Rendering the title of a work in another language can always be challenging: Is it better to transliterate or to translate? Translating allows those of us who don’t know the language to understand what they are reading and perhaps to know something about the work. Transliterating ensures that all who talk about the work use the same title.
If we choose to transliterate, a further issue arises: Should we adopt the pronunciation of the author’s milieu, or perhaps we should prefer the pronunciation of the contemporary community of potential readers?
The challenge of transliteration can be particularly difficult when the pronunciation of the original Hebrew title is unclear. In one such case, rendering the title into another language might actually clarify how the original Hebrew title should be read.
This may be the case with the inspiring collection of the teachings of the hassidic leader Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Halevi Epstein of Kraków (1751-1823). This collection of hassidic teachings was first published in 1842 and it went on to gain widespread popularity. Its popularity soared from the 1860s when the work was published in a five volume set, typeset as a commentary to the Bible with the base text and other classic commentators. This edition allowed readers to follow the weekly Torah reading, while glancing at Epstein’s hassidic teachings.
While Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman had a hand in preparing at least part of the manuscript, it was his son Rabbi Aron Epstein (d.1881) who completed the preparation and brought the manuscript to the printing press. We have no evidence that the author, Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman, chose a title for his collection of teachings. It appears that the honor fell to the hassidic master, community rabbi, and author of responsa, Rabbi Arye Leibush Lipschitz (c.1767-1846). Rabbi Lipschitz’s mention of the title in his 1840 approbation for the work is the earliest source for a name of the collection.
The title was taken from the last two words of a biblical verse: “The day is Yours, the night also; it was You who set in place the orb of the sun” (Psalms 74:16). Rabbi Lipschitz explained that the title was appropriate for the collection because Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman’s hassidic teachings provide light for the world and humanity; the entire work illuminates with the light of the seven days of creation, just as the sun lights up the world.
It is not entirely clear how Rabbi Lipschitz, the other scholars who provided approbations, or Rabbi Aron would have pronounced the title. Transliterating the words into modern Hebrew as they appear in the Bible would result in calling it Maor Vashamesh. The Hebrew word for sun is shemesh, yet the vowels of the word change slightly because in the Bible the word appears at the end of a sentence, changing the form of the word to shamesh. Thus people unfamiliar with the biblical source of the title would likely call the work Maor Vashemesh. What was the work called in the nineteenth century?THE WORK was first published in Breslau in 1842, almost 20 years after the demise of Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman. That edition had a mysterious fake title page, backdating the volume to 1784/5 and providing other misinformation. In the autumn of 1858, the publisher, Pinchas Moshe Balaban, purchased the rights from the author’s son to print the volume. The agreement between Balaban and Rabbi Aron stated clearly that Balaban was licensed to publish one edition of the work. Subsequent agreements allowed for more editions. Other editions were also printed, apparently without gaining express permission from either the author’s family or the Balaban printing press.
Soon after purchasing the rights, in 1859, Balaban printed the second edition of the work in his Lemberg printing press. Lemberg – today Lviv, Ukraine – was the capital of Galicia in the Austrian Empire where German was the official language. In addition to the name of the work and other relevant information in Hebrew, the title page included a transliteration of the name of the work: Muer Weschumesch. Besides the German rendering – sch instead of sh, w instead of v – the transliteration follows the Galician pronunciation of Hebrew where a kamatz (the short vowel a in modern Hebrew) is read as the short vowel u. Hence Muer instead of Maor. The second word in the title, Weschumesch, indicates that the title was read as the words appeared in the Bible – Maor Vashamesh, and not shemesh.
Mystery solved!
Or perhaps not: Maor Vashamesh was published a number of times in Lemberg in the following years. The first edition after the original Breslau printing to be issued outside Galicia was the 1877 Warsaw printing. Here too the name of the work was transliterated on the title page. Warsaw was the capital of the Kingdom of Poland, a satellite of the Russian Empire. The title page gave the name the work in Cyrillic alphabet. The printer did not follow the biblical source of the title, calling the book Maor Vashemesh!
To be sure, the value of this seminal collection of hassidic teachings is unaffected by how we choose to pronounce the title of the work, and this may be one reason why those who have studied the word since it appeared in 1842 were not troubled by the question. Yet I for one would like to call the book by its name, as I study the inspiring teachings of Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Epstein of Kraków.
The writer is on the faculty of Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies and is a rabbi in Tzur Hadassah.