On the History of Translations and Publications of Sippur Yamay by Zeev Jabotinsky into/in English

In 2016, a translation of V.E. Jabotinsky`s memoirs about Russia, the Russian Revolution and the First World War was published by Wane State University Press. The author of this lecture is listed there as the "discoverer" of an unknown and unsigned English translation: “… the identity of the translator is a mystery”.

We will not touch now on the history of this publication, nor how exactly our work is reflected in it. Now we are interested in the history of translations and the publication of the protograph of the English translation used in the 2016 book without specifying our day editor/translator`s name.

The fact is that the publication was made with a handwritten typescript of Jabotinsky`s memoirs, preserved in the Archive of Mahon Jabotinsky. The publisher has explicitly edited the old, and also undated translation. It is difficult to recognize such a publication as academic one.

In the proposed message, we will touch on the protograph of the published translation, on the one hand, and on the other hand, we will pat attention of the Congress participants to the newspaper subscribed publication of fragments of this translation in the Jewish English-language press from the very beginning of the 1940s, that, of course, are not taken into account in the bibliographies of Zeev Jabotinsky lifetime publications available in the Zeev Jabotinsky Institute archive.

Russian but English language autobiography materials allow us to say that during his lifetime Zeev Jabotinsky used his own not very correct English title of his autobiography, which is a rough linguistic analogue from the Russian language. This allows us to assess the degree of authorization of the English versions of the autobiography of the leader of revisionist Zionism published in 2016.

All of the above makes it possible to raise the question of the need for a textually verified edition of Z. Jabotinsky`s memoirs in English, paying tribute to his first translator that must be returned to the editorial history of “Sypur Yamay”.