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Abstract

“Das Muttermal / The Birthmark / דער מוטער־צײכן” is a trilingual work of transcreative poetry that stages translation as a method of mourning, cultural memory, and feminist inheritance. Composed first in German and then translated into English and Yiddish, the poem explores the catastrophic rupture of maternal loss and the slow transformation of trauma into understanding. The central metaphor of the birthmark—Muttermal, the “mother-mark”—figures the maternal body as both wound and connective tissue, binding ancestors and descendants through a physical trace that persists across generations, geographies, and languages. Formally, the project demonstrates how translation unveils the layered meanings embedded in terms such as “wound,” “redemption,” and “memory,” and how movement across languages can enact emotional shifts that exceed semantic equivalence. Drawing on Jewish mysticism, philosophical discourse (Spinoza), psychoanalytic thought (Winnicott), and post-Holocaust poetics (Sutzkever), the poem interrogates how catastrophe is inherited and reimagined as a source of knowledge, agency, and renewal. It argues that creative, multilingual poetics can function as a scholarly practice: an embodied theorization of how narrative, language, and grief are co-constitutive. By repositioning translation as both aesthetic form and ethical response to personal and historical trauma, this project contributes to debates in translation studies, memory studies, and feminist theory. It offers a model for understanding creative work as a rigorous mode of academic inquiry—where poetic imagination becomes a site of lineage, resistance, and reparative transformation.

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