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Chana K.: I am an Israeli, born and raised in Israel, the child of survivors from Eastern Europe. I am a Professor of Hebrew, Yiddish and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley, and like Chana Bloch have always also been devoted to Yiddish literature (Yiddish was actually my first language). For many years the focus of my work has been the language of poetry: why it has the power it does for readers. Ravikovitch’s work has always been the central example for me of how poetic language, especially the use of allusion and metaphor, can do ethical or political work more effectively than any other kind of language. I came to translation via theoretical concerns; I was interested in the ways in which we always interpret when we translate; we engage with the culture that we are translating from as well as with our own culture. I don’t like the standard metaphor of “faithfulness and betrayal; I see translation rather as a negotiation between different ways of looking at the world. A translation may be as significant and informative when it misses as when it gets the thing right. Translation highlights the differences between cultures and languages, revealing what is bridgeable and what is not.
ITHL: How was this project born? How long did you work on it altogether?
Chana B.: Chana Kronfeld and I really enjoyed working together on our translation of Amichai’s Open Closed Open. We wanted to continue collaborating, and we were thinking about a project that would offer a new set of challenges when we were asked to submit some Ravikovitch translations to the online review Poetry International. That got us started. We always felt – Chana K as a scholar of Hebrew lit, and I as a translator – that there ought to be a fuller representation of Dahlia’s work in English. At the time, we had no idea that we’d be living with her poems for seven years, or that the end result would be a Collected Poetry.
ITHL: What was the nature of your collaboration? Could you describe how you worked together?
Chana B.: Our working method, in a word, was conversation. We would sit down together at the computer and talk over every single line, every image, every source. We recorded our reflections as we worked – the various possibilities, the reasons for our choices. Some of the time I would produce rough drafts as a starting point. Then Chana would explain everything I missed: “This line comes from the Talmud, and this is a pop song, and this is army slang, and this is children’s talk, and this line comes from a skit in the 1980s that everyone knew. Or “Here Dahlia is using rhyme in a particularly meaningful way. Or “We need to sharpen the irony in this line. Then I would revise and revise and revise some more. I learned a great deal in the course of our work together. I love being a student, so it was an enormous pleasure for me.
ITHL: What special difficulties did this book present to a translator?
Chana K.: One of the main difficulties is the allusiveness of modern Hebrew poetry. All the layers from Bible through rabbinic and liturgical Hebrew are present in the background, and they are still part of the cultural memory of many native speakers. The speaker of the poems is often in active combat with those sources, dueling with them.
Chana B.: The difficulty is compounded by the fact that what is perfectly obvious to an Israeli reader may not be at all obvious to the American reader, who doesn’t know the Bible well – not to speak of the Hebrew literary tradition or Israeli popular culture. A good example is “The Love of an Orange, the title poem of Dahlia’s first book, which weaves together allusions to the Garden of Eden story, Jotham’s parable of the talking trees, the rebukes of Job’s so-called friends, and the Book of Proverbs’ scorn for fools and folly – all this in addition to a sustained dialogue with Prokofiev’s comic opera The Love of Three Oranges. In translating this intricately-wrought poem, we worked hard to render Dahlia’s densely allusive style while at the same time retaining her ironic modernist tone. And here, as in much of the early poetry, the archaisms presented a major challenge. This poem probably takes the prize for the most hours logged in. I should add that in some poems we would use an allusion to the English literary tradition to compensate for an allusion in the Hebrew that we couldn’t convey. Dahlia knew English and Anglo-American poetry well; she studied English literature at the Hebrew University and translated Scottish ballads and poems by Poet, Yeats, and Eliot.
ITHL: Apart from the allusions, what challenges did you face in translating Dahlia’s poetry, and how did you deal with them?
Chana K.: Hebrew genders everything; as Yona Wallach said in a famous poem, Hebrew is a sex maniac. Where gender is used as part of a sustained metaphor – for example, the city as a woman in “Lying upon the Waters – we use “she, though the English reader might expect “it. When we can’t indicate gender through pronouns, we do so in our choice of diction: for example, “A few husky insects (charakim, masc.) strutted about in the grass, / whistling at those foolish ants (nemalim, fem.) in “Two Garden Songs. Irony presents another difficulty. It’s a matter of cultural tone, really. In Hebrew we commonly use sarcasm to deflate the pathos, especially when dealing with painful subjects – death, the war, everything. This may be culturally challenging for an English reader who is unaccustomed to the ironic reversals of Jewish discourse. In our translations we often needed to stretch the limits of what is considered proper or comfortable in English, indeed to “foreignize it a bit, in order to get Ravikovitch’s edgy, ironic tone across – all this while making sure that her poem in English would still read, and sound, like poetry.
Chana B.: And let’s not forget about rhyme, which can sound so clunky in English. Hebrew rhymes much more easily than English since grammatical rhyme results automatically from suffixes marking gender, number, or person. Rhyme is an important component of Ravikovitch’s cadences, and it’s often used to make a point. Wherever possible we tried to follow Dahlia’s use of full or half-rhyme – for example in “Lullaby, a lament of Palestinian mothers that draws on the folk genre of the Yiddish lullaby with its formal conventions, its rhythms and rhymes.
ITHL: Do you feel you know Dahlia Ravikovitch’s poetry better now that you’ve worked on these translations?
Chana B.: Translating is the closest form of close reading. With each revision we moved a little deeper into the text. Often we would appreciate the complexity of a poem only when we were fully immersed in it.
Chana K.: And we got a lot of helpful feedback from colleagues and students; I was teaching graduate seminars in Ravikovitch’s poetry at UC Berkeley as we were translating, so it became an occasion for group study of her poetry on the chevruta model. My article on the verbal art of Ravikovitch’s political poetry, forthcoming in Hebrew in a collection of critical essays edited by Hamutal Tsamir and Tamar Hess, draws on our work together and on that communal work.
ITHL: What keeps you both translating Hebrew poetry? The love of a specific author? Of the language? Wanting it to reach more people? The personal challenge (or all of the above)?
Chana B.: We are both devoted to Dahlia’s work and have long felt that it deserves an international audience. We are fascinated by the ways in which Hebrew differs from English in communicating meaning and emotion. And we both enjoy the kind of problem-solving that translation requires. Translating poetry is especially exhilarating; it keeps the blood circulating in the brain. We recommend it as a tried-and-true antidote to the aging process; it’s even better than red wine.
Berkeley, California, May 2009
Reprinted from Modern Hebrew Literature (NS) 5, 2009/2010 © ITHL
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