Liana X. Jacobs, your Phillips Across College, Oxford associate professor from Cowley,
lecturer in modern Hebrew literature and fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew Jewish Studies at the UN.
When did you come to Oxford and to some course college? I came to Oxford answering Cross at the same time.
In September 2013, when I took up my post as the Kaldi lecturer in modern Hebrew literature in the Faculty of Oriental Studies.
And how friends across college and house have been for you.
So I think for me, it's because I am not a what they call here the college tutorial fellow.
I think St. Cross has been an important community for me outside of my faculty and outside of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies.
It's brought me into contact with a variety of academics and a range of disciplines, and I find it to be a very collegial environment.
And I also really relish the informality of St. Cross, which is a breath of fresh air sometimes from the very formal aspects of teaching at Oxford.
No high table. So it's great. So you want I think it appeals to my American individualism.
Can you talk to somebody, something about your story, what you did before you came to Oxford?
And what led you to switch them? So. So I did my APHC at Princeton.
I was in comparative literature and I focussed there on and I still do on modern Hebrew literature,
which I study and teach and research in a comparative context.
So I'm really interested in the relation between writing in Hebrew and translating into and out of Hebrew.
And I was living in New York City. I was a postdoctoral fellow at Yale.
Coming to the end of that of that experience. And like a lot of people, I was on the job market.
And it's a very challenging job market as much then as it is now.
It's probably even harder now.
And that year, I was really coming to that question that a lot of academics who'd been on the job market for a long time are asking themselves,
which is how much longer can I keep doing this? And so I decided to cast a really wide net.
And as a result, I ended up sending an application to this post at the University of Oxford.
Do I have to say that I don't think living in England or was ever on my horizon.
But as it turns out, I. I got the job.
And my family and I my husband and I sat down and talked about and we decided it was too good of an opportunity to pass up.
So we decided to make the move. So can you tell me something about your research?
So, yeah, as I said, I've been working on Hebrew literature and translation for quite a while.
My specialisation is modern Hebrew poetry.
And in my book, which came out in August 2013, a book titled Strange Cocktail Translation In the making of modern Hebrew Poetry,
I turned my attention to the figure of the poet translator.
So what really motivates that study is the question of why poets translate, how they translate,
what they translate, and ultimately how this shapes their own writing in Hebrew.
But it was also a project that was very translations centred because I brought together
poets who I think typically wouldn't be considered connected in any sort of obvious way.
But they were connected, in my view, because they had all been translated by the poet who closes the study.
So this American born Hebrew poet who translated the poets of the first three chapters into English.
So by putting the translator at the heart of the project, I was able to bring in writers who otherwise I think would not be gathered together.
And I continue working on relations between Hebrew writing and translation.
But I've been broadening my work in the last couple of years to include Spanish
and also Anglophone writing as part of a new project on poetry of crisis,
which I'm currently researching and giving shape.
Can you tell me something about the skills that it requires of you to be able to do this kind of work?
The poet translator. Well, I think one thing was I had to learn Hebrew.
I had to learn a lot of Hebrew. And I'm still I always say that. I think I'm still learning Hebrew.
Each poet that I encounter opens up a whole new world of text, both in Hebrew and in other languages.
So I feel like I'm still a student in that respect, which I really quite like.
I think I'd like learning from my research.
And instead of just imposing my theoretical models or sense of mastery, I take the view that I can learn a great deal from the poets that.
I'm looking at I think that for my kind of work, I think it helps to really love poetry.
I have to read a great deal of it. And one way to preserve the love of it is to read for me.
It's to read poets also outside of Hebrew.
So I was really careful, even as a doctoral student, that I didn't want to turn reading the reading of poetry into into a chore.
So one way I kept the passion alive was to read poets and other languages.
I read Spanish and English, of course, and this ended up, I think, influencing the current book project.
But that's been very important. I think also because I work on translation and it's also helped to be a translator.
So I'm also a literary translator. I translated contemporary Hebrew poetry into English.
And that practise of translation is something that I also addressed in the book.
And how for me, what I call a practise of translation is inextricable from theories of translation or the way I theorise or think about translation.
Would you call that practise led research?
It is to some extent I am careful to distinguish between the ways that I translate, and that process is sometimes how I'm thinking about translation.
I mean, they are very much connected. But I think the practise of translation for me is also very personal.
It's very subjective. I can see how the series that I'm reading, the criticism I'm reading,
or other translations that I'm reading influenced and sometimes inspire certain approaches.
But ultimately, the experience of sitting down and translating a poem is sometimes a very long process that can take years until I feel it's right.
And there are parts of that process that I think for me are hard to put into words.
But yeah, I do think that in my case it is practise led to a degree so lost in translation.
I mean, what kinds of things are lost in translation? Do you think? So I'm allergic to the expression lost in translation.
I I'm I'm very aware of its history and its currency, but I don't see translation in terms of loss any more than I see writing in terms of loss.
I am aware is also someone who writes both academically and creatively that there's a great deal that doesn't end up on the page.
So I take that also in my ways of reading and practising translation.
I think Yosef Brodsky said that translation was also just too much about gains.
And I think that culturally we gain a great deal from translation.
I know that's certainly been the case for me, not only as a student of translation and someone who teaches it,
but I remember that my first encounters with translated literature really opened up in Windows and Worlds, all those metaphors.
But it it was so critical to shaping a wider perspective on the world.
And so I don't think we can live without it. Can I ask you then,
is translation an extension of work in the same way that an exhibition of an artist's
work is an extension of that artist's work in the way that it might be exhibited,
displayed interpretive in some way? Or am I being naive? No, I think it is.
But I also think translation is this is its own thing. So I think on the one hand, a translation can offer new ways of reading an author.
So, for instance, I, I always tell my teaching of Hebrew literature, my students at Oxford read these texts in Hebrew.
But before I came to Oxford, I taught Hebrew literature largely an English translation.
And I often bring English translations into my teaching here because I think it's important for
students to see sometimes how translators are wrestling with certain aspects of a Hebrew text and
in ways that can be really productive and sometimes really well often will illuminate something
about the Hebrew text that is only that we can only see through the translation or in this case,
through sometimes multiple translations. So in that respect, yes, I think it's an important interpretive tool.
And certainly as part of the life of a text, but it also takes on its own life.
And we certainly have cases of translations that have superseded their original.
And I think that translations can be incredibly creative and they can spark new works and create their own lineages.
I have to ask you, do you love poetry? I have to ask you what your favourite song.
Oh, gosh. So I think if you go into so in my office, I have a shelf for kind of my workbooks.
And then I have a shelf. So all the poetry that I've gathered that I'm not necessarily working on.
And I read. So if you look at it, you'll see that I've a lot of.
And Carson, I'm a huge fan of. And Carson. I also love American poet name Alice Notley.
She lives actually part of the year in Paris and ended up a sardonic, wonderful Argentinian poet who I also enjoy reading.
And Yvette Seagate's English translation. So I can read underfunded up.
You certainly can in Spanish.
But she's an example of someone who I also enjoy reading and translation because of the wonderful things Evet is doing with her work in English.
So say those are three poets that loom large for me in Hebrew.
I think I'm always my favourite poet. Sometimes the poet that I'm currently translating.
So I really love the work of To Help Frosch, whose work I've been translated into English.
Schiemann Adath is a wonderful contemporary poet. So it's a hard question to ask.
It keeps changing. I'm sorry if it seems so. What makes what you do imprudent and for whom?
Yeah, that's always a big question for us academics.
And now that we're approaching the end of the ref cycle, I've been asked to give this a lot of thought.
What is the impact of my research? What is its reach? There are a lot of different answers to this question.
I think I know my work is important in the field of Hebrew literature,
which has become increasingly interested in histories and theories of translation.
I think my book is it, and it's focussed on poetry.
I think a meaningful contribution to the field of modern Hebrew literature and its engagement with translation issues.
Outside of that, I think it's important because I work on Hebrew,
which is for me a fascinating language that has taken has lived many lives over the centuries.
I think today the issue of Israel, Palestine and that whole region necessitates a continued study of Hebrew and its and its literature,
which can, I really think, open up new perspectives on that conflict.
But I think also broadly, I really believe that studying poetry is vital to human beings.
I think it makes us. It may not save our lives, but it could save our life, actually.
I'm going to revise that. Yes, I just said it and I'm already contradicting myself.
I do think I just recently read a really wonderful book to my son's classroom by a book called Frederich by Leo Leonys,
which is a book about mice that are trying to survive the winter. And one mouse doesn't seem to be doing any work.
He is then taken to task by his his fellow mice.
And and he says that he's gathering words.
And at the end of the winter, when all the food has run out and the mice are very cold, they ask Frederick to share his words.
And then he delivers this really beautiful poem which cheers them up.
And for me, this is what what my work does is cast some light on that moment when I think something like a poem can alleviate our anxieties,
sometimes point us towards a way forward out of a crisis. And can you say things in poetry you can't say in other ways?
Oh, absolutely. I think so. I think the other thing is that you can also not say things in poetry.
You don't have to explain everything. And that's also something I really love about poetry.
I also am I'm aware that this is what makes poetry very challenging.
Sometimes we seek explanations and poetry sometimes offers them, but not explicitly, which then encourages us.
If we're open to it, to doing a great deal of work with the poem and with the poet and being a part of that creative process.
And so I think, yes, I think poetry can offer up.
So it is very radical ways of experiencing language and.
Strong language, but it's also an experience with what isn't spoken or written down.
You've been doing the podcast series. Could you tell us something about that?
Yes. So I last year, I had a John Fell fund grant to produce a podcast series that's connected to my new project.
So this is a series on poetry of crisis. And I called it Staying Alive Poetry and Crisis.
So pretty straightforward title. And it was an eight part series that featured an interview with a poet with a contemporary living poet.
In each episode and these poets came from the U.K., the United States, from Israel.
And yeah, it was it was a lot of work.
It was very challenging. I've never done anything like that.
It was also a bit scary because with this new project, I decided that I was going to share it at a very rough stage, I think, with the first book.
A lot of it I kept close to my chest. I just didn't really talk a great deal about, aside from conference presentations.
But with this book, I decided I maybe I've given the subject matter or maybe given that I was working
with contemporary poets who are alive and therefore one can engage with them,
that I wanted to share it in its rough early stages.
So the podcast was also a way for me to do this kind of research, but maybe do it in in a way that was less lonely than in the first book.
Something about having put Kerstetter cutting away.
Yeah, I know.
And it's I think it was interesting to see how, first of all, how poets understand their work and also poets often don't enjoy explaining their work.
And one of the features of the podcast was that we would read a poem and then and then the poet would discuss it.
And at first I was a little concerned about this because I thought, well, sometimes poets really don't want to be doing this.
They want to let the reader experience the work without the baggage of the author's intentions or ideas about the work.
But it actually ended up being my favourite part about the podcast.
I think it just gives listeners a chance to really dig into at least one text and experience it and think about it with the author.
And but yeah, no,
I think uncut is an interesting way of putting it because there's so much that didn't make it into the podcast and I'm so aware of that.
All these these long transcripts. And then you have to. So it's both cut and uncut.
There's the podcast that no one will see or no one will hear.
And then there's this edited version. So I had the experience of both very much.
The translators are high exact on podcasting, which. Which is which is fascinating.
Right. Yeah, no. And I think that's another thing I like about translation.
And I brought that a little bit into this podcast is that there's so much that goes into the process of translation,
so many attempts and words scattered around margins and on napkins.
And then ultimately what people see is this thing that we call kind of the finished translation, which for me is really still a work in progress.
And so I think the podcast in that way, people can hear these edited and somewhat polished interviews.
But for me, it's still just the beginning of this project.
Adriana, what's on the horizon for you? Well, there's this book on poetry of crisis.
It's somewhat apt that we're having this conversation today in the midst of virus anxiety.
So now I'm wondering if we're going to see a lot of poetry come out of this and maybe this will work its way into my book.
I'm going on sabbatical next year, so I'll have the chance to develop this research.
Possibly do a season two of staying alive.
There were a lot of poets that I wasn't able to include, poets who also were interested in being a part of it.
So if I can figure out the funding aspect, I'd love to do another round of this podcast.
Adrianna X. Jacobs, thank you so much. Thank you.