The Translation of Wiesel’s ‘Night’ Is New, but Old Questions Are Raised – The New York Times
The publisher and the translator of a new English-language edition of “Night,” Elie Wiesel’s harrowing account of life in the Nazi death camps, said yesterday that the new edition corrects several small factual errors in the previous translation, including a reference to the author’s age when he entered the camps.
Oprah Winfrey’s choice of “Night” as the next selection for her television book club on Monday immediately sent the book to the top of national best-seller lists.
But it also revived questions about “Night,” one of the first autobiographical accounts of the death camps and a book that changed modern American understanding of the Holocaust. At times over the last 45 years it has been classified as a novel on some high-school reading lists, in some libraries and in bookstores.
Some scholars who have studied Holocaust memoirs have also raised questions about how much of the book can be verified.
Mr. Wiesel and his literary agent, Georges Borchardt, said in interviews this week that the book was factual and that they had never portrayed it as a novel. They said the differences in the new edition are not significant enough to justify the kind of questions raised about Ms. Winfrey’s last book club selection, the memoir “A Million Little Pieces” by James Frey.
Mr. Frey’s book sold more than two million copies in the three months after Ms. Winfrey chose it last fall for her book club, but a furor erupted last week when The Smoking Gun, an investigative Web site, reported that police and other legal records contradicted portions of Mr. Frey’s accounts of his past.
While Mr. Wiesel, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, notes in a preface to the new edition that the new translation allowed him “to correct and revise a number of important details,” he did not specify what the changes were. Yesterday, Marion Wiesel, Mr. Wiesel’s wife and the translator of the new edition of “Night,” said in an interview that among the changes were a reference to the age of the book’s narrator — that is, Mr. Wiesel — when he arrives in 1944 at Birkenau, the entry point for Auschwitz.
In the previous translation, published in 1960, the narrator tells a fellow prisoner that he is “not quite 15.” But the scene takes place in 1944. Mr. Wiesel, born on Sept. 30, 1928, would have already been 15, going on 16. In the new edition, when asked his age, he replies, “15.”
“At no point did this change the meaning and the fact of anything in the book,” Ms. Wiesel said. “When I worked on the book, I kidded Elie and told him, ‘I don’t think you can add.’ “
Such arguably insignificant details have at times been seized upon by critics, however. In his 1999 book, “Imagining the Holocaust,” Daniel R. Schwarz, a professor of English and a Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow at Cornell University, wrote, “Is not this age discrepancy one reason why we ought to think of ‘Night’ as a novel as well as a memoir?”
Nonsense, said Jeff Seroy, a senior vice president at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, the parent company of Hill & Wang, which first published “Night” in the United States and which also commissioned the new translation.
“Some minor mistakes crept into the original translation that were expunged in the new translation,” Mr. Seroy said. “But the book stands as a record of fact.”
The publisher might itself have contributed to some of the debate. A teacher’s guide to the book posted on both the publisher’s Web site (www.nightthebook.com) and Ms. Winfrey’s site (www.oprah.com) says the book is “only slightly variant from Wiesel’s own personal and familial history.”
Mr. Seroy said the guide had been prepared for the previous translation, by Stella Rodway. He said that Farrar, Straus didn’t change the teacher’s guide because it feared that taking the statement out might raise questions about whether the publisher was trying to cover up any changes.
Ms. Wiesel expressed surprise when told of the statement in the teacher’s guide, which she said neither she nor her husband had ever seen. “I wish they had consulted us about that,” she said.
Other alterations in the new edition, Ms. Wiesel said, include a change to a description of furtive sexual activity by some of the young prisoners as they traveled to Auschwitz in a cattle car. Ms. Wiesel said the original English translation used the word “copulate,” a reference that was changed in later printings to “flirt.” In the new translation, the youths “caressed one another.”
In his new preface, Mr. Wiesel also says that he has reinstated some material that had been cut from his original Yiddish manuscript when “Night” was being prepared for its first publication in France.
Those additions include elaborations on his father’s death, Ms. Wiesel said yesterday, “but at no point is he saying something here that contradicts the original version.”
Mr. Wiesel also acknowledges in his preface that the original Yiddish manuscript was significantly longer and included passages harshly criticizing modern Germany and people who have denied the Holocaust in France and the United States.
Some critics have pointed to those differences as indications that the published version was watered down for public consumption, perhaps losing some of its autobiographical nature.
Ms. Wiesel said when the publisher Arthur Wang approached her several years ago to consider making a new translation of “Night,” she did not believe it was necessary.
Fluent in French, she had never read the English version, she said. Mr. Wiesel notes in his preface that at the time the book was originally published his English was not good enough to judge all of the subtleties of the translation.
Once she began working on the new translation, Ms. Wiesel said, she came to believe that the earlier version lacked “many nuances” of the French original. But even with the changes, neither the old version nor the new is a novel.
“This is a factual account, and the changes were made with full transparency,” she said. “It is Elie who speaks about the differences himself in his preface.”
A version of this article appears in print on Jan. 19, 2006, Section E, Page 1 of the National edition with the headline: The Translation of Wiesel’s ‘Night’ Is New, but Old Questions Are Raised. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe