A gorgeously produced, bilingual edition of Nobel Prize laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer's canonical story about a hapless yet charmingly resilient baker named Gimpl, who resists taking revenge on the town that makes him the butt of every joke. Singer's original Yiddish appears alongside his own partial translation, now completed and edited by writer and scholar David Stromberg, and the 1953 translation by fellow Nobel laureate Saul Bellow. With illustrations by Liana Finck and an afterword by David Stromberg.
Isaac Bashevis Singers Gimpl tam was published on March 30, 1945, in the Yiddish-language journal Idisher kempfer, about a month before the Nazi surrender. It tells the deathbed confession of an orphaned baker from the town of Frampol who is targeted by his community for ridicule and practical jokes. About seven years later, Singer was invited by Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg to include Gimpl tam in their Treasury of Yiddish Tales, and Howe asked Saul Bellow to help with the translation. It was finished in a single sitting and published in 1953 in The Partisan Review as Gimpel the Foolthe version that has since been canonized. Yet, unlike every other major work of Singers published in his lifetime, the author had no involvement in the English translation.
In 2006, Joseph Landis, editor of Yiddish, published a draft play script titled Simple Gimpl, made by Singer directly from the Yiddish originalthe closest extant rendition of the story in the authors own translation, and covering a majority of the tale. Now, writer, translator, and literary scholar David Stromberg has completed Singers translation with an aim to address some of the criticism directed at Bellows version. Strikingly, the storys title and opening sentence make a distinction between the Yiddish tam, or simpleton, and the nar, or fool. Gimpl may be considered simple by others, but he is nobodys fool. Through Singers lightly ironic tone, we see that Simple Gimpl is not the story of a fool, but rather one of self-deception and of the personal cost of blind faith. By the end, Gimpl is no longer a simple man, but someone who has accepted the complexity of his life and faith.
Recenzijas
Praise for Isaac Bashevis Singer:
Singers stories have plots that unravel not because they are old-fashionedthey are mostly originals and have few recognizable modes other than their ownbut because they contain the whole human world of affliction, error, quagmire, pain, calamity, catastrophe, woe: things happen; life is an ambush, a snare; ones fate can never be predicted. His driven, mercurial processions of predicaments and transmogrifications are limitless, a cornucopia of invention. Cynthia Ozick
[ Singer] is a spellbinder as clever as Scheherazade; he arrests the reader at once, transports him to a far place and a far, improbable time and does not let him go until the end. Jean Stafford, The New Republic
A peerless storyteller, Singer restores the sheer enchantment with story, with outcome, with what-happens-next that has been denied most readers since their adolescence. David Boroff, Saturday Review
Singer is a genius. He has total command of his imagined world. Irving Howe, The New Republic
Extraordinarily beautiful It's the integrity of the human imagination that Singer conveys so beautifully. Alfred Kazin, The New Leader
"[ Singers]... impassioned narrative art with roots in a Polish-Jewish cultural tradition, brings universal human conditions to life." The Nobel Prize Committee, 1978
Papildus informācija
Winner of Nobel Prize for Literature 1978.
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Isaac Bashevis Singer (19041991) was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978. An immigrant from Poland, he arrived in New York following the steps of his older brother, Israel Joshua Singer. He wrote essays, stories, and other writings for the Forverts, at times under pseudonym. Saul Bellow translated his story Gimpel the Fool, which heralded his talent for a young generation of American Jewish readers. For years Singer published his stories in The New Yorker, where he developed a distinct style. His numerous books include Satan in Goray (1935), Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories (1957), The Magician of Lublin (1960), The Slave (1962), The Spinoza of Market Street (1963), A Friend of Kafka and Other Stories (1970), Enemies, a Love Story (1972), Old Love (1979), and Shadows on the Hudson (1997). His work has been translated into dozens of languages.
Saul Bellow (1915 - 2005) was born of Russian Jewish parents in Lachine, Quebec, and was raised in Chicago. He received his bachelors degree from Northwestern University in 1937. His novel The Adventures of Augie March won the National Book Award for fiction in 1954. His further awards include the Pulitzer Prize for Humboldts Gift (1975); the International Literary Prize for Herzog, for which he became the first American recipient; and the Croix de Chevalier des Arts et Lettres, the highest literary distinction awarded by France to non-citizens. In 1976, Bellow was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Liana Finck is a regular contributor to The New Yorker, The Awl, and Catapult. She is a recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, and a Six Points Fellowship for Emerging Jewish Artists. She has had artist residencies with the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and Tablet magazine. Her first book, A Bintel Brief, was published in 2014.
David Stromberg, a writer, translator, and literary scholar, is editor for the Isaac Bashevis Singer Literary Trust. His books include Baddies, Idiot Love and the Elements of Intimacy, and A Short Inquiry into the End of the World. He is the editor of Old Truths and New Clichés: Essays by Isaac Bashevis Singer (Princeton, 2022).
