Sunday, July 03, 2016

Corrected editions of Elie Wiesel's Night

"The publisher and the translator of a new English-language edition of "Night," Elie Wiesel's harrowing account of life in the Nazi death camps, said yesterday that the new edition corrects several small factual errors in the previous translation, including a reference to the author's age when he entered the camps....Some scholars who have studied Holocaust memoirs have also raised questions about how much of the book can be verified. Mr. Wiesel and his literary agent, Georges Borchardt, said in interviews this week that the book was factual and that they had never portrayed it as a novel...While Mr. Wiesel, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, notes in a preface to the new edition that the new translation allowed him "to correct and revise a number of important details," he did not specify what the changes were. Yesterday, Marion Wiesel, Mr. Wiesel's wife and the translator of the new edition of "Night," said in an interview that among the changes were a reference to the age of the book's narrator -- that is, Mr. Wiesel -- when he arrives in 1944 at Birkenau, the entry point for Auschwitz. In the previous translation, published in 1960, the narrator tells a fellow prisoner that he is "not quite 15." But the scene takes place in 1944. Mr. Wiesel, born on Sept. 30, 1928, would have already been 15, going on 16. In the new edition, when asked his age, he replies, "15." "At no point did this change the meaning and the fact of anything in the book," Ms. Wiesel said. "When I worked on the book, I kidded Elie and told him, 'I don't think you can add.' "...