, beyond her parents’ silences, defies narrative reconstruction. Rosner acknowledges these boundaries and leaves room for the inaccessible and illegible, reflecting the quality of unreadability inherent to Holocaust literature, the void of that which resists being interpreted or deciphered. Yet, at the same time, she struggles to evoke and enact her childhood and youth memories, symbiotically turning to both the expressive urge of poetry and the temperance of reflective prose in order to come to terms with this belated memory. By revisiting and rewriting her life, she reaches a form of posttraumatic growth only attainable through literature. Indeed, translating her work poses complex questions about the boundaries of communicating and representing the Holocaust.
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