ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the English-language critical literature on 'Dos tepl' and the Frances Butwin, Bernard Isaacs, Sacvan Bercovitch and Ted Gorelic translations. It compares both to English-language descriptions of the Yiddish language in order to use 'Dos tepl' as a test case to assess the degree to which Sholem Aleichem's translatability into English has changed over time. The questions about what language can do that are provoked by the criticism re-emerge in the English translations of 'Dos tepl'. Jacob Shatzky argued that Sholem Aleichem was 'the most untranslatable of writers', because of the well-known difficulty of reproducing the linguistic elements of his characters' Yiddish speech in other languages. Both Kachuck and Miller assume that an argument for Sholem Aleichem's translatability is tantamount to an argument that the effects his texts produce on Yiddish readers or listeners can be reproduced on an Anglophone audience, and thus that Yiddish itself is fundamentally translatable.
