St. Petersburg Winter School of Translation: 2024
St. Petersburg State University’s Winter School of Translation, held on January 26, 2024, included a Yiddish section dedicated to the translation of literary texts and documents from Yiddish into Russian.
Yoel Matveyev, a St. Petersburg-based writer and poet, spoke about the history of women’s poetry in Yiddish and the difficulties of its adequate translation. He also briefly outlined the history of early verse in this language, starting with a short anonymous 13th century poem. The Moscow linguist Lyubov Lavrova introduced various examples of handwritten correspondence in Yiddish from WWII, explaining the difficulties of translating it due to unclear handwriting, different dialects and borrowings from different languages.