четверг, января 19, 2012

Der Yapanisher Yid

Газета haАрец частично перепечатала статью Росса Перлина из “Forward” о выпуске идиш-японского словаря, насчитывающего 28000 слов. Статья очень любопытная. Приведу пару цитат из оригинала:

Among the dictionary’s virtues are entries based on Weinreich and rendered in the standard orthography of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research; apposite example sentences, primarily from the legendary Moscow literary journal Sovietish Heymland (Yiddish for “Soviet homeland”); user-friendly transliteration, YIVO-style, for every entry, and special marking of all Germanisms, Slavisms and Hebraisms. Its cardinal vice is a price tag of 60,000 yen (nearly $770 at the current exchange rate) — not exactly a vilde metsie, or a great bargain, even in one of the world’s most expensive countries.

The tradition of making Yiddish dictionaries stretches back to at least 1542, when Venice-based polymath Elia Levita, who is best known as the author of the popular Yiddish chivalric romance “Bovo-Bukh,” the original bobe-mayse, and is an improbable ancestor of British Prime Minister David Cameron, compiled a Yiddish-Hebrew-Latin-German dictionary — half a century before the first dictionaries of English began to appear. Today, the YIVO archives contain more than 100 different Yiddish dictionaries of every description, including comprehensive bilingual dictionaries in Belorussian, Dutch, English, French, German, Hebrew (both biblical and modern), Lithuanian, Polish, Russian, Spanish and Ukrainian. Ueda’s dictionary marks a significant milestone: the first time that the full wealth of the Yiddish lexicon has been made accessible in a non-European language (Hebrew aside). The challenges of translation here must have been particularly intense, not least because Yiddish is sweet on diminutives while Japanese thrills with honorifics. Many juicy idioms and interjections, such as oy and feh, apparently defied the lexicographers and fell by the wayside.

Yiddish first came to Japan in the early 20th century, when a trickle of Russian Jews, most of them from Siberia, settled in the port cities of Yokohama, Nagasaki and Kobe. After World War I, Yiddish theater superstar Aaron Lebedeff took Japan by storm on an East Asian tour (a long-forgotten Yiddish operetta, “Mendl in Japan,” appears to have resulted). Two decades later, eminent Yiddishists and Bundists, as well as students and teachers of the famous Mir Yeshiva, were among the several thousand refugees saved by Japanese consul Chiune Sugihara. Most passed through Kobe en route to America, Palestine, the international settlements in Shanghai and other havens.

Read more: http://www.forward.com/articles/149439/#ixzz1jtYNGoFk

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