China in Yiddish: Translations of Poetry and Theater
Speaker: Prof. Kathryn Hellerstein, University of Pennsylvania
Moderator: Prof. He Huibin, Zhejiang University
Time: 15:00-17:00 pm, Dec. 13, 2025 (Saturday)
Venue: 紫金港校区东五青荷咖啡吧
Abstract: This talk is part of my current book project, a study of Yiddish writings—poems, translations, fiction, travelogues, journalism, ethnographies, memoirs, and dramas—about China. Written and published in the first half of the twentieth century in New York, Warsaw, and Shanghai, these translations or adaptations of Chinese literary works, along with original writings about China, provide evidence for the modernist endeavor to create a world literature in Yiddish. This talk will examine Yiddish translations of classical Chinese poetry and a Yiddish adaptation of a classical Chinese drama in order to define what world literature comes to mean in Yiddish.
Kathryn Hellerstein is Professor of Yiddish and past Director of the Jewish Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania. Her monograph, A Question of Tradition: Women Poets in Yiddish, 1586-1987 won the 2014 National Jewish Book Award in Women’s Studies and the 2015 MLA Fenia and Yaacov Leviant Memorial Prize in Yiddish Studies. She edited the selected essays of Irene Eber, Jews in China: Cultural Conversations, Changing Perceptions (Pennsylvania State UP, 2020). Her co-edited volume, China and Ashkenazic Jewry: Transcultural Encounters, was published by De Gruyter in 2022. Hellerstein’s current projects include Women Yiddish Poets: Anthology and China through Yiddish Eyes: Cultural Translation in the Twentieth Century.
浙江大学教育基金会钟子逸基金资助
