Saturday, February 25, 2023

Translating (or not) Boris Lurie’s use of “KaZet” for “Konzentrationslager” (concentration camp)

One of the first texts I translated in Boris Lurie's "Geschriebigtes Gedichtiges" was the first poem in the book from 1955, "Hier, in New York, Friedl" (which is also the only poem included in the book from before the 1980s). Here, Lurie uses the expression "KaZet", which is his phonetic spelling of "KZ", an abbreviation for the German word for "concentration camp": "KonZentrationslager". Not being sure what I should do with it, I put in "concentration camp" as a placeholder. But as Lurie uses the expression often (by my count, in fourteen texts in the book in all), I ultimately decided to always leave the phrase in the original German: "KaZet". (Andrew Shields, #111words, 25 February 2023) 

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