I investigate and write about a translation of Victor Hugo's Les Misérables into Yiddish that I had found in the New York socialist daily newspaper, the Forverts. I discovered that this piece of work was the second in line, a development from an earlier translation of the novel emanating from the pen of the same man, Morris Winchevsky.; As I became cognizant of the scholarly style of the first, or London, version, I realized that much more was in play than a translation (or even two translations) of a novel for the entertainment of a readership not familiar with the language in which it had been written.; I felt it impossible to separate the man from his work and incumbent on me to gain an understanding of the translator from a personal point of view his background and early surroundings, his education and literary experimentation in several languages, and gradual commitment to writing in Yiddish, of the history of his activities and evolution within the socialist movement and the interplay of historical events with that evolution, of the various influences that helped mark his literary progress too, from study of the Talmud to reading and writing within the Hebrew Enlightenment (the Haskalah) and from there to a universal socialism in Yiddish.; I to devote over a third of the pages in this thesis to an historical-biographical section on Morris Winchevsky's life and times, before proceeding to an examination of his translations of Les Misérables. In the process I have written the first biography in English of a significant portion of the translator's life, which I hope will be of interest to future readers. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)
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