Strange Cocktail: Translation and the Making of Modern Hebrew Poetry by Adriana X. Jacobs (review)

The singer-songwriter Elvis Costello once said that people were always asking him to explain the meaning of his songs, i.e., the point he was trying to get at with them, to paraphrase them in other words. He replied, “If I could have said it in other words, I would have written a different song!” The phrase “in other words” is similarly the recurring refrain—and in stylistic terms, a sometimes overused idiom—in Adriana X. Jacobs’s book Strange Cocktail: Translation and the Making of Modern Hebrew Poetry. The act of translating from one language to another—an art form of which Jacobs herself is an exceptional exponent—is literally the process of expressing the idea of an artwork “in other words.” Although a growing library of translation theory devotes itself to how this alchemy transforms the poem itself, the equally significant yet less remarked upon focus of Jacobs’s book is how this process has changed, in historical, social, and aesthetic terms, not just the poem being translated but also its target language, Hebrew.

Beyond the theoretical questions addressed in the book, its core examines four poets spanning twentieth-century Hebrew and Israeli literature: Esther Raab, credited conventionally as the first “native-speaker” Hebrew author; Leah Goldberg, the polyglot poet and scholar who, among other achievements, co-founded the department of comparative literature at Hebrew University in Jerusalem; Avot Yeshurun, an Eastern-European-born author whose translation consists of reworking his own writings and memories from Yiddish and other Eastern European vernaculars into Hebrew verse; and Harold Schimmel, an American-born poet who transformed himself from an Anglophone writer into a Hebrew author in part, as Jacobs argues, through the translation and transformation of poets such as Robert Lowell into a Hebrew idiom. These authors are among the most significant Israeli poets of the twentieth century, yet each in differing respects poses an anomaly or challenge to an ideological convention that sees the Hebrew language as synonymous with the Zionist movement, which in turn is synonymous, so the reasoning goes, with the State of Israel. Though Raab was raised in Palestine speaking Hebrew, the status of the language at the beginning of the twentieth century, as well as formative experiences she had as a young woman living in Egypt as well as Europe, ensured that her ostensible monolingualism was at every turn suffused with other languages. Her translations of Charles Baudelaire, the primary focus of Jacobs’s chapter, though apparently unpublished during her lifetime, nevertheless exerted a formative influence on her poetry, in effect conferring a translingual literary parentage on her Hebrew verse.

Leah Goldberg, born in Lithuania and trained in Berlin before making aliyah, is similarly a canonical figure, yet her literary career was distinguished by its cosmopolitanism. Her poetry reflects the strong influence of French Symbolism, as does Raab’s, and Russian Acmeism; in addition to her scholarship she was a leading translator of world literature into Hebrew. Jacobs focuses in particular on a cycle of sonnets that Goldberg writes, reimagining the imitation of Petrarch by non-Jewish female poets during the Renaissance. This exercise complicates the commonly understood relationship of an original text with its supposedly incomplete, unoriginal, even parasitic translation—pejorative designations for translation that resonate historically with prejudice toward both female and Jewish writers. Imitation, indeed, is one of the most venerable formal devices in the history of lyric poetry, and Goldberg’s transformation of Petrarchian form across languages effectively erases the distinction of original and translation as much as it links Hebrew with Italian and other Renaissance languages as new vernaculars, while complicating the gendered hierarchies between Petrarch and his female epigones, effectively mastering the master through her expert imitation of his imitators.

For Yeshurun, one of...