The Stevanovich Institute on the Formation of Knowledge is pleased to share with you news that Jonah Lubin, BA Comparative Literature, German and Jewish Studies has been awarded 1st Place in SIFK’s 2020-21 Undergraduate Thesis Award. He received $1000 for Der Tsoyberbarg un (d) Der Zauberberg: Bashevis’s Translation of The Magic Mountain and the Project of Yiddish Bildung. This award is given annually to best undergraduate thesis dealing with topics related to the social and historical influences shaping the formation of knowledge, and most effectively crossing disciplinary and divisional boundaries in its research, argument, and conclusions.
“This thesis offered an extraordinarily erudite examination of the translation of Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg from its original German into the Yiddish Der Tsoyberbarg by the famed Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer. Analyzing the motivations and outcomes of any translation is difficult, but here doubly so since it required mastery of both German and Yiddish. In the process, Lubin demonstrates not simply what the translator got right or wrong – the objective of most scholarship on specific translations – but how passages of narration and passages of dialogue differentially and self-consciously emphasized German or Yiddish phraseology as a means to contribute to the formation of a Yiddish intellectual culture during the interwar period.”
More information on this award can be found at https://sifk.uchicago.edu/funding-opportunities/undergraduate-thesis-award/former-undergraduate-thesis-prize-winners/ and @SIFKnow