How Translation Changed Elie Wiesel's Night: Comparing the Two English Versions

What is it about?

Elie Wiesel's Night is one of the most widely read accounts of the Holocaust. Few readers know that it exists in two English translations: Stella Rodway's from 1960 and Marion Wiesel's from 2006. Both are based on the French La Nuit (1958), which Wiesel himself shortened and reworked from a much longer Yiddish original published in Buenos Aires in 1956. This article compares the two English versions passage by passage and finds that they tell the story differently. The 1960 translation tends to smooth the text. It replaces hesitant ellipses with full stops, swaps German camp terms such as Blockälteste for plain English, and places the narrator "at" Auschwitz. The 2006 translation restores the broken rhythm, keeps the German vocabulary, and places the narrator "in" Auschwitz. The article also traces the people and institutions behind each version, including publishers, editors and literary mentors, and shows how they shaped what English-speaking readers received.

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Why is it important?

As the last Holocaust survivors pass away, their testimony increasingly reaches new generations through texts, and very often through translations. Choices that look minor, such as punctuation, a preposition or a pronoun, can soften or sharpen how readers experience a survivor's trauma. Night is taught in schools and universities around the world, yet many classrooms still use the older translation without knowing how it differs. The article gives teachers, students, translators and publishers concrete examples of what changes between versions and why it matters. It also appears at a symbolic moment: 70 years after the Yiddish original and 20 years after the retranslation that most students now read.

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