It’s quite the confluence of talent: Vivian Felsen, a professional translator, Pierre Anctil, a University of Ottawa historian and chronicler of Canadian Jewry, and the preeminent Yiddish poet J.I. Segal.
The trio has intersected, and not for the first time: Felsen is a finalist in the 2018 Governor General’s Literary Awards of Canada for Jacob Isaac Segal: A Montreal Yiddish Poet and His Milieu, her English translation of Anctil’s magisterial study of Canada’s most renowned Yiddish poet.
Published by the University of Ottawa Press last year, Felsen’s translation has been hailed as a “brilliant” and “sensitive” rendering of Anctil’s original work, Jacob Isaac Segal (1896–1954): Un poète yiddish de Montréal et son milieu, which was published in 2012.
“I’m very honoured,” Felsen told The CJN about being a finalist for the prestigious award. “It’s very exciting. I wasn’t expecting it. I put out of my mind the fact that the publisher did tell me they were submitting it.”
In a poetic twist, a few days before the announcement of the finalists, Felsen received word that on Nov. 14, she’ll be presented with the J.I. Segal Award for her translation of The Vale of Tears, the Holocaust memoirs of Rabbi Pinchus Hirschprung, who would go on to become a major religious figure in Montreal.
Anctil is also a winner of the J.I. Segal Award for his 2017 book, Histoire des Juifs du Québec.
This is not the first time the three literary figures have found their fates intertwined: Felsen’s grandfather, Israel Medres, was a longtime journalist for the Montreal-based Yiddish newspaper, Keneder Adler, and penned a portrait of Jewish life in the city from 1900 to 1920 called Montreal Fun Nekhtn (Montreal of Yesterday). The foreword was written by Medres’ colleague, Segal.
Anctil’s scholarly translation into French of Medres’ book appeared in 1997 and inspired Felsen to render the work into English. That experience, in turn, gave her the impetus to translate the second volume of her grandfather’s study, Between the Wars: The Canadian Jewish Community in Transition (for which she won the Segal Award in 2004).
Anctil “gave me a real gift,” Felsen said. “I got to know my grandfather as an adult.” Medres died when Felsen was 18.
Anctil, Felsen said, “has had a real impact on my life because after I translated those books, I started getting requests to translate Yiddish to English.”
Over the past 20 years, Felsen has been involved in Anctil’s translations of Yiddish works by prominent mid-20th century Montreal Jewish cultural figures, such as Keneder Adler founder Hirsch Wolofsky, poet Sholem Shtern, Labour Zionist activist Simon Belkin and lexicographer Chaim Leib Fuks.
Whether it was helping to track down obscure words and expressions in Yiddish, Russian, Polish or German, or reading through a draft of a French translation, “I found myself entering a world I had only known from a child’s perspective – the rich cultural milieu of Montreal’s Yiddish writers and intellectuals, the world of my grandfather,” Felsen states in a foreword to her translation.
The devotion of her grandfather and mother to Yiddish “instilled in me a deep appreciation for the language and a love of Jewish history,” she wrote.
Eventually, she stopped doing French-to-English translations for the government of Ontario and developed her skills as a Yiddish translator.
It all seemed to lead to her latest, award-nominated effort.
While Anctil’s French prose is “erudite and wonderful,” translating it was “challenging,” she said. Included in Felsen’s translation are examples of Segal’s voluminous correspondence with other poets and more than 20 of his poems, few of which had previously been translated into French or English.
Felsen worked from Segal’s original Yiddish verse instead of relying on Anctil’s French translations.
“The sentence structure of Yiddish and English are very similar,” she explained. “They’re both Germanic languages. French is totally different, and to try to translate French back into English just wouldn’t have made sense.”
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Born in present-day Ukraine in 1896, Segal arrived in Montreal in 1910 and published 10 volumes of poetry in his lifetime, including the first book of Yiddish poetry ever published in Montreal, Fun mayn velt (From My World) in 1918. He died in 1954.
His best-known works, Felsen said, are those that were modernist in form, but used traditional subject matter and imagery from Jewish sources.
“He made a lot of use of his Hasidic background,” she said. “He had these images from the shtetl superimposed on Montreal.”
Translating his work was “a wonderful experience. I fell in love with Segal’s poetry,” she said.
Also nominated for a Governor General’s Award is Anctil for his history of Quebec Jewry. Winners will be announced Oct. 30.
