Translator Todd Hasak-Lowy
Why did you want to translate Motti?
I read Motti while living in Tel Aviv in 2008. I felt a strange connection with the book early on in my reading of it, and I had a hunch it came from the way Asaf was using Hebrew. I wanted to make sense of this strangeness. Before there were any discussions about me translating the book, I translated a few pages, just for myself. I wanted to see what would happen if I tried to render his Hebrew into English. There was a type of thinking at the center of the prose that made a great deal of sense to me, was very close to how I think, even though I couldn’t quite articulate this. So I wanted to see if I could move the text from Hebrew to English as a way to explain the novel to myself.
I spend a fair amount of time dealing with Hebrew fiction. But my interest in this literature is typically limited to fiction that somehow deals with politics and history. Motti is a novel with a different agenda, so I understood that if I wanted to spend more time with this novel, and I did, that it wouldn’t be through research. Since my own fiction started being translated, the notion of translating something myself began to gnaw at me. I wanted to try this.
Last, I wanted to help this novel get into English so that a new new (and larger) readership could have access to it. I’m so grateful to the people who have done this for my writing, I wanted to try and return the favor. This will sound strange, but I think of translation as a highly moral act, at least when it’s done responsibly (it remains to be seen if my translation will be moral in this sense).
What do you like most about the book?
There are three things in the novel that I like, three things that are woven together nicely. First, the language. By this I mean the sound of the prose, the rhythm of the sentences, the choice of words. I would love to hear this novel read aloud by Asaf. Second, the intelligence of the prose. The narrator is simply very, very smart. He has an analytical eye that constantly amazes me. His treatment of the conventions of fiction—the novel’s many meta-fictional or self-conscious moments—are regularly exhilarating. Third, and maybe most important, is the novel’s sincerity, if I can call it that. Self-conscious asides often have the effect of distancing the writer from the contents of his or her story. They’re often playful or clever more than anything else. They somehow lower the stakes of what’s involved within the story itself. Asaf’s asides, his “games,” present him as extremely vulnerable, as almost desperate, and these are, to my mind, some of the most powerful moments in the novel. The combination of these three things is not an easy thing to pull off.
What specific difficulties are you having, in terms of translation?
Because the novel is made up of short chapters, and because the plot is relatively simple, the language of the novel carries an unusually large amount of responsibility in terms of making the novel work. There are chapter where very little happens on the level of action. What the reader encounters instead is a narrator reflecting on possibilities, contemplating the very task of storytelling. This all leaves the translator little place to hide. The language in which all this reflecting and contemplating takes place is, while not necessarily revolutionary, quite singular. Asaf’s narrator always sounds exactly like himself, the voice is steady. So my task here is get that voice, to get it exactly, even though the voice narrates in short bursts.
Any special anecdote to tell about the translation?
Asaf and I became friends, mostly through email after I left Israel in July 2008 (though we did meet briefly at Hebrew Book Week. This friendship—along with Asaf’s remarkable promptness in responding to emails—gave me confidence that I wouldn’t be entirely alone as a translator. Our correspondence often had little to do with literature, instead focusing on things like the TV show “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” But most amazing was the help Asaf gave me, through email, when we got a dog last Fall. Asaf is a certified dog trainer, and he guided me through the process of preventing our puppy from eating our entire house, something that seemed a distinct possibility back in October.
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From Motti
Trans. Todd Hasak-Lowy
Full translation in progress
Mottie loved Menachem like a brother. That is, unwillingly.
Perhaps they met in the army, for instance. This is not uncommon among Israelis. Perhaps they met before that, in school. Possibly even in the university. Only from the beginning the balance of powers was clear. Menachem always had the upper hand, even when it was patting a friend’s shoulder.
It’s like this: like a strike across the nose, if it’s strong enough—like a strike across the snout among dogs—can the beginning of the ties between people give structure to the common soul of their interrelations. To engrave in them a pattern, to cut a path through them like water does through a stone (to scar, that is). It’s hard to build a lever whose strength is great enough to alter the balance of powers. Among packs of wolves the hierarchy is more fluid, whereas among us, out of habit and the law, more than once these things are established and don’t budge afterwards. And if Motti and Menachem really did meet in the army, it’s obvious who the commanding officer was. Obvious, because despite the many years that have passed since then, the law was scorched into Motti and hasn’t faded. And he knows that at first it was surely a mask—at first, it lasted just a few weeks, Menachem screaming and punishing and mighty, it was safer to stand next to him, otherwise he could pop up suddenly and give an order, you could be punished for anything—and now he’s his good friend Menachem. And even though he knows it, over the course all the years since (they’ve spent a hundred hours together as friends for each difficult hour they had back then) he’s not truly convinced that then it was a mask, as now this is his true face. At any moment, he fears, Menachem’s face is liable to fall away from him like so many dirty clothes, revealing below them those remembered marks. At any moment he could start abusing him like he used to, and he would be obeyed.
His willingness to be obeyed, along with his courtesy, like electric fences in certain situations, served him as a wonderful tool that left around itself an uncontaminated area. Air for breathing. No one can enter there (he lied to himself). Worried he needs this space out of the fear that others would hurt him. Never admitted, clearly not even to himself, that there was another reason entirely. That he actually ascribed to himself so much importance that he feared that even the force of the slightest act on his part might cause someone else an injury for which this is no cure.
What are you doing tonight? Menachem asked over the telephone. I was thinking about leaving Edna at home with the little ones and going out for a drink, are you with me? I’ll pick you up at your place at 8:30?
Sure, Motti said to him. 8:30.
Ya’alla, Menachem said. 8:30. I’m crazy about your ass.
I love you, too, my brother, Motti said.
Hello man, are you becoming a fag on me or what?
And Motti said, just blabbering with you. I didn’t mean it seriously. I just wanted to see how the expression rolls off the tongue.
And that’s the problem: all the true expressions are a matter of rolling, even though all the true problems are not a matter of expression, many of them stem precisely from this, that is, from the desire to see how they roll. Because from the moment it’s possible to say a thing, even something untrue, it becomes necessary to say it, let it roll, and so it takes on motion and expands, and then try to stop it (impossible). And the moment it is spoken and receives a form, a beautiful and common mistake to think that maybe it’s true. But it’s possible to say all sorts of things, wonderful things. This doesn’t mean anything, but the temptation, oy, the temptation to say them (the need to believe them).
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