“Denk dir”: On Translating Paul Celan into Hebrew

In the wake of the Six-Day War of June 1967, Paul Celan wrote the poem “Denk dir,” which is considered his least hermetic and most political poem. This article examines the poem’s four Hebrew versions, which were authored by Nathan Zach, Ben-Zion Orgad, Ilana Shmueli, and Shimon Sandbank between 1969 and 2013. Close readings of the original and translations shed light on the myriad philosophical, poetical, historical, and political layers that constitute the original poem, on the interpretation of these layers by the poet-translators into Hebrew, and more generally on the Israeli Hebrew reception of Celan’s poetry in the decades after his visit to the country in 1969. The striking variations between the four Hebrew versions expose not only differing translational approaches such as domestication versus foreignization, or autonomistic versus referential readings, but emphasize an original that seems to demand the replication of its irresolvable tensions, conflicts, and strangeness. It is thus considered whether translators into Hebrew transfigured the linguistic and referential disruptions and disjunctures of the source within their target texts. The close philological readings also consider existing literature by Ruth Ginsburg, Peter Szondi, and Shira Wolosky, among others on translation from German into Hebrew and on Celan as prolific translator.