Literature in Translation: Teaching Issues and Reading Practices

Hebrew Poetry, Ancient and Contemporary, in Translation

235 Hebrew Poetry, Ancient and Contemporary, in Translation Chana Bloch The linguistic and cultural barriers that separate any two languages are palpable to the translator who works her way across them, although more often than not they are invisible to the reader who picks up a poem in translation, comfortably ensconced on his side of the border. But when the languages in question differ as fundamentally as Hebrew and English, the roadblocks and checkpoints must be identified if the reader is to experience the poem in all its demanding particularity. Hebrew is an ancient language, and its historical strata are transparent to an educated speaker; thus, allusion and intertextuality are a common form of shorthand in conversation, and even more so in written texts. The earliest examples of this practice are found in the Hebrew Bible, an anthology of narratives, poetry, wisdom literature, law, prophecy, and apocalypse spanning a millennium, from the archaic Song of Deborah (ca. 1200 bc) to the book of Daniel (ca. 165 bc). The author of the Song of Songs, for example, is in dialogue with Genesis, the prophets, and the book of Psalms. The contemporary Hebrew poet Yehuda Amichai (1924–2000) is able to draw upon the whole history of the language—biblical, rabbinic, medieval, and modern—alluding to texts from earlier periods without any sense of strain and relying on his audience to recognize the allusions. It is customary to speak about the “revival” of Hebrew at the end of the nineteenth century. In fact, even when the language ceased to be spoken, it continued to live as a medium of textual exchange, and its historical layers were accessible in the daily life of Jewish males. Thus, when Hebrew once again became a spoken language, even the simplest words remained charged with ancient, often sacred meanings. A common term like davar, which means “word” or “thing,” can also refer to a prophetic vision; makom, 236 literature in translation “place,” and shem, “name,” are familiar designations for God. The theological connotations of biblical and rabbinic language are present everywhere in Amichai’s poetry, often serving as grist for his irony. Hebrew verbs and nouns are typically based on triconsonantal roots that embody some general idea. The root can generate a multiplicity of related meanings, a fertile source of nuances and associations that has no semantic equivalent in English. For example, the root chatza means “to cut, divide, or cross a dividing line.” Among the biblical nouns derived from chatza are chetzi, “half” (that which has been cut in two), and chutz, “outside” (implying the divide between inner and outer). In modern Hebrew la-chatsot et ha-gvul means “to cross the border,” and chutz la-aretz means “abroad.” The rabbinic term mechitza is the partition that separates men from women in an Orthodox synagogue; the plural form of that word, mechitzot, may occur in the modern Hebrew phrase “linguistic and cultural barriers” with which I began. The Hebrew language today is very fluid; like the English of Shakespeare’s day, it is open to new coinages, portmanteaus, and all forms of wordplay. A reader of Hebrew needs no special expertise to divine the meaning of an unknown word, because it is usually based on a familiar root, whereas a reader of English might have to call upon a knowledge of Latin or to look up the word’s etymology. Verbs and nouns in Hebrew are either masculine or feminine in form (there is no neuter); gender is readily apparent, and it exerts an insistent pressure. Hence the fact that the woman has most of the lines in the Song of Songs—remarkable indeed in a book of the Bible!—is much more obvious in Hebrew than in an English translation. When the lovers address one another, there is no doubt in the Hebrew about who is speaking to whom, because masculine and feminine are differentiated in the second person. (Some English translations resort to such devices as “The Shulamite Speaks,” “The Bridegroom Speaks”; in the translation I did with Ariel Bloch, we used different typefaces—roman type for the man and italics for the woman.) Gendered nouns lend themselves easily to personification. For example, the common word for “moon” in biblical and modern Hebrew is the masculine yare’ach, from yerach, “month,” while the poetic word, found most often in rabbinic texts, is the feminine levana, from lavan, “white.” Yare’ach is often personified in Hebrew poetry as a man and levana as a woman...