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All right. Good afternoon and welcome, everybody.

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Uh, there's a special delight in presenting not only a colleague from Oxford who does work on matters related to Israeli studies,

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but also a good friend, Professor Edwina Jacobs.

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Uh, Edwina is, professor is Associate Professor of modern Hebrew Literature and fellow at the Oxford Centre for Centre for Hebrew Injury Studies.

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And she's a fellow at Saint Cross's Quartette.

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She is also on the steering group of the research program on comparative criticism and translation at Deutsche Project at St Ann's College.

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And we are here in part to celebrate the publication of her new book, a recently published book.

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Translation I'm Sorry, Strange Cocktail Translation and the Making of Modern Hebrew Poetry.

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And the title of her talk today is a gift from Thenight, Translation and Nation Building.

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And we want to thank you for coming. Thank you. So thank you, Yaakov, for including me in this seminar series.

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So a lot of my book deals with late 19th and early 20th century modern Hebrew poetry,

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but then towards the end is dealing with the transition from diasporic Hebrew to then territorial nation state.

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Hebrew. So pre 48. Post 48.

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And so what I'm going to talk about today is not quite post 48, but it's getting there.

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So I think it satisfies the rubric of Israel studies and it's going, as the title indicates,

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it'll deal with the relation between translation and the nation building project in Palestine, in pre-State Palestine.

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So this is from a part of the book that is sort of historic sizing a bit,

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the role that translation played in the development of modern Hebrew as a national literature in particular,

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and looking at certain writers and moments from this kind of literary history.

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So I'll just start. And the early 20th century Hebrew translation activity became a more visible literary practice in the Hebrew,

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as well as a crucial and valuable component of the modern Hebrew literary economy.

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Between 1910, in 1933, the Hebrew literary enclaves of Europe and Russia began to move and consolidate their operations in Palestine.

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And for much of this period, particularly the years 1908 to 1920, translation was a major,

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indispensable component of modern Hebrew literary production, according to the historian Zohar Shavit.

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Such was the role and status of translation that it was, in her words, quote,

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designated to fulfil part of the functions of an original literature, unquote.

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The translation of different kinds of texts from scientific, historical, linguistic and literary, and within the literary, both high.

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What we would think of as high and low literature also encouraged the development of distinct linguistic and literary registers in Hebrew.

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Editors and publishers began to establish strict standards for the kinds of works they sought to publish,

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and they invested primarily in what they considered to be the classics of world literature, with an emphasis on translations from German,

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Yiddish and Russian in order to generate a corpus of translated work in Hebrew that could serve as a model for original Hebrew

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writing and also to effect transformative changes in original Hebrew works through the influence of these literary translations.

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So in this respect, Hebrew translation activity in this period took on the status of creative literary

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labour in the early decades of the Jewish Nation Building Project in Palestine.

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Although it wasn't well-represented in the early 20th century,

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book market poetry and poetry in translation circulated widely in literary journals and almanacs of this period,

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as well as in the Hebrew press, like in journals and newspapers, often featured poems both in original Hebrew and in Hebrew translation.

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This was the case throughout the better part of the 19th century through the 20th.

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So there was nothing kind of new about this way that poetry circulated in the Hebrew literary market.

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And in fact, today, poetry both original and translated features daily in the Hebrew press as well.

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Nevertheless, when I glanced at the publication listing the first stable press,

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which was by far the most prolific publisher of Hebrew translations in this period.

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So like the 1910 through the 1930s, it made it very clear that poetry in Hebrew translation represented a very small

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percentage of the translated books that were published between 1917 and 1946.

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Still wasn't the only publishing house, Hebrew publishing house that was invested in translation.

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But given its wide distribution relative to other presses and its financial stability, we can draw from this publication.

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Listing a pretty fair,

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fairly accurate picture of the state of poetry in translation in the Hebrew book market in the early decades of the 20th century.

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So in this context, it was notable that in the year 1918, of the 16 titles that should be considered high priority for translation into Hebrew,

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one finds Alexander Pushkin's Russian novel in verse Evgeny Onegin.

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It was the only book of poetry that was on this list of must translate texts.

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We know from letters that passed between the publisher, Avraham Yosef Stable and David Fishman,

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who at the time was the editor of Hatikvah, that they had reached out to the poet Haim Nachman Bialik to translate this particular work.

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And they were insistent that Bialik in particular do this because they felt that only a poet of his calibre could do justice to Pushkin,

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who was widely regarded as one of the greatest, if not the greatest Russian poet of the time of his time,

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and one of the founders of modern, modern Russian literature.

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And by the time Fishman approached Bialik with this idea to translate Evgeny Onegin,

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Bialik had already paved his own career as the newly minted poet of the national Renaissance, as the critic Yosef Klausner dubbed him.

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A translation by Bialik, therefore, would have validated the value that Fishman, for instance,

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was placing on literary translation and on his insistence on including first rate Hebrew translations in Hatikva, but would also do something more.

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Having Bialik translate this work would also make a statement about the status

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of Hebrew as a full grown 20th century national language and literature.

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However, the comparisons to Pushkin may have deterred Bialik.

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He was being referred to as well as sort of the Jewish Pushkin, and he was intent as a young writer on forging his own identity in Hebrew.

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So while it appeared for a time that he was considering the possibility of doing this translation,

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in the end he declined, and the translation by Bialik of this particular text never materialised.

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But what interested me about this little exchange between stable and freshmen was that despite Bialik's resistance to translating Pushkin,

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he was actually, though, a very prolific translator, both of poetry and prose into Hebrew.

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In fact, there's this widely circulated maxim in in Hebrew that reading a text in translation is like kissing through a handkerchief.

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It's a nashieqa me. But the mood part. This is the Hebrew equivalent of poetry is what's lost in translation or something like that.

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So as is the case for most translation maxims, bialik's words have a more far more complicated source.

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In fact, locating an origin for this phrase is difficult,

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given that Bialik himself often repeated variations of kissing through a handkerchief in various contexts,

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almost as often as he also referred to translation as an act of almost divine creation as a Jewish metaphor for translation,

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this handkerchief can represent a space between distance and intimacy.

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But Bialik also understood that translations took their own life apart from their originals.

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And in this respect, the handkerchief also suggests the thin, sometimes translucent space of mediation between an original and translation.

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And this particular space of mediation has wide implications when you're translating Hebrew in a time of nation building, as I'll now discuss.

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In 1917, Bialik delivered a speech at a gathering of Holy Basford ever lovers of Hebrew,

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which took place in Moscow that year, shortly after the February revolution.

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In his remarks, which he later published in an essay titled Mother LaShawn on The Nation in Language,

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Bialik offers what appears to be at first glance a scathing repudiation of translation and of literary translation in particular.

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And this is where he invokes the metaphor of the handkerchief.

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And I have the quote, because it's quite long. So you can follow it's the first quote on the handout, and I'll just read the English.

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There are original Jews who are bound to the foundation of the national spirit.

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And there are translated Jews who live their lives not in their language, but in foreign tongues.

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Miguel Cervantes wrote Even the best translation is only the reverse side of a tapestry.

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He who uses a foreign language, who knows Judaism only in translation.

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That person is like someone who kisses his mother through a handkerchief.

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Anyone who glances through a translation is just looking into a blurred mirror

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and can't appreciate its full flavour and the full longings of the spirit.

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Because this language alone is the language of the heart and soul.

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He who has.

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Stood on this Mount Sinai, who forged a covenant of first love with his national language and to it bound the dreams of his youth and ideals.

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This person will no longer forsake his people.

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And you can see that in brackets. I offer the actual quote by Cervantes.

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So even Bialik is slightly manipulating his. What Cervantes is actually saying.

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So that's more just so that you can see how oftentimes these sort of ideas of translation get quickly politicised in different contexts.

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So to be a translator Jew, according to Bialik, is to be cut off from the full experience of Jewish tradition and Jewish textual tradition.

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And to remedy this condition, Bialik was committed to the project of Pina's Jewish cultural ingathering.

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That is, the reconstruction of a Jewish canon that would form the basis of modern Hebrew national culture.

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To this end, in 1908, as early as 1901, he had founded Modo Woodyard, a Hebrew publishing house based in Odessa.

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And although World War One interrupted its operations, it was briefly revived between 1917 and 1918, which is when this address took place.

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The Hebrew translation of key Jewish texts written in other languages, including Yiddish, was a major component of this project.

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In fact, the reference to Miguel de Cervantes remark on translation is a nod to Bialik's own Hebrew translation.

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And I put that in quotes because it's actually more of an adaptation of Don Quixote.

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And Bialik's translation appeared in 1912 and was published by the aptly named Press Tour of Yemen, which Bialik also founded.

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So Bialik had his he had a lot of his hand in lots of parts editor, translator, poet, public lecture.

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Nevertheless, despite the sort of Zionist ideology that was underpinning his remarks, Bialik had yet to settle in Palestine.

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In fact, aside from a visit in 1909, Bialik spent most of these years in Odessa,

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where he was committed to the diasporic Hebrew literary economy, a crucial stage.

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Bialik believed in the emerging national culture in Palestine when he immigrated in 1924 and settled in Tel Aviv.

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He brought with him his publishing house, de Villa.

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So what interests me about his remarks is that they don't these particular remarks don't repudiate translation as a whole.

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They seem to, but they actually don't. Rather, Bialik objects to the translation of Jewish life, rituals, experiences into other languages.

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In fact, there's a great quote that I also address in the book when years, years later,

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the Hebrew writer and Nobel laureate Shai Agnon met with the American Jewish writer Saul Bellow,

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and he was telling Bellow, he said, that you need to be translated into Hebrew because that's the only way you can ensure the afterlife of your work.

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And he tells him the language of the diaspora will not last.

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So this idea that Hebrew offers this afterlife is is one that goes back to echoes throughout the 20th century.

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But translating into Hebrew also serves the aim of creating a new linguistic beginning of sorts for an emerging Hebrew national culture,

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one in which these Hebrew translations will assume the status of original texts.

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When Onegin did appear in Hebrew translation in 1937,

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which was actually the centennial of Pushkin's death, it did so under somewhat remarkable circumstances.

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It appeared in two separate translations.

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The first was by Avraham Levinson, a Hebrew writer and translator who had completed the translation years earlier but had not found a publisher.

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But his translation was completely eclipsed by the other Hebrew Onegin, which was translated by Avraham Shemenski Slutsky,

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a Russian born Hebrew poet who had settled in mandatory Palestine in 1921,

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had become the central figure of the Hebrew modernist movement in Palestine and Schlotzsky's participation in the Hebrew literary culture.

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This period marks an important shift, in my view, in the culture of poetry translation,

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which began to take on greater urgency and visibility in the 1920s and 1930s.

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Although poetry and Hebrew translation didn't make any major financial contribution to this issue's literary economy,

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and certainly poets weren't making a lot of money off of it. Its cultural capital.

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Capital was unquestionable, and the Hebrew modernist investment in translation had much to do with this.

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Although the focus of the Hebrew publishing industry in the early 20th century was on original and translated prose,

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the poem nevertheless held the status of a kind of national genre, at least for the first half of the 20th century.

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Poets were the major representatives of the emerging national literary canon in Hebrew.

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And it was in this arena that. Poetry were the more polemical discussions on language and culture took place.

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In fact, she lansky's debates with Bialik, who had been anointed the Hebrew Marshall where little me the national poet mark an important

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transition in the development of modern Hebrew poetry in ways that also implicated translation.

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Because Slansky sort of set up a kind of duel between him and Bialik, that was very much a sort of generational conflict.

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He sort of would publicly deride Bialik's poetic style or Noosa which and and sort of portrayed Bialik as a

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sort of an arcane writer who was relying on certain conventions that were now like biblical intertextuality,

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for example, that in his view, were were becoming outmoded and, and that had characterised Hebrew poetry and translation of the late 19th century.

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Whereas in Schlotzsky's view, the 20th century needed to mark its modernity with an entirely new style of writing.

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And in Schlotzsky's view, Bialik had never successfully transitioned out of the 19th century,

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and he hadn't established a model that would form the basis of a truly modern Hebrew poetic idiom.

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But the differences, as Slansky articulated them publicly between the two poets,

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also rested in their divergent views with regard to the status of Hebrew in the yishuv or in in mandatory Palestine,

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in the Jewish community of Mandatory Palestine. And this also implicated translation as well.

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So in 1927, Bialik, who had been appointed president of the Hebrew Writers Union,

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gave a keynote address in Tel Aviv at a reception in honour of the Yiddish writers Sholem Asch and Peretz Fishbein.

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Although Bialik strove to be diplomatic, he reproached the language politics that preoccupied the younger generation,

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including Shemenski, when he remarked in quotes that language is just a part of nation building and not.

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And I see this in quotes, everything. He then went on to describe the relation between Yiddish and Hebrew in terms of translation,

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noting that translations from Hebrew to Yiddish and vice versa had over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, enriched both languages.

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And then here in this and in these comments, he also invoked the figure of the Talmudic mature gay man or translator.

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And this is the second quote, which is shorter, but it's great.

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So I wanted you to have it before you. The Talmud tells us that the mature gay man is obligated to translate even a

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list of names which ostensibly does not require translation Schneid McLarty,

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Hutter Bloom, twice Torah and once Targum.

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But in the head they would translate every Hebrew word into Yiddish, even if the word remained unchanged in translation.

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So this expression twice Torah and once Targum comes from the Kalahari Jewish law,

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which prescribes that the weekly Torah portion should be read at least twice in that week,

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as well as in translation, and specifically in the Targum or the Aramaic translation slash interpretation of the Biblical text,

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Bialik transposes the Talmudic method command to the Eastern European head of the traditional study house for young Jewish boys,

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the very space that 19th century masculine or Hebrew writers of the late 19th century

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repudiated in their pursuit of secular education and European cosmopolitanism.

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Bialik brings his audience back to this diasporic space, arguably to remind his audience of the family ties that these languages share,

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and also to re-establish a continuity between the spaces of Jewish diasporic tradition and Hebrew national culture in mandatory Palestine.

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And in this respect,

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Bialik's attempt to accommodate both Hebrew and Yiddish in the project of keynotes marked a shift from his 1917 push for Hebrew monolingual ism,

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which is what we see in the first quarter. But Bialik also intended to illustrate tactfully to the Yiddish writers and their supporters in attendance.

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The Yiddish writing could not escape the trace of Hebrew.

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But Lansky understood from these remarks that the reverse also held true that if Yiddish writing couldn't escape Hebrew,

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then it could also be argued that Hebrew couldn't escape Yiddish.

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So Bialik's address sparked a very heated debate,

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or at least also with respect to how Shklovsky reacted in the sort of debate Polonsky stirred up afterwards.

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In particular, he was taken to task for his now famous,

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infamous assertion that there is between the two languages a kind of match made in heaven 0 minutes from mine that can't be divided.

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In his response, Slansky declared, And I this is a long quote.

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We never accepted this match between the languages, so we're not going to dance at their wedding.

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We view this catastrophe of bilingualism as we would tuberculosis knocking away at the lungs of the nation.

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We want our let's is highly breath to be purely Hebrew with both lungs and quote.

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And it's important to note here that although Slansky is repudiating or appears to be refuting multilingualism,

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his own writing was actually quite multilingual. In fact, he has a number of poems where he's sometimes juggling up to five languages.

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And also he was a prolific translator for many languages.

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And so this activity, his own literary activity, sort of contrast very sharply,

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I think, with his public statements on language politics in this particular period.

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And in fact, so Trotsky's remarks brings me to another key for me,

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a key historical episode in this sort of history of modern Hebrew literary translation in a time of nation building.

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And that's the 1942 publication of the anthology She Got Russia Russian Poetry,

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which was edited by Slansky and his contemporary, the poet Leah Goldberg.

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And I actually when I came to Oxford and I went my office was at first at the Oriental Institute, and it was empty except for for two books.

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The first one was a I'm not even going to mention it was a very strange kind of book on Jewish Sex by Ishmael Lebow.

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So I just I put that aside. But the second book was not kosher.

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Someone had left a copy of that in my office.

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Predestination. Yeah. So I felt like it was Bashir.

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I was supposed to have it. I was supposed to come to Oxford to it.

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But anyway, so this is the copy that I recovered there. Anyway, so this collection is really fascinating.

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It was actually meant to be the first volume of a whole series that they were going to do on world and on World Poetry in translation.

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They were supposed to follow this up with Anthology of French poetry and then English poetry.

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But so far, this is all they think that they managed to do is the Russian one.

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It's a collaboration of 17 translators, including Slansky and Goldberg, and it offered a sampling of 34 Russian poets.

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And these these were poets whose work spanned the 19th century or the Silver Age,

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such as on Akhmatova and Osip mandelstam, as well as the futurists like Vladimir.

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If you know Russian poetry, these names will be very familiar Vladimir Mayakovsky and Vladimir Klebnikov, as well as state sanctioned Soviet poets.

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And this combination would have been unprecedented in the Soviet Union at the time.

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You wouldn't have seen this sort of anthology there.

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So it's a it's a very sort of special kind of gathering that hasn't been replicated, as far as I know, in other contexts.

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At the same time, the selection of poets and poems reflected in large part,

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the editor's own personal and biographical connection to the Russian literary tradition.

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The scholar Nina Segal, who's written about this collection, says that in its structure,

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it undoubtably represents an emigre or outside perspective on Russian poetry and its historical evolution,

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but also reflects the inside view of the cultural situation in Jewish Palestine at the beginning of the 1940s.

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And quote, This balance is also evident in the ways these texts were translated, both faithful to the varying styles and idioms of these poets,

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Russian language poets, but also adapting these texts in several instances to realities in mandatory Palestine.

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And this ranges between certain animals are translated to reflect kind of the animals you find in in Israel.

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The flora was also translated to reflect the landscape.

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But every translator had their own way of dealing with these things.

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So in this one collection, you see a whole range of translation practices, which is really fascinating.

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But what's interesting is that the term translation is never mentioned in the editor's introduction.

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They never explicitly acknowledged that that's what this anthology is.

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And years later, the scholar and translator, I mean, Dickman, reflected on the influence that she,

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Lucia, had on readers and poets and translators at the time,

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when he's when he observes that never before had there been in Hebrew poetry such a complete and profound accord between original and translation.

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And never had there been such a bold and clear relation between the two in Russian poetry.

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So the appearance of this anthology during World War Two is hardly incidental.

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And in fact. Minsky and Goldberg explicitly framed the anthology as a collective response to the war.

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They assert the power of poetry to, quote, shed light, as they put it, in dark times.

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Illustrating this point through their reading of specific poems and poets that engage and respond to Russian and Soviet political upheavals,

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beginning with the assassination of Tsar Alexander the second in March 1881.

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The underlying objective of their historical survey is to show through the example of Russian poetry,

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the pivotal role that poets can and should play in national life and in times of crisis.

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Sharansky and Goldberg characterised their objective as follows and I quote the offering of a portrait of a generation,

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a biography of its tradition, which in every nation and language one discovers in the best poetry and quote.

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This portrait, however, served a dual purpose. It gave Hebrew readers a key collection of late 19th and 20th century Russian poetry.

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But it also served as a portrait of a generation of Hebrew poets inspired and shaped by these very works in the in the pre-state period.

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Anthologies of this kind also reflected a desire to create what Benedict Anderson has

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called an imagined national community consistent with particular ideologies and politics.

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The specific language that Goldberg and Slutsky use in their introduction this matter

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and the mood they are cannot handle the offering of a portrait of a generation.

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For Turkey to unpack in translation is fairly innocuous at first glance,

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until we reach the end of the introduction, where they conclude on this note and I quote Destruction surrounds us.

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Our hearts are alarmed by the apocalyptic signs announcing, as it were, the end.

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But it is in such times that poetry has known how to decipher these signs with light and not with darkness, end quote.

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The revelatory power of poetry and in this case, poetry in Hebrew translation suggest a relation between this offering and the modern Torah,

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the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai as related in Exodus 31,

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by casting and translating the light of Revelation onto the political and cultural concerns of the Jewish community in Palestine,

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she got the position, poetry and its translation prominently in the nation building project,

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while also reasserting the prophetic role of the poet to chart a new future for modern Hebrew poetry.

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The poet Haim Haim, who was born in mandatory Palestine in 1923 to Russian parents, recalls that although Russian was never spoken at home,

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the publication of she read Russia returned to him, the Russian past of his parents.

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But in quote, our Hebrew for a younger generation of poets like Gooley, who would become a major poetic voice of the post 48 generation.

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This collection offered the possibility of carrying Hebrew poetry in a new direction,

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paving the way for the statehood generation that would emerge shortly thereafter that it

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did so in what Guri refers to as our Hebrew as a critical contribution of this anthology.

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For in their translations, she, Goldberg and other translators strove to represent as well as to create varied registers and styles of poetic language

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in modern Hebrew as a way of bringing these possibilities to the attention of the next generation of Hebrew poets.

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Two years later. So in 44, Goldberg published an essay on Bialik that further contextualised her understanding of the

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role of translation in the development of modern Hebrew poetry in a time of nation building.

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In her essay Her Live Hello Me, the National Poet,

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she advances a poignant portrait of Bialik as a cultural translator and mediator and in some way recovers him from Schlotzsky's

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sort of presentation of Bialik as someone whose work is now outdated and out of touch with present day national concerns.

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And this quote from her essay is the third piece on the handout.

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Bialik returned to the Jewish people, their childhood poems that recall childhood Zohar and Safia.

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They convey the same real feeling of the real world of childhood by giving it a name for the first time.

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All these things were given to us through his poetry. In the Hebrew language.

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He translated our childhood into Hebrew until it became the origin.

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And in this way, he taught us that a full life from the beginning is possible in this language, in this culture.

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Goldberg acknowledges how writing in Hebrew in the early 20th century could be a translational and revisionary act.

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In this case, as a way of rewriting the Jewish diasporic past to create a new Hebrew national beginning, this translation is inter lingual.

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Between the languages of this past and modern Hebrew situating bialik's diasporic Hebrew

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as the point of origin for what later becomes a territorial lines national Hebrew.

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And while this passage could be read through the lens of Zionist rebirth and renewal

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by explicitly referring to Bialik's composition of these texts as translation,

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Goldberg calls attention to the ways in which translating and writing are mutually inclusive and transformative practices in the now national,

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modern Hebrew literature of the period. Surely, she writes, This is the first step toward a new life.

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Thank you.