'The Virtue of Hellenism': Yoram Bronowski'S Hebrew Translations of Constantine Cavafy and Israel's Mediterranean Identity

In his 1978 and 1993 translations of the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy, the Israeli writer and journalist Yoram Bronowski offered a theoretical perspective on literary translation between Hebrew and Greek suggesting a deep affinity between both the languages and the broader Eastern Mediterranean cultures that produced them. Bronowski's translations, however, are more than simply literary exercises: they also allowed Bronowski to intervene in contemporary Israeli debates about national identity and orientation. For Bronowski, long an advocate of an Israeli national identity which embraced its European and Mediterranean roots rather than its Levantine and Eastern ones, the cosmopolitan and Europhilic Greek poet served as an aspirational model for Bronowski as an individual and Israel as a whole.