Two translations of the Odyssey, made in the shadow of the Shoah — and what a single word, chosen without knowing what was coming, can carry.
Moshe Leyb Pitshenik, born in Zlotshev, Galicia, in 1895, completed a Yiddish translation of the Odyssey in 1937 and won the Yiddish PEN Club prize for it. He was murdered in the Kazimierz forest in 1941, after the Nazi occupation of Poland, leaving an original Ancient Greek epic poem unfinished. Moshe Ha-Elion, born in Thessaloniki in 1925, survived twenty-one months in Auschwitz, the sole survivor of his immediate family, and at age ninety completed a Ladino translation of the Odyssey, published with a facing Hebrew version by the poet Avner Peretz. He died in 2022 at ninety-seven.
In 1937, in Poland, a schoolmaster named Moshe Leyb Pitshenik sat down to translate the first line of the Odyssey into Yiddish. Homer's Greek calls Odysseus polútropon — a man of many turns, many devices, a man who is hard to pin down. Every translator before Pitshenik and most after him reached for some version of that: cunning, resourceful, complicated. Pitshenik wrote farvoglt. Lost. Far from home.
No other translation of the Odyssey, in any language, makes that choice. It isn't a mistranslation — Pitshenik knew Greek well enough to be working, at the same time, on an original epic poem in Ancient Greek, the first attempt at one in that language in over a thousand years. It was a decision. He looked at a word meaning clever and chose instead a word meaning displaced, and a few lines later he had Odysseus surviving something the text calls a khurbn before he makes it home.
In 1937, khurbn meant catastrophe in the older sense — the destruction of the Temple, the historical ruin of a people, a word already heavy with precedent. Pitshenik could not have known what the word was about to become. He finished his translation two years before the invasion of Poland. He was still working on his Greek epic when the ghetto of Łowicz closed around him. In 1941 he was taken to the forest outside Kazimierz and shot. The poem stopped where he stopped.
What he left behind was a translation that had already answered a question he didn't yet know he was asking: can a man who is farvoglt — lost, displaced, away from everything he knows — still find his way back.
Eighty-eight years later, and roughly two thousand kilometers south, a different translator finished the same task in a different language.
Moshe Ha-Elion was seventeen when the trains from Thessaloniki took his mother, his sister, and his grandparents to Auschwitz, where they were sent directly to the gas chambers. He was the only one who survived. For twenty-one months he traded Greek lessons for food, one of the few currencies available to a prisoner, and when the Nazis marched the camp toward Austria in the last winter of the war, he ate coal from a train car to stay alive. He was liberated at Ebensee in May 1945.
At ninety, he started translating the Odyssey into Ladino, the Judeo-Spanish of his childhood in Thessaloniki, a language that had lost more than ninety percent of its speakers in that city to the same catastrophe that killed his family.
He kept it in dactylic hexameter — the meter has a name that means finger, because you count it on one, the way a Greek reciting Homer three thousand years ago would tap out the beat with a fingertip. Ladino had no words for some of what Homer described — certain trees, certain terms of agriculture and seafaring long since fallen out of use. Ha-Elion didn't invent them. He went to the Ladino Bible and to a Hebrew-Ladino dictionary and found what was already there, and used only that. And as he translated, in his nineties, he tapped his finger on the table to hold the rhythm of the language that had survived him, when almost no one else had, rendering a story about a man finding his way home.
Homer's opening line calls Odysseus a man of many turns. Pitshenik's Yiddish called him lost. Ha-Elion's Ladino, a version later, calls him astuto — cunning again, closer to the Greek, the word Pitshenik had turned away from.
Ha-Elion could not have read Pitshenik's translation. There is no evidence he knew it existed. But the man who actually made the journey Pitshenik's word predicted — displaced, surviving a khurbn, decades later still counting the beat with his own hand — did not need to borrow the word farvoglt to answer what it had asked. He answered it by living long enough to sit at a table in his ninety-first year and translate the same twenty-four books in a language that, like the one Pitshenik used, very few people left alive could still read to him.