Louis Zukofsky and The West Wing

What is it about?

In this project, translation plays a key part in highlighting some key moral discomforts imbedded in the day-to-day reality of a seemingly heterogeneous American culture (and indeed, at the heart of the pretense that "everyone is the same"), first in popular culture and in relation to primetime television series The West Wing, and more deeply within the historical cultural ground imbedded already in the negotiation of ethnic, cultural and economic identity within the seemingly egalitarian artistic revolution of early twentieth-century Modernism. In relation with the television series, West Wing, this project examines the uneasy and disturbingly oedipal relationship between the characters of White House Director of Communication Toby Ziegler and President Joshua Bartlett. On the literary front, the article examines the intense and volatile relationship between American Modernist Ezra Pound and his stubborn Jewish disciple, Louis Zukofsky. The West Wing, featuring Ziegler's birth place in Brooklyn NY (in an episode that actually opens in Yiddish ), renders Brooklyn the geographical focal point of this research, and a common ground to both Ziegler and Zukofsky, Brooklynite Jews, born to poor immigrant parents as the promise of a new generation. Both in the fictional case of Toby Ziegler and the non-fictional case of Louis Zukofsky, translation comes to the fore as the language and culture of immigrant communities emerge either in printed text or in subtitles. In either case, the translation undercuts hegemonic linguistic norms, introducing Yiddish on prime-time television or slang in texts of “high” literature. Most importantly, translation does not take place, as Walter Benjamin claims, in “the high and pure literary air,” but rather at street level, highlighting important cultural differences that are often glossed over in dominant discourses.

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Why is it important?

The article considers contemporary use of Yiddish in electronic media; places it within the context of foreign language usage in American films and television programs; and raises some questions about the nature of interdisciplinary and multicultural study in AVT.

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