Wednesday, May 11, 2011

Polish translations of Jewish texts

TRANSLATIONS of Torah, Talmud excerpts, and other Jewish texts into Polish:
Gained In Translation: Sacred Texts For Poles

Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Steve Lipman (The Jewish Week)

A Croatian-born college student in Prague in the late 1980s, Sacha Pecaric became interested in traditional Judaism, but no Jewish texts were available in Serbo-Croatian or Czech. He turned to English and Hebrew books.

As an Orthodox rabbi doing outreach to Krakow’s small Jewish community in the first decade of this century, he found few Jewish texts in Polish. Again, he used English and Hebrew.

Rabbi Pecaric, now 45 and a resident of Teaneck, decided to fill the literary-linguistic void. The rabbi, who moved to New Jersey with his wife Ksenija, an artist, and two young sons, in 2005, has written, edited and translated some 30 classical Jewish texts in Polish during the last decade.

[...]

His most ambitious project was his translation of the Talmud (chapters from the often-studied tractates of Berachot, Kiddushin and Baba Kama), which includes the standard Aramaic text as well as a translation, ArtScroll-style explanations, and a commentary in the guise of a teacher-student dialogue.

[...]