Translation, Resistance, Activism

Reclaiming the Erotic: Hebrew Translations from 1930 to 1980

129 In January 2004 a new publishing house called Katom (Orange) was launched in Tel Aviv, announcing the publication of a new series of pornographic novels, all written by women. The news was acclaimed in the electronic media with exclamations such as: “Well done,” “High time,” “Pornography and in Hebrew!” As though finally retrieving what had been for men only, young women reacted enthusiastically to the exclusive female-writers aspect; only one female reader, obviously unaware of the historic prominence of male writers in the genre, protested: “What about men-writers!”1 Somewhat earlier, in February 2003, a high-court decision overruled the 2002 prohibition of the Playboy channel on Israeli cable TV. The prohibition was a direct result of the strengthening of the right-wing coalition between the national Likud party and the Orthodox parties which had issued in a 2002 parliamentary law canceling pornographic channels on Israeli TV. Presiding over a panel of eleven judges, Chief Justice Michael Heshin justified the decision by evoking the principle of freedom of speech, concluding with the remark that the historic decision to ban D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover would nowadays be shrugged off with a smile. Welcome as they may be, these two incidents stand out in twenty-first-century so-called liberal Israeli society and should be viewed in their historical and cultural contexts; they are minor illustrations of the ongoing discourses concerning erotic literary material and the freedom of speech. This essay indicates how ideological mobilization can explain the puritanical tendencies in modern Hebrew literature and in literary translations NITSA BENARI Reclaiming the Erotic: Hebrew Translations from 1930 to 1980 130 Nitsa Ben-Ari into Hebrew in one of its most critical formative periods, 1930–80, but it indicates as well the subversion of and resistance to that ideology. The essay covers a long stretch of time, allowing for synchronic and diachronic analysis , through risking generalizations. Two milestones in this period are the 1936 adoption in pre-state Israel of the Mandatory British Obscenity Law and the 1977 political upheaval that ended the long rule of the Israeli Labor party. The tendencies exposed in the half century covered by this essay lie behind current discourses about pornography in Israel illustrated above. Research in semiotics and translation studies has provided insight into the mechanisms of ideological manipulation, making it possible to understand what an influential and effective vehicle of ideological manipulation translated literature can be within a national literature (Even-Zohar 1990, Tymoczko 1999, Gentzler 2002). My research on issues pertaining to the formation of national identity in what I call “mobilized” translations of historical novels (Ben-Ari 1997, 2006b) and on the censorious manipulation of religious, particularly Christian, elements related to the formation of Self and Other in Hebrew translation (Ben-Ari 2002) has motivated me to look further into moral censorship. Puritanical trends in Hebrew literature offer insights into the processes that helped construct the valorized representation of the puritanical native-born Israeli, called the sabra. Within this large context the role of translation is doubly interesting. Mobilized within canonical culture, it led to censorship of the most effective type, that is, self-censorship. Mobilized within the margins, it had a completely different role, that of initiating and canonizing erotic models. Two remarks before I proceed. In this essay I use terms like obscenity or pornography as descriptive terms rather than evaluative ones. I do not attempt to define pornography or to supply a historical overview of the various definitions the word has been given. The only (non) definition I adopt is a semiotic view of obscenity as writing about sex or eliminative functions that past or present officials or influential groups have suppressed or tried to suppress on the grounds that they were morally corrupting or degrading (Loth 1961:8). It seems impossible in a post-Foucauldian era to view sexuality in any cultural context without considering power relations and their role in the shaping of personal as well as national identity.2 Moreover, terms like puritanism and Zionism are obviously much more complex and diverse than can be discussed adequately in a short study. Like many other broad terms, they are place- and time-dependent. Modern studies of Victorian puritanism (Marcus 1966, Morgan 1966, Gay Reclaiming the Erotic 131 1998) have undermined customary notions about Victorian prudery. Research has demonstrated the many faces of puritanism within different social classes, as...