ABSTRACT
Historians of literary translation have often noted a strange phenomenon: although an original text still gives us pleasure even centuries after it was written, almost all translations age quickly. Why translations should be more time-bound than literary works of art remains a mystery, but the consequences are clear: each new age demands its own versions of the literary past. The centrality of spoken-word events in modern Yiddish culture is textually embedded in Tevye the Dairyman in the form of Tevye himself, the work's only speaker and the most fully fleshed-out character in Sholem Aleichem's oeuvre. Dan Miron's 2009 Hebrew translation of Tevye the Dairyman starts from a more advantageous position because he is translating from one Jewish language to another. In the case of the 2009 translations of Tevye the Dairyman into English, Hebrew, and Danish, the translators actualized various features of the work's range of verbal performance, linguistic artistry, and humour for three very different readerships.
