All right. Good afternoon and welcome, everybody. Uh, there's a special delight in presenting not only a colleague from Oxford who does work on matters related to Israeli studies, but also a good friend, Professor Edwina Jacobs. Uh, Edwina is, professor is Associate Professor of modern Hebrew Literature and fellow at the Oxford Centre for Centre for Hebrew Injury Studies. And she's a fellow at Saint Cross's Quartette.
She is also on the steering group of the research program on comparative criticism and translation at Deutsche Project at St Ann's College. And we are here in part to celebrate the publication of her new book, a recently published book. Translation I'm Sorry, Strange Cocktail Translation and the Making of Modern Hebrew Poetry. And the title of her talk today is a gift from Thenight, Translation and Nation Building.
And we want to thank you for coming. Thank you. So thank you, Yaakov, for including me in this seminar series. So a lot of my book deals with late 19th and early 20th century modern Hebrew poetry, but then towards the end is dealing with the transition from diasporic Hebrew to then territorial nation state. Hebrew. So pre 48. Post 48. And so what I'm going to talk about today is not quite post 48, but it's getting there.
So I think it satisfies the rubric of Israel studies and it's going, as the title indicates, it'll deal with the relation between translation and the nation building project in Palestine, in pre-State Palestine. So this is from a part of the book that is sort of historic sizing a bit, the role that translation played in the development of modern Hebrew as a national literature in particular, and looking at certain writers and moments from this kind of literary history.
So I'll just start. And the early 20th century Hebrew translation activity became a more visible literary practice in the Hebrew, as well as a crucial and valuable component of the modern Hebrew literary economy. Between 1910, in 1933, the Hebrew literary enclaves of Europe and Russia began to move and consolidate their operations in Palestine.
And for much of this period, particularly the years 1908 to 1920, translation was a major, indispensable component of modern Hebrew literary production, according to the historian Zohar Shavit. Such was the role and status of translation that it was, in her words, quote, designated to fulfil part of the functions of an original literature, unquote. The translation of different kinds of texts from scientific, historical, linguistic and literary, and within the literary, both high.
What we would think of as high and low literature also encouraged the development of distinct linguistic and literary registers in Hebrew.
Editors and publishers began to establish strict standards for the kinds of works they sought to publish, and they invested primarily in what they considered to be the classics of world literature, with an emphasis on translations from German, Yiddish and Russian in order to generate a corpus of translated work in Hebrew that could serve as a model for original Hebrew writing and also to effect transformative changes in original Hebrew works through the influence of these literary translations.
So in this respect, Hebrew translation activity in this period took on the status of creative literary labour in the early decades of the Jewish Nation Building Project in Palestine. Although it wasn't well-represented in the early 20th century, book market poetry and poetry in translation circulated widely in literary journals and almanacs of this period, as well as in the Hebrew press, like in journals and newspapers, often featured poems both in original Hebrew and in Hebrew translation.
This was the case throughout the better part of the 19th century through the 20th. So there was nothing kind of new about this way that poetry circulated in the Hebrew literary market. And in fact, today, poetry both original and translated features daily in the Hebrew press as well. Nevertheless, when I glanced at the publication listing the first stable press, which was by far the most prolific publisher of Hebrew translations in this period.
So like the 1910 through the 1930s, it made it very clear that poetry in Hebrew translation represented a very small percentage of the translated books that were published between 1917 and 1946. Still wasn't the only publishing house, Hebrew publishing house that was invested in translation. But given its wide distribution relative to other presses and its financial stability, we can draw from this publication.
Listing a pretty fair, fairly accurate picture of the state of poetry in translation in the Hebrew book market in the early decades of the 20th century. So in this context, it was notable that in the year 1918, of the 16 titles that should be considered high priority for translation into Hebrew, one finds Alexander Pushkin's Russian novel in verse Evgeny Onegin. It was the only book of poetry that was on this list of must translate texts.
We know from letters that passed between the publisher, Avraham Yosef Stable and David Fishman, who at the time was the editor of Hatikvah, that they had reached out to the poet Haim Nachman Bialik to translate this particular work.
And they were insistent that Bialik in particular do this because they felt that only a poet of his calibre could do justice to Pushkin, who was widely regarded as one of the greatest, if not the greatest Russian poet of the time of his time, and one of the founders of modern, modern Russian literature.
And by the time Fishman approached Bialik with this idea to translate Evgeny Onegin, Bialik had already paved his own career as the newly minted poet of the national Renaissance, as the critic Yosef Klausner dubbed him. A translation by Bialik, therefore, would have validated the value that Fishman, for instance, was placing on literary translation and on his insistence on including first rate Hebrew translations in Hatikva, but would also do something more.
Having Bialik translate this work would also make a statement about the status of Hebrew as a full grown 20th century national language and literature. However, the comparisons to Pushkin may have deterred Bialik. He was being referred to as well as sort of the Jewish Pushkin, and he was intent as a young writer on forging his own identity in Hebrew.
So while it appeared for a time that he was considering the possibility of doing this translation, in the end he declined, and the translation by Bialik of this particular text never materialised. But what interested me about this little exchange between stable and freshmen was that despite Bialik's resistance to translating Pushkin, he was actually, though, a very prolific translator, both of poetry and prose into Hebrew.
In fact, there's this widely circulated maxim in in Hebrew that reading a text in translation is like kissing through a handkerchief. It's a nashieqa me. But the mood part. This is the Hebrew equivalent of poetry is what's lost in translation or something like that. So as is the case for most translation maxims, bialik's words have a more far more complicated source.
In fact, locating an origin for this phrase is difficult, given that Bialik himself often repeated variations of kissing through a handkerchief in various contexts, almost as often as he also referred to translation as an act of almost divine creation as a Jewish metaphor for translation, this handkerchief can represent a space between distance and intimacy. But Bialik also understood that translations took their own life apart from their originals.
And in this respect, the handkerchief also suggests the thin, sometimes translucent space of mediation between an original and translation. And this particular space of mediation has wide implications when you're translating Hebrew in a time of nation building, as I'll now discuss. In 1917, Bialik delivered a speech at a gathering of Holy Basford ever lovers of Hebrew, which took place in Moscow that year, shortly after the February revolution.
In his remarks, which he later published in an essay titled Mother LaShawn on The Nation in Language, Bialik offers what appears to be at first glance a scathing repudiation of translation and of literary translation in particular. And this is where he invokes the metaphor of the handkerchief. And I have the quote, because it's quite long. So you can follow it's the first quote on the handout, and I'll just read the English.
There are original Jews who are bound to the foundation of the national spirit. And there are translated Jews who live their lives not in their language, but in foreign tongues. Miguel Cervantes wrote Even the best translation is only the reverse side of a tapestry. He who uses a foreign language, who knows Judaism only in translation. That person is like someone who kisses his mother through a handkerchief.
Anyone who glances through a translation is just looking into a blurred mirror and can't appreciate its full flavour and the full longings of the spirit. Because this language alone is the language of the heart and soul. He who has. Stood on this Mount Sinai, who forged a covenant of first love with his national language and to it bound the dreams of his youth and ideals. This person will no longer forsake his people. And you can see that in brackets. I offer the actual quote by Cervantes.
So even Bialik is slightly manipulating his. What Cervantes is actually saying. So that's more just so that you can see how oftentimes these sort of ideas of translation get quickly politicised in different contexts. So to be a translator Jew, according to Bialik, is to be cut off from the full experience of Jewish tradition and Jewish textual tradition. And to remedy this condition, Bialik was committed to the project of Pina's Jewish cultural ingathering.
That is, the reconstruction of a Jewish canon that would form the basis of modern Hebrew national culture. To this end, in 1908, as early as 1901, he had founded Modo Woodyard, a Hebrew publishing house based in Odessa. And although World War One interrupted its operations, it was briefly revived between 1917 and 1918, which is when this address took place. The Hebrew translation of key Jewish texts written in other languages, including Yiddish, was a major component of this project.
In fact, the reference to Miguel de Cervantes remark on translation is a nod to Bialik's own Hebrew translation. And I put that in quotes because it's actually more of an adaptation of Don Quixote. And Bialik's translation appeared in 1912 and was published by the aptly named Press Tour of Yemen, which Bialik also founded. So Bialik had his he had a lot of his hand in lots of parts editor, translator, poet, public lecture.
Nevertheless, despite the sort of Zionist ideology that was underpinning his remarks, Bialik had yet to settle in Palestine. In fact, aside from a visit in 1909, Bialik spent most of these years in Odessa, where he was committed to the diasporic Hebrew literary economy, a crucial stage. Bialik believed in the emerging national culture in Palestine when he immigrated in 1924 and settled in Tel Aviv. He brought with him his publishing house, de Villa.
So what interests me about his remarks is that they don't these particular remarks don't repudiate translation as a whole. They seem to, but they actually don't. Rather, Bialik objects to the translation of Jewish life, rituals, experiences into other languages.
In fact, there's a great quote that I also address in the book when years, years later, the Hebrew writer and Nobel laureate Shai Agnon met with the American Jewish writer Saul Bellow, and he was telling Bellow, he said, that you need to be translated into Hebrew because that's the only way you can ensure the afterlife of your work. And he tells him the language of the diaspora will not last.
So this idea that Hebrew offers this afterlife is is one that goes back to echoes throughout the 20th century. But translating into Hebrew also serves the aim of creating a new linguistic beginning of sorts for an emerging Hebrew national culture, one in which these Hebrew translations will assume the status of original texts. When Onegin did appear in Hebrew translation in 1937, which was actually the centennial of Pushkin's death, it did so under somewhat remarkable circumstances.
It appeared in two separate translations. The first was by Avraham Levinson, a Hebrew writer and translator who had completed the translation years earlier but had not found a publisher.
But his translation was completely eclipsed by the other Hebrew Onegin, which was translated by Avraham Shemenski Slutsky, a Russian born Hebrew poet who had settled in mandatory Palestine in 1921, had become the central figure of the Hebrew modernist movement in Palestine and Schlotzsky's participation in the Hebrew literary culture.
This period marks an important shift, in my view, in the culture of poetry translation, which began to take on greater urgency and visibility in the 1920s and 1930s. Although poetry and Hebrew translation didn't make any major financial contribution to this issue's literary economy, and certainly poets weren't making a lot of money off of it. Its cultural capital. Capital was unquestionable, and the Hebrew modernist investment in translation had much to do with this.
Although the focus of the Hebrew publishing industry in the early 20th century was on original and translated prose, the poem nevertheless held the status of a kind of national genre, at least for the first half of the 20th century. Poets were the major representatives of the emerging national literary canon in Hebrew. And it was in this arena that. Poetry were the more polemical discussions on language and culture took place.
In fact, she lansky's debates with Bialik, who had been anointed the Hebrew Marshall where little me the national poet mark an important transition in the development of modern Hebrew poetry in ways that also implicated translation. Because Slansky sort of set up a kind of duel between him and Bialik, that was very much a sort of generational conflict.
He sort of would publicly deride Bialik's poetic style or Noosa which and and sort of portrayed Bialik as a sort of an arcane writer who was relying on certain conventions that were now like biblical intertextuality, for example, that in his view, were were becoming outmoded and, and that had characterised Hebrew poetry and translation of the late 19th century. Whereas in Schlotzsky's view, the 20th century needed to mark its modernity with an entirely new style of writing.
And in Schlotzsky's view, Bialik had never successfully transitioned out of the 19th century, and he hadn't established a model that would form the basis of a truly modern Hebrew poetic idiom. But the differences, as Slansky articulated them publicly between the two poets, also rested in their divergent views with regard to the status of Hebrew in the yishuv or in in mandatory Palestine, in the Jewish community of Mandatory Palestine. And this also implicated translation as well.
So in 1927, Bialik, who had been appointed president of the Hebrew Writers Union, gave a keynote address in Tel Aviv at a reception in honour of the Yiddish writers Sholem Asch and Peretz Fishbein. Although Bialik strove to be diplomatic, he reproached the language politics that preoccupied the younger generation, including Shemenski, when he remarked in quotes that language is just a part of nation building and not.
And I see this in quotes, everything. He then went on to describe the relation between Yiddish and Hebrew in terms of translation, noting that translations from Hebrew to Yiddish and vice versa had over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, enriched both languages. And then here in this and in these comments, he also invoked the figure of the Talmudic mature gay man or translator. And this is the second quote, which is shorter, but it's great.
So I wanted you to have it before you. The Talmud tells us that the mature gay man is obligated to translate even a list of names which ostensibly does not require translation Schneid McLarty, Hutter Bloom, twice Torah and once Targum. But in the head they would translate every Hebrew word into Yiddish, even if the word remained unchanged in translation.
So this expression twice Torah and once Targum comes from the Kalahari Jewish law, which prescribes that the weekly Torah portion should be read at least twice in that week, as well as in translation, and specifically in the Targum or the Aramaic translation slash interpretation of the Biblical text, Bialik transposes the Talmudic method command to the Eastern European head of the traditional study house for young Jewish boys,
the very space that 19th century masculine or Hebrew writers of the late 19th century repudiated in their pursuit of secular education and European cosmopolitanism. Bialik brings his audience back to this diasporic space, arguably to remind his audience of the family ties that these languages share, and also to re-establish a continuity between the spaces of Jewish diasporic tradition and Hebrew national culture in mandatory Palestine.
And in this respect, Bialik's attempt to accommodate both Hebrew and Yiddish in the project of keynotes marked a shift from his 1917 push for Hebrew monolingual ism, which is what we see in the first quarter. But Bialik also intended to illustrate tactfully to the Yiddish writers and their supporters in attendance. The Yiddish writing could not escape the trace of Hebrew.
But Lansky understood from these remarks that the reverse also held true that if Yiddish writing couldn't escape Hebrew, then it could also be argued that Hebrew couldn't escape Yiddish. So Bialik's address sparked a very heated debate, or at least also with respect to how Shklovsky reacted in the sort of debate Polonsky stirred up afterwards.
In particular, he was taken to task for his now famous, infamous assertion that there is between the two languages a kind of match made in heaven 0 minutes from mine that can't be divided. In his response, Slansky declared, And I this is a long quote. We never accepted this match between the languages, so we're not going to dance at their wedding. We view this catastrophe of bilingualism as we would tuberculosis knocking away at the lungs of the nation.
We want our let's is highly breath to be purely Hebrew with both lungs and quote. And it's important to note here that although Slansky is repudiating or appears to be refuting multilingualism, his own writing was actually quite multilingual. In fact, he has a number of poems where he's sometimes juggling up to five languages. And also he was a prolific translator for many languages.
And so this activity, his own literary activity, sort of contrast very sharply, I think, with his public statements on language politics in this particular period. And in fact, so Trotsky's remarks brings me to another key for me, a key historical episode in this sort of history of modern Hebrew literary translation in a time of nation building.
And that's the 1942 publication of the anthology She Got Russia Russian Poetry, which was edited by Slansky and his contemporary, the poet Leah Goldberg. And I actually when I came to Oxford and I went my office was at first at the Oriental Institute, and it was empty except for for two books. The first one was a I'm not even going to mention it was a very strange kind of book on Jewish Sex by Ishmael Lebow. So I just I put that aside. But the second book was not kosher.
Someone had left a copy of that in my office. Predestination. Yeah. So I felt like it was Bashir. I was supposed to have it. I was supposed to come to Oxford to it. But anyway, so this is the copy that I recovered there. Anyway, so this collection is really fascinating. It was actually meant to be the first volume of a whole series that they were going to do on world and on World Poetry in translation. They were supposed to follow this up with Anthology of French poetry and then English poetry.
But so far, this is all they think that they managed to do is the Russian one. It's a collaboration of 17 translators, including Slansky and Goldberg, and it offered a sampling of 34 Russian poets. And these these were poets whose work spanned the 19th century or the Silver Age, such as on Akhmatova and Osip mandelstam, as well as the futurists like Vladimir.
If you know Russian poetry, these names will be very familiar Vladimir Mayakovsky and Vladimir Klebnikov, as well as state sanctioned Soviet poets. And this combination would have been unprecedented in the Soviet Union at the time. You wouldn't have seen this sort of anthology there. So it's a it's a very sort of special kind of gathering that hasn't been replicated, as far as I know, in other contexts.
At the same time, the selection of poets and poems reflected in large part, the editor's own personal and biographical connection to the Russian literary tradition. The scholar Nina Segal, who's written about this collection, says that in its structure, it undoubtably represents an emigre or outside perspective on Russian poetry and its historical evolution, but also reflects the inside view of the cultural situation in Jewish Palestine at the beginning of the 1940s.
And quote, This balance is also evident in the ways these texts were translated, both faithful to the varying styles and idioms of these poets, Russian language poets, but also adapting these texts in several instances to realities in mandatory Palestine. And this ranges between certain animals are translated to reflect kind of the animals you find in in Israel. The flora was also translated to reflect the landscape. But every translator had their own way of dealing with these things.
So in this one collection, you see a whole range of translation practices, which is really fascinating. But what's interesting is that the term translation is never mentioned in the editor's introduction. They never explicitly acknowledged that that's what this anthology is.
And years later, the scholar and translator, I mean, Dickman, reflected on the influence that she, Lucia, had on readers and poets and translators at the time, when he's when he observes that never before had there been in Hebrew poetry such a complete and profound accord between original and translation. And never had there been such a bold and clear relation between the two in Russian poetry. So the appearance of this anthology during World War Two is hardly incidental.
And in fact. Minsky and Goldberg explicitly framed the anthology as a collective response to the war. They assert the power of poetry to, quote, shed light, as they put it, in dark times. Illustrating this point through their reading of specific poems and poets that engage and respond to Russian and Soviet political upheavals, beginning with the assassination of Tsar Alexander the second in March 1881.
The underlying objective of their historical survey is to show through the example of Russian poetry, the pivotal role that poets can and should play in national life and in times of crisis. Sharansky and Goldberg characterised their objective as follows and I quote the offering of a portrait of a generation, a biography of its tradition, which in every nation and language one discovers in the best poetry and quote.
This portrait, however, served a dual purpose. It gave Hebrew readers a key collection of late 19th and 20th century Russian poetry. But it also served as a portrait of a generation of Hebrew poets inspired and shaped by these very works in the in the pre-state period. Anthologies of this kind also reflected a desire to create what Benedict Anderson has called an imagined national community consistent with particular ideologies and politics.
The specific language that Goldberg and Slutsky use in their introduction this matter and the mood they are cannot handle the offering of a portrait of a generation. For Turkey to unpack in translation is fairly innocuous at first glance, until we reach the end of the introduction, where they conclude on this note and I quote Destruction surrounds us. Our hearts are alarmed by the apocalyptic signs announcing, as it were, the end.
But it is in such times that poetry has known how to decipher these signs with light and not with darkness, end quote.
The revelatory power of poetry and in this case, poetry in Hebrew translation suggest a relation between this offering and the modern Torah, the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai as related in Exodus 31, by casting and translating the light of Revelation onto the political and cultural concerns of the Jewish community in Palestine, she got the position, poetry and its translation prominently in the nation building project,
while also reasserting the prophetic role of the poet to chart a new future for modern Hebrew poetry. The poet Haim Haim, who was born in mandatory Palestine in 1923 to Russian parents, recalls that although Russian was never spoken at home, the publication of she read Russia returned to him, the Russian past of his parents. But in quote, our Hebrew for a younger generation of poets like Gooley, who would become a major poetic voice of the post 48 generation.
This collection offered the possibility of carrying Hebrew poetry in a new direction, paving the way for the statehood generation that would emerge shortly thereafter that it did so in what Guri refers to as our Hebrew as a critical contribution of this anthology.
For in their translations, she, Goldberg and other translators strove to represent as well as to create varied registers and styles of poetic language in modern Hebrew as a way of bringing these possibilities to the attention of the next generation of Hebrew poets. Two years later. So in 44, Goldberg published an essay on Bialik that further contextualised her understanding of the role of translation in the development of modern Hebrew poetry in a time of nation building.
In her essay Her Live Hello Me, the National Poet, she advances a poignant portrait of Bialik as a cultural translator and mediator and in some way recovers him from Schlotzsky's sort of presentation of Bialik as someone whose work is now outdated and out of touch with present day national concerns. And this quote from her essay is the third piece on the handout. Bialik returned to the Jewish people, their childhood poems that recall childhood Zohar and Safia.
They convey the same real feeling of the real world of childhood by giving it a name for the first time. All these things were given to us through his poetry. In the Hebrew language. He translated our childhood into Hebrew until it became the origin. And in this way, he taught us that a full life from the beginning is possible in this language, in this culture. Goldberg acknowledges how writing in Hebrew in the early 20th century could be a translational and revisionary act.
In this case, as a way of rewriting the Jewish diasporic past to create a new Hebrew national beginning, this translation is inter lingual. Between the languages of this past and modern Hebrew situating bialik's diasporic Hebrew as the point of origin for what later becomes a territorial lines national Hebrew.
And while this passage could be read through the lens of Zionist rebirth and renewal by explicitly referring to Bialik's composition of these texts as translation, Goldberg calls attention to the ways in which translating and writing are mutually inclusive and transformative practices in the now national, modern Hebrew literature of the period. Surely, she writes, This is the first step toward a new life. Thank you.