The Difficulties of Verbalizing Trauma: Translation and the Economy of Loss in Claude

Lanzmann's "Shoah"
Author(s): Gabriela Stoicea
Source: The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association , Fall, 2006, Vol. 39,
No. 2, Special Convention Issue: History, Memory, Exile (Fall, 2006), pp. 43-53
Published by: Midwest Modern Language Association

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 The Difficulties of Verbalizing Trauma:
Translation and the Economy of Loss
in Claude Lanzmann's Shoah
Gabriela Stoicea

Upon its release in 1985, the nine-and-a-half-hour monumental oral

history of the Holocaust, Shoah, was hailed as "the film event of the centu
ry" (Lanzmann, "Obscenity" 201), driven as it was by an almost obsessive
urgency to bring to memory and record the workings of the genocidal
machinery of destruction developed by the Nazi regime. Today, a little over
thirty years since Claude Lanzmann first started work on the film that
brought him international acclaim, Shoah is still considered by most critics
a truly revolutionary artistic and cultural production.
With its strict dismissal of any direct representation of the past,
whether by means of fictional reenactment or genuine archival footage,
with its desacralizing insistence on minute details and on a testimonial
reenactment, rather than an aesthetic figuration, of traumatic experience,
Shoah is unlike any other cinematic exploration of the Holocaust before
and after it. It is a film on the borderline between documentary and fic
tion, made up exclusively of testimonies that relate past to present in a
surprisingly economical palimpsest of voices, faces, and places. On the
deeper epistemological and symbolic levels, Shoah challenges our notions
of historical knowledge and understanding. It engenders a "collapse of the
materiality of history" (Felman 134) and endorses a view of the Holocaust
as an experience which resists trivialization through ready-made cultural
discourses and predetermined cinematic modes of representation. The
alternative cognitive model Lanzmann offers us is based on an outright
dismissal of the obscene project of understanding the "convoluted logic of
dehumanization that characterized the Final Solution" (Bernard-Donals
and Glejzer 12).
The extensive critical scholarship on Shoah has repeatedly taken up and
analyzed visible indications of reciprocity between Lanzmann's film and
psychoanalysis, in terms of both content and procedure. Particularly in the
past decade or so, with the advent of new insights in trauma theory, the
main emphasis seems to have fallen on trauma as a crucial psychoanalytic
category for understanding Lanzmann's cinematic and philosophical
endeavor. Notwithstanding this shift of critical paradigm, surprisingly few
efforts have been made to reevaluate, in psychoanalytic terms, the

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metaphorical role of translation in Shoah as a space within the cinematic
discourse for the enactment of paradoxes typical of traumatic experience
in general.
Shoah uses not one but several kinds of translation. Each of these com
bines technical specificity and symbolic figuration to a greater or lesser
degree. The most obvious form of translation used by Claude Lanzmann is
consecutive interpretation by trained professionals, whose physical pres
ence within the diegetic space of the film is either implied through aural
impressions or made directly visible on the screen. Another form of trans
lation, namely subtitles, reveals itself solely in relation to English-speaking
audiences, adding yet another layer of complexity to the already impene
trable linguistic texture of the film. Thirdly, Shoah also intimates the exis
tence of a type of translation performed not by an outside agent, such as
the translator/interpreter, but by the speaker him- or herself.
Before taking a closer look at the third, and for my purposes most
important, type of translation, I will briefly dwell on the aforementioned
intervention by professional interpreters. That their translational compe
tence became an essential prerequisite for carrying out interviews with
witnesses whose preferred language(s) the director did not speak should
not come as a surprise, particularly in a film which makes use of six lan
guages in total. Whenever Lanzmann's foreign language skills prove insuf
ficient and threaten to break down communication between filmmaker and
interlocutor, translation rescues the transmission by converting the origi
nal message into the language of the interviewer but of next to none of the
witnesses. Consequently, the overall impression remains that of a film
dominated by a foreign language of translation that literally and symboli
cally defies understanding and is fragmented by trauma. Beyond this func
tional role, what alerted critics to the potential for symbolic meaning in
the act of translation was Lanzmann's decision to include the lengthy
translated sequences in the final version of the film instead of replacing
them with more accurate French subtitles. The director observed the same
principle in the book which reproduces the entire text of the film: "I have
completely respected their [the interpreters'] method of translation . . ..
the exact words, the hesitations, the repetitions-all the crutches of the
spoken language" (Lanzmann, Shoah. An Oral History xi). In good keeping
with Lanzmann's decision not to edit out the contributions of his French
translators, the English subtitles of the film are synchronized with the
French translations and not, as one would expect otherwise, with the
source-language messages. Francine Kaufmann's subsequent article "Inter
view et Interpretation consecutive dans le film Shoah de Claude Lanz
mann" details the numerous difficulties with which her translation work
for Lanzmann was wrought and suggests that the director conceived of
translation as a key catalyst in his cinematic enterprise. Some notions from

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trauma theory can help us make more sense of the multiple roles of trans
lation in Shoah and reconsider the dynamics between spectator, translator,
and interviewer through that very lens.
First of all, the multiplicity of languages in Shoah and the necessity for
translation to create a space of encounter between witness and listener
become emblematic of the radical foreignness of all traumatic experience
even to its own participants, as well as of the oftentimes painful yet
futile attempts of trauma survivors to "muster a language capable of
making the viewer, the interviewer, see" (Bernard-Donals and Glejzer 8).
This language may very well be that of a film which tries to make its
viewers see that there is nothing to see, at least not in the sense of physi
cal traces that the cinematic medium can capture. But, in Shoah at least,
spoken language becomes just as, if not even more, important than the
visual language of the film. Of the eight Jewish survivors to whose testi
monies the film comes back time and again, only three necessitate the
presence of a professional interpreter. The reason for this is that,
whether by choice or by necessity, Mordekhai Podchlebnik, Motke Zaidl,
and Itzak Dugin verbalize the traumatic events in Yiddish or Hebrew,
two of the three languages that lie outside the sphere of Lanzmann's lin
guistic competence. The symbolic content with which translation is
invested in the testimonies of camp survivors is of a different nature
than for the only other category of interviews carried out through the
mediation of a professional interpreter: those of Polish bystanders. This
is apparent also in the fact that while Lanzmann allows the three Yid
dish- or Hebrew-speaking witnesses to set and regulate the pace of their
narration, he adopts a more aggressive interviewing style in his inter
views with various Poles, and this, in turn, dictates a quicker tempo for
the translation as well. The frequency, visibility, and aggressiveness of
Lanzmann's interventions into his witnesses' testimonies reach their
absolute peak in the interviews with former Nazi officials. The fact that
the French director did not commission any translation services for these
latter interviews, despite his obvious difficulties in speaking German,
suggests that the presence of translators was not dictated solely by the
linguistic barrier between interviewer and interviewee but also by the
nature of their encounter and the message that Lanzmann wanted to
convey.
In order to fully appreciate the dimensions and complexity of Lanz
mann's project concerning the language of trauma, we should note that
some interviews with camp survivors are also carried out, and also deliber
ately, without the mediation of translators. In these cases, however, the
absence of translators functions differently than it does in interviews with
Nazi officials. It signals a different kind of translation work, one which
demonstrates that linguistic foreignness, with all its psychological and

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symbolic connotations, can persist even outside the realm of professional
translation. In Shoah, testimonial accounts carry the full dimension of their
foreignness in relation to Jewish survivors themselves, many of whom
painfully try to articulate traumatic experiences in broken, heavily accent
ed English, German, or even French. The banishment into a language
other than their mother tongue(s) of all Jewish survivors but one in this
film already entails an initial process of internalized translation from one
language into another, which in some cases is followed by a translator
mediated transposition into yet another foreign language. In the case of
internalized translation, the positions of speaker and translator are col
lapsed into one, as if to suggest that working through a trauma always
involves some sort of translation. The ensuing physical impression of dis
comfort for the viewer is very much in keeping with Lanzmann's intention
of creating a film "pour le corps"' (Cuau 14) as an enactment of his belief
that the truth of history "s'inscrit lentement dans le corps"2 (Cuau 14) but
also as an implicit tribute to the etymology of the word trauma, which in
ancient Greek denoted an injury inflicted on the body instead of the mind
(Caruth, Unclaimed Experience 3).
Be it in its internalized or externalized form, translation negotiates
between two otherwise irreconcilable parties while simultaneously pro
claiming their lack of control over the act of translation per se and over
what is lost in the process. This loss indexicalizes that which can never be
accessed in trauma. Though very sporadic, there are moments in Shoah
when Lanzmann attempts to reclaim this deficit, or at least to draw our
attention to it. He does so by exposing, somewhat brutally, the inner
workings of translation. In a couple of sequences, which he did not edit
out subsequently, Lanzmann admonishes the translators for failing to pro
vide an accurate translation of the source language text. Faithfulness of
rendition seems important to the director because it is emblematic of his
general struggle to counteract the lack of explicitness and transparency in
Nazi language, with its countless possibilities of distortion and abuse. But
what Lanzmann's filmic project demonstrates equally well is that an
obsessive attention to detail is not tantamount to a better understanding
of the issue at hand. The more one recovers details through a revised
translation or historical account, the less one is able to comprehend.
Somewhat counter-intuitively for a documentary, Shoah aims to bring its
viewers to the double realization that, on the one hand, "the masses of
accounts of the ghettos and the extermination camps" (Lanzmann, Shoah.
An Oral History vii) published after the war did not really help people
understand much of what had happened and, on the other hand, that such
a goal is not something towards which Lanzmann's film strives, nor, for
that matter, something it could ever bring about. This, however, does not
amount to a self-admission of failure on the part of the film. Shoah may

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want to explode the conventions of documentary filmmaking, but it also
achieves its goal brilliantly, that of bringing out precisely the impossibility
of committing to reason the aberrations of the Nazi era.
Among the many things that remain branded in the viewer's memory
are the linguistically imperfect victims' accounts, which duplicate and
amplify the radical psychological disruptions caused by trauma, i.e., the
fragmentariness and inaccessibility of traumatic experience as it insistently
occurs outside the boundaries of any single space and time (Caruth, Intro
duction I 9) but perhaps not of language. Lanzmann's film provides ample
illustration that this internalized process of translation in a foreign lan
guage always entails linguistic difficulties for the Jewish interviewees.
These difficulties do not always come across as such in the grammatically
correct foreign-language counterpart offered by the professional translator,
but they surface quite frequently in the accounts provided by Jewish wit
nesses who testify in a language other than their own. This struggle with
language encapsulates some of the reluctance of all trauma survivors to
consign the traumatic event to speech and collective memory for fear it
might somehow become understandable (Caruth, Introduction 11 154), but
it also epitomizes the inaccessibility of an event whose registration in the
psyche has been precluded from the moment of its initial occurrence
(Bernard-Donals and Glejzer 9).
Throughout the film, Mordekhai Podchlebnik remains the only Jewish
interviewee who, although fluent in Hebrew with his family, purposely
chooses to testify in Yiddish. By Mordekhai's own admission, Yiddish
brings him closest to an authentic reenactment of the traumatic event. He
can gain access to and reenact the scattered fragments of his traumatic
memory, as well as articulate and transmit their significance to the view
ers, only in his mother tongue: "Ces choses-la, on ne peut les dire qu'en
yiddish"3 (Kaufmann 667). But it is not only in front of the camera that
Mordekhai resorts to Yiddish in order to invoke his traumatic past. In the
article she published eight years after the release of Shoah, Francine Kauf
mann reports that Mordekhai had confessed to Fanny Apfelbaum, another
one of the translators who worked on the film, that his children had never
heard the story of his Holocaust experience because of their ignorance of
Yiddish (667). Under these circumstances, the presence of a translator
becomes indispensable to verbalizing the traumatic experience, not only in
front of the camera or the director but in front of anyone. The fact that no
one else had heard Mordekhai's account of the Holocaust until then puts
film viewers on a par with his own children. If we read this sequence ret
rospectively, with Francine Kaufmann's article in mind, we realize that this
is perhaps the first time that the idea of generational trauma is alluded to
in Shoah in such a way that it applies to the audience as well as the direct
biological descendents of camp survivors. The translator therefore helps

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bring survivors and viewers closer together, but her presence also
estranges Mordekhai the most from Lanzmann, who cannot interview his
witness directly. A similar dialectic can be observed in the testimony of
Abraham Bomba, whom we usually see testifying in English but who
briefly resorts to Yiddish in order to overcome an emotional breakdown
caught on film by Lanzmann. In this and all other cases of Jewish survivors
in Shoah, there is a constantly implied or stated oscillation between at least
two languages, one of origin and one of refuge. This foregrounds another
central theme of the film borrowed from psychoanalysis: the fluctuation of
traumatic flashbacks between a past in which the event was not fully expe
rienced and a present in which "its precise images and enactments are not
fully understood" (Caruth, Introduction 11 153).
Incomprehensibility in Shoah is closely bound up with repetition and
delay in the act of translation. While the camera rests on the witness's
face, Lanzmann exposes us first to the uninterrupted slow-rhythm testi
mony in the original language and then to its French counterpart recorded
on the soundtrack. On several occasions, an additional space opens up
between sound and image: for instance, the sequences in which we see the
image of a silent witness who seems to be listening to his or her (in actu
ality overdubbed) voice along with the film viewers. More dramatically
still, other sequences consist of long panning shots of former concentra
tion camps accompanied by voices with which it is hard to identify, prima
rily because it takes a few seconds or even minutes before the faces of wit
nesses are shown on screen and even longer before we hear the French
translation of the respective foreign-language testimony. I am interested in
three central aspects of this deliberate cinematic technique of "temoignage
a deux temps"4 (Kaufmann 669). Firstly, Lanzmann uses translation not
simply as a technical rendition that encroaches upon the source language
narrative but rather as an amplified, deformed, or faded echo thereof. The
underlying principle of repetition with inquisitive undertones replicates
one of Lanzmann's own interviewing strategies of literally repeating cer
tain parts of a testimony so as to emphasize an idea and/or produce anoth
er question in the witness's answer. But translation, like trauma, can come
into being and appeal to its target individual and/or social space only in
and through repetition, not memory. From a psychological point of view
then, translation in Shoah epitomizes Freud's notion of "repetition compul
sion" (qtd. in Caruth, Unclaimed Experience 2), which lies at the very heart
of traumatic experience, i.e., "the way the experience of a trauma repeats
itself, exactly and unremittingly, through the unknown acts of the survivor
and against his very will" (Caruth, Unclaimed Experience 2). Translation,
therefore, probes the dynamics of return enacted by traumatic flashbacks
and, like them, gains its force by repeating to us what we have not under
stood: "Repetition is addressed to incomprehension" (Paul Valery, qtd. in

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Felman 144). In Shoah, translation engenders a repetitive act meant to
address not only the incomprehensibility of the traumatic event but also
the lack of cohesion and the literal obscurity of the trauma narrative of the
Jews, which Lanzmann himself admittedly found very difficult to under
stand when he first met the witnesses for preliminary interviews (Lanz
mann, Seminar 92).
Secondly, translation in Shoah becomes instrumental in shifting focus
from the impact of traumatic episodes upon individual psychology to the
historical dimension of trauma more generally. Against the backdrop of
images of empty rooms and flat open spaces overgrown with vegetation,
the voice of the translator, which becomes audible a couple of minutes into
the witness' testimony, takes on an echo-like quality. In conjunction with
the temporary visual ban that Lanzmann sometimes places on survivors'
faces, this disembodied voice draws attention away from the source/con
veyor of the message to the message itself and the act of its transmission.
Identification with the respective witness is thereby prevented, allowing
Lanzmann symbolically to make the transition from individual cases of
trauma, with all their psychological complexities, to the notion of collec
tive historical trauma. The fact that Lanzmann achieves all this solely with
the aid of the camera, i.e., without ever having physically brought his wit
nesses together in the same room, or even the same country, also makes
Shoah suitable for a discussion about the numerous possibilities for aes
thetic figuration that cinema has opened up in the production of Holo
caust narratives.
Thirdly, the frequent alternation between original and translated
sequences creates a sense of prolonged delay whose otherwise different
implications for witnesses, interviewer, and viewers draw on one and the
same principle of incomprehensibility. While listening to witness accounts
in languages they are unfamiliar with, viewers and interviewer alike man
age to isolate names of perpetrators, as well as individual words that have
either become international currency (ghetto, Nazi) or that can intuitively
be identified as imports from German (Scheissdreck, Figuren). This may well
help us and Lanzmann envisage the linguistic dimension of the genocide,
anticipate the translational discourse to a greater or lesser extent, and
eventually assess the accuracy of the translation. But, in spite of the imme
diacy of the original account, or what Cathy Caruth calls "the precision of
recall" (Introduction II 153), our perception of the traumatic event
remains broken, fragmentary at this point. We are denied willed access to
a totalizing account of the past as we hear the testimonies for the first
time, in much the same way as trauma escapes full consciousness as it
occurs. Our literal failure to re-create a comprehensible total out of a few
linguistic fragments until the later intervention of the translator becomes a
powerful metaphor for the paradox between the overwhelming immediacy

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and literality of all traumatic experience on the one hand and its belated
ness and incomprehensibility on the other, all of which then reverberate
on the level of individual witnesses:
The film places us in the position of the witness who sees and hears, but
cannot understand the significance of what is going on until ... the delayed
processing and rendering of the significance of the visual/acoustic infor
mation by the translator, who also in some ways distorts and screens it,
because . . . the translation is not always absolutely accurate. (Felman
110-1 1)

Still, one should not be too hasty in blaming translation for its lack of
accuracy. For one thing, this is one of the main points of similitude
between translation and trauma: the logic of loss/failure (aufgeben),
according to which the task (Aufgabe) of translation succeeds (Paul de
Man, qtd. in Santner 26), parallels precisely the way in which trauma com
pletes its circuit by way of interruptions. Furthermore, as Cathy Caruth
points out, for the survivors of trauma, the truth of the event resides pre
cisely in the way it "defies simple comprehension" (Introduction 11 153),
hence also their reluctance to commit trauma to narrative memory for fear
its truthfulness might be lost along with the force of its precision and of
its "affront to understanding" (Introduction 11 154). In this context, it is pre
cisely in light of its proverbial infidelities, gaps, and omissions that trans
lation can best serve Lanzmann's purpose of setting up his witnesses for
the encounter with the traumatic recall, as well as of preserving the
authenticity of the cinematic transmission through an endless perpetua
tion of incomprehensibility.
As several critics have pointed out, translation in Shoah, far from being
restricted to its functional role, gradually evolves as a reflection of and on
the complex relationship between two central structural patterns of the
filmic discourse: witnessing and testimonial in relation to a traumatic
event. This can also be said of the entire linguistic set-up of this film.
Specifically, the way in which witnesses, interviewer, and spectators are,
with very few exceptions, made to occupy distinct linguistic spheres5 in
Shoah parallels the three levels of witnessing identified by Dori Laub in
relation to the Holocaust experience: "the level of being a witness to one
self within the experience, the level of being a witness to the testimonies
of others, and the level of being a witness to the process of witnessing
itself" (61). Moving as they do in between these three levels, translators
occupy a somewhat distinct place. The acts of testifying to a traumatic
event and of translating an account thereof are both essentially solitary
activities, although by nature committed to transmission of knowledge as
"a means of passing out of the isolation imposed by the [traumatic] event"
(Caruth, Introduction I 11). Hence, both testimonial and translation are
always performed in an endless chain of bearing witness, i.e., with a cer

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tain target audience in mind, whose reactions Shoah envisages, projects, or
even embodies. But, in Lanzmann's film, the translator occupies an oscil
lating position in the testimonial equation (Kaufmann 665). At times she
identifies with the filmmaker in her quality of second-degree witness and
first spectator. But in most cases, the translator takes an uncomfortable,
even intolerable stance between her adhesion to the filmmaker's goals, her
empathy with the witness, and her role as a stand-in for the viewers' con
sciousness through the inscription on the act of translation of her immedi
ate reactions to the testimony: "C'est l'interprete qui traduit mal, volon
tairement.... Il y avait aussi des moments oCu au contraire, elle traduisait
la verite avec beaucoup de violence"6 (Lanzmann, A propos de Shoah 205
06). Above all, translation emerges in Shoah as a metaphor for the wide
and always palpable psychological space between witnessing the traumatic
event and testifying to it. It marks a point between witness and testimony
that can itself be seen as a moment of trauma (Bernard-Donals and Glejzer
2). In illustrating the structural incompatibility of witness and testimony,
translation reiterates two aspects of the Shoah reality signaled by many
prominent thinkers in the aftermath of World War II: the impossibility of
making the incomprehensible fit into preexisting cognitive patterns and of
conveying the unspeakable in intelligible words: "The world of Auschwitz
lies outside speech as it lies outside reason" (Georg Steiner, qtd. in Kell
man 23). Beyond this, the imperfection of translation may also be taken to
respond to the urgency and facilitate the fulfillment of our task as viewers,
that of witnessing a trauma narrative without making it our own.
Like trauma survivors who are painfully aware of the distance between
what has been witnessed and what can be committed to testimony
(Bernard-Donals and Glejzer 2), i.e., between trauma and the language of
trauma, the translator in Lanzmann's film knows that "beyond the lan
guage of the camps as well as the language into which he must translate it,
there lies something perhaps inaccessible, the abyss of the event as it pre
cedes experience and discourse" (Bernard-Donals and Glejzer 13). The
translator "mime et reduplique par sa presence physique, par la qualite de
sa traduction, par son empathie ou ses resistances, le difficile passage du
vecu au dire, de la comprehension intellectuelle a une sorte d'adhesion
interieure.... Car la distance qui separe la parole dite de la parole traduite
n'est qu'une faible mesure de celle qui separe le vecu du souvenir, et le
souvenir de la parole"7 (Dayan-Rosenman 193). Therefore, if, as Dominick
LaCapra points out, we are to assume that "in all transmissions of the
traumatic, there is always a part that is not transmissible" (241), then
Claude Lanzmann's choice of translation to typify the absence of the event
witnessed and the failure of language to contain the act of witness is a
most suitable one. What is more, it becomes emblematic of a larger proj
ect to which a certain kind of film aesthetic can also contribute, that of

Gabriela Stoicea 51

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 emphasizing the necessity for a new mode of historical transmission, one
that acknowledges fragmentariness and denies overly simplistic, linear
models of understanding personal and collective history.

Yale University

Notes
I would like to thank Professor Anke Pinkert for her useful comments on an earlier
version of this article.
1. "for the body" [my translation].
2. "slowly engraves itself in the body" [my translation].
3. "These things, one can only recount them in Yiddish" [my translation].
4. "two-time witnessing" [my translation].
5. As I have pointed out before, next to none of the camp survivors speaks French
on screen. French, however, is Lanzmann's mother tongue, i.e., the language in
which he feels most comfortable conversing. A third and final level of separation
arises from the fact that English-speaking audiences with little or limited knowl
edge of French will feel alienated even from Lanzmann himself.
6. "It is the interpreter who mistranslates, deliberately. . . . There were also times
when, on the contrary, she would translate the truth with utmost violence" [my
translation].
7. "Through his physical presence, through the quality of his translation, through
his empathy or his acts of resistance, the translator imitates or replicates the diffi
cult passage from lived experience to utterance, from intellectual comprehension
to a kind of interior adhesion. . . . Because the distance between the spoken word
and the translated one is but a feeble projection of the distance which separates
lived experience from memory, and memory from language" [my translation].

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