At the head of a trail of mentors that led Zaia Alexander from a career in translating to the acquisition of a PhD in Germanic Languages and Literatures stands noted writer Carlos Castaneda.

Her skills as a translator brought her to the attention of Castaneda, who was looking for someone to translate articles into German. After a few years of wide-ranging conversations-but no completed translations-Castaneda gave her some advice: "Instead of complaining all the time," he told her, "why don't you go and have a romance with knowledge?"

Despite its source, the suggestion wasn't an immediate hit with Zaia. In fact, at the time, "going back to school was just not in my plans," she says. "I was going to be a famous writer." But she dutifully visited UCLA, approaching the Department of Germanic Languages and Literature in the middle of winter quarter, not the usual time for graduate school applications. Instead of rebuffs or indifference, she got encouragement. In fact, Wolfgang Nehring, the first of her UCLA mentors, urged her to apply and offered her a teaching assistantship.

By April, she was a graduate student at UCLA and beginning to acquire a team of academic mentors. Emily Apter, chair of the Department of Comparative Literature, provided input on translation theory, and renowned translator Michael Henry Heim offered advice on the practice of translation, including the work for Castaneda, which now got under way.

Professor Heim also had a project for Zaia: Publisher Henry Holt had asked him to translate the diary of a Holocaust survivor, and lacking the time himself, he passed the job to her. The woman had written her diary in German shorthand while a prisoner at Theresienstadt.

"I had to find the diarist's voice, and to do this, I had to put myself to some extent into her shoes," Zaia says. "I was trying to be true to her thinking, to her perception of events, finding the words that she would use instead of using my academic English."

Accustomed to seeking help from the experts, Zaia enrolled in a class in Holocaust literature taught by Professor Arnold Band. He introduced her to the diaries, memoirs, literary treatments, and secondary scholarship about this time and place, describing the format and language in which the stories were told. As Zaia explored this emotion-charged body of work, Professor Band also "helped me to frame the right questions instead of offering easy answers," she says. "He made sure I stayed in touch with the reality of human suffering, to keep the project from becoming cold research or some passing academic trend."

Out of her work with Band came more than a successfully completed translation project. During their many discussions, Zaia discovered her dissertation topic: "Beyond Babel: Translating the Holocaust at Century's End." In it, Zaia explores three levels of writing about the Holocaust: the language-making in the camps, survivors' struggle to communicate their unprecedented experiences after the war, and the growing body of critical writing that has evolved over five decades.

As she studied these works, Zaia was sensitized by her experience with "the dubious and delicate task" of translating the Theresienstadt diary. "I became alarmed by the lack of attention given to translation in the debates about representing the Holocaust," Zaia says, "particularly as I recognized the impact of translation in terms of retaining the historical and factual accuracy of the testimony." These considerations, both practical and ethical, are the driving force behind her project, which is the first at UCLA to use translation theory as a critical framework. There has been "a steady evolution in the dialogue between survivors trying to tell their stories and the rest of us trying to make sense out of it," says Zaia. "That conversation is what I'd like to chart, how each generation translates the Holocaust anew."

Not surprisingly, her mentors continue to have an important role. Through her work with Castaneda, she came to understand his sensitivity "to the vicissitudes of translation, the notion of language as world-making, and the task of finding cultural and linguistic equivalence," Zaia says. "Those conversations have been helpful in thinking about how concentration camp survivors had to create a language for experiences that were unprecedented, and that much of the crisis of witnessing had to do with lacking words for the experience.

Professor Apter's "erudition and elegance, analytic intelligence, and palpable love of knowledge and words" have been another source of inspiration. Indeed, the relationship has encouraged Zaia to pursue a career as a scholar and academic herself. She will bring excellent qualifications to her job search, including participation in the Collegium for University Teaching Fellows and her department's nomination for the Luckman Distinguished Teaching Award.

Inevitably, her new work will take her across a boundary, from mentee to mentor, and Zaia feels well-prepared. Following the patterns that nurtured her, she will treat her students with respect and acknowledgment of their individuality, not trying "to conform them to a certain way of thinking" but only "to help them get the tools to argue their point in a scholarly way."

Teaching is "like any conversation," Zaia says. "You can make it really dull and horrible and one-sided or you can engage in a dialogue that will be meaningful to both sides."

Published in Fall 2000, Graduate Quarterly