Israel in Translation – Details, episodes & analysis

In his essay, “The Desire to be Gisella,” Grossman ponders the root of our fear of the “other” in ourselves and in those we love, and he thinks of authorship as a mad rebellion against this fear.

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David Grossman, “The Desire to be Gisella.” Writing in the Dark, Essays on Politics and Literature. Translated by Jessica Cohen. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.

This week, Marcela takes a step back from the literature itself to look at the language of the words we use. The idea of the podcast, Israel in Translation, is that the works discussed were written originally in a language other than English—indeed, in the writer’s native language. But one of the realities of our age—or rather—one of the realities of literature—is that often poets and writers do not write in their first language. Or, if they do, this first language is not the language of the culture in which they find themselves.

Marcela revisits the Granta Hebrew issue of the Ilanot Review to talk about Dory Manor’s The Language Beneath the Skin: A Meditation on Poetry and Mother Tongues.

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Dory Manor. “The Language Beneath the Skin: A Meditation on Poetry and Mother Tongues” translated by Mitch Ginsburg. The Ilanot Review.

On this episode, Marcela reads an excerpt from Yaniv Iczkovits’s novel The Slaughterman’s Daughter: The Avenging of Mende Speismann by the Hand of her Sister Fanny. It is translated from the Hebrew by Orr Sharf.

The protagonist of this book is the titular character, Fanny Keismann, who leaves her home and her wonderful husband, a cheesemaker, and their beloved children, to find her sister’s husband. Adventures and misadventures ensue.

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The Slaughterman’s Daughter, by Yaniv Iczkovits. Translated by Orr Sharf. Maclehose Press. Quercus, 2020.

For this Yom Kippur, we read a section of S. Y. Agnon's Twofold translated by Jeffrey Saks.

Text:

Twofold, by S. Y. Agnon, trans. Jeffrey Saks, in The Outcast and Other Tales. Toby Press, 2017

Between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are the ten days known as the Days of Awe. Today we feature works by Yehuda Amichai and Ibn Gavirol fitting of these Days of Repentance.

Text:

The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, edited by Robert Alter. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2015.
Vulture in a Cage. Poems of Ibn Gavirol. Translated by Raymond P. Scheindlin. Archipelago Books, 2016

Music:

Exploring the Convoluted Singularity by OKAM vs ps

Next week, from Sunday night until Wednesday at sunset, we celebrate Rosh Hashanah, or the Jewish New Year. This year, Marcela focuses on the figure of Isaac, son of Abraham, because the Torah readings for both days of the holiday focus on Sarah’s conceiving and giving birth to Isaac, Hagar’s banishment into the desert, and also on the binding of Isaac on Mount Moriah.

Text:

Amir Gilboa, “Isaac,” translated by Arieh Sachs in The Modern Hebrew Poem Itself, ed. Stanley Burnshaw, T. Carmi, et. al.
“Sarah Laughed Again,” and “Isaac in Reverse” from Twenty Girls to Envy Me. New and Selected Poems of Orit Gidali, translated by Marcela Sulak. University of Texas press, 2016.
“Hagar” by Yocheved Bat-Miriam, translated by Zvi Jagendrof, in The Defiant Muse. Hebrew Feminist Poems from Antiquity to the Present. Ed. Shirly Kaufman, et al. The Feminist Press, 1999.

Music:

Avinu Malkeinu by Barbara Streisand
Avinu Malkeinu (feat. Maria Katz) by Andrey Makarevich & Евгений Борец
Avinu Malkeinu by Lior

Previous Rosh Hashanah Episodes:

2017 https://tlv1.fm/israel-in-translation/2017/09/20/fear-and-glory-rosh-hashanahs-unetanneh-tokef/
2016 https://tlv1.fm/israel-in-translation/2016/09/28/hava-pinhas-cohen-poems-for-the-month-of-elul/
https://tlv1.fm/israel-in-translation/2016/10/05/poems-for-rosh-hashanah-and-yom-kippur/
2015 https://tlv1.fm/arts-culture/2015/09/16/blowers-to-the-shofar-souls-to-the-firing-line/
https://tlv1.fm/arts-culture/2015/09/09/free-admission-to-rosh-hashanah/
2014 https://tlv1.fm/arts-culture/2014/09/17/rivka-miriam-on-asking-forgiveness-israel-in-translation/
https://tlv1.fm/arts-culture/2014/09/24/haim-gouris-piyyut-for-rosh-hashanah-israel-in-translation/

Today we feature poems translated this past spring and summer by some of Marcela's translation seminar students at Bar-Ilan University. After studying and discussing various translation theories, and becoming familiar with different poetic traditions and styles, these graduate and undergraduate students chose a poet and translated their work.

The poems in this episode were translated by Aya Abu Riash, Yavni Bar-Yam, and Hiba Jiryis.

Text:

“Bigger Than All Words” by Nizzar Qabbani, translated by Aya Abu Riash

“The Big Billybong” by Roy “Chicky” Arad, translated by Yavni Bar-Yam

“A Prayer to the New Year” by Fadwa Tuqan, translated by Hiba Jiryis

This episode features a short story written by Sheikha Helawy, a Bedouin woman living in Jaffa. The story, published on the Short Story Project, was originally written in Arabic and was translated by Basma Ghalayini.

Helawy was born in the unmarked Bedouin village of El-Roi, on the outskirts of the city of Haifa. Helawy currently works as a supervisor and advisor at the Institute for Democratic Education in Israel. Her Arabic-language publications, published in Amman, Jordan, include two books of short stories, as well as a book of poetry. Her work has also been translated into French, German, and Hebrew.

Text:

Sheikah Helawy, “R.A. Looks for His Eyes,” translated from Arabic by Basma Ghalayini.

David Avidan was born in Tel Aviv where he lived and worked as a self-described “poet, painter, filmmaker, publicist, and playwright.” He studied literature and philosophy during a short stint at Hebrew University.

Avidan was often attacked by poetry critics who criticized him as being egocentric, chauvinistic, and technocratic. In an interview, he proclaimed: “My arena is the entire planet. Israel is but a small piece of land. I don’t work in Tel Aviv. I work from Tel Aviv.”

The poems read in today's episode are translated by Tsippi Keller, from the new collection Futureman.

Text:

David Avidan, Futureman translated by Tsippi Keller, introduced by Anat Weisman. Phoneme Media, 2017.

Roy Hasan was born in 1983 in Hadera, Israel and is the author of two collections of poetry – The Dogs that Barked in our Childhood were Muzzled (Tangiers, 2014) and Golden Lions (Tangiers, 2016). 

Michele Rosenthal translated several of Hasan's poems and says of Hasan, “He challenges the cultural gatekeepers to look beyond the traditional topics, tropes and metaphors toward a different, more inclusive version of Hebrew poetry that reflects the lived experience of those that have been traditionally left outside of the canon.”

Text:

Roy Hasan, If There’ll be Peace all the Arsim will Come, translated by Ron Makleff

Roy Hasan, “The State of Ashkenaz,” and “Four in the Morning,” translated by Michele Rosenthal

Music:

Yemen Blues - Tonight I'll Be Pretty Ft. Mariem Hassan