Spanish discovers Yiddish (or the cultural policies of Salomón Resnick in Argentina in the Interwar period)

ALEJANDRO DUJOVNE

Customs officers or smugglers? Literary translation and cultural mediators in peripheral cultures.

Palgrave Macmillan

Año: 2018; p. 91 - 112

Solomon Resnick (Russia, 1894-Argentina, 1946) was, and remains to this day, one of the most important facilitators of the encounter between two linguistic and cultural worlds that rarely met before him: Spanish and Yiddish. His historical significance as a cultural mediator can be measured in the variety and number of intellectual tasks that he carried out as well as in his being one of the first to perceive the need to foster this contact. For him and for the handful of intellectuals and cultural entrepreneurs that propelled similar actions, it was about presenting a yet unknown literary and intellectual repertoire to the new country of arrival, Argentina, and through it to the whole geography of Spanish speakers. His work, which can be read as an extended political-cultural project that unfolded throughout his life, developed through different actions. First, translation itself. This is, the passage of essays as well as political and literary texts from Yiddish into Spanish. His successive selections and translations appeared in various newspapers, magazines and books. In addition to these translations, he published a large number of notes, prologues, short articles, etc., where he sought to present to Spanish-speaking readers the names, styles, concerns, traditions, movements and transformations of Jewish culture in general and Yiddish in particular. Third, Resnick stands out among his contemporaries for the creation and support of publishing projects of great importance. On the one hand, he participated in a number of periodicals, of which the most important were the daily Mundo Israelita (co-founded by Resnick in 1923 and co-directed by him in its first ten years) and the journal Judaica (created in 1933 and directed by him until his death in 1946). On the other hand, he was a constant promoter of the publication of books, mostly produced in not entirely favorable conditions. The fact that all of these publications were not under one imprint has made it difficult to recognize this aspect of his work as a cultural mediator. The first four decades of the twentieth century, the period during which he developed his intellectual work, were the heyday of literary, intellectual and political creation in Yiddish in the world. But these were also the decades, especially the 1930s, where migrations, ideological disputes within the Jewish world and the growing anti-Semitic persecution in Europe, presaged serious threats to the survival of this language.