Translated Holocaust poetry and the reader

This chapter considers how Holocaust memories have been encapsulated in poems, what it means to translate these poems, and what it means to read them. Focusing on poetry about those who fell victim to the Nazis because of a perceived disability, it discusses something of the background to the poetry and how it came to be written. It then considers why we need such poetry and how it can be translated so that the reader of the translation can read in an engaged and creative way. It asks how the reader of these poems in translation differs from the reader of the original poems and how the translator might take this difference into account. It is argued that translation, far from obscuring the memory embodied in the original poem, can instead enhance it, because memory is essentially communicative, and translation is a form of communication. As a result, the reader of the translated poem can gain understanding of the individual memories, without which there is no understanding of history, even where such memories are of necessity only very sparsely documented.