Jessica Cohen is an independent translator born in England, raised

in Israel and living in Denver.

She translates contemporary Hebrew prose and other creative work.

In 2017, she shared the Man Booker International Prize with

David Grossman for a translation of A Horse Walks into a Bar.

She has also translated works by major Israeli writers, including Amos Oz, Edgar

Caret, Ronit Mathelon, and Mayarath, and by filmmakers Ari Folman and Nadev Lapid.

She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in

Translation and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Cohen works with the Authors Guild and American Literary Translators

Association to advocate for literary translators recognition,

rights, and working condition.

She spoke about Hebrew literature, the Authors Guild, and working

with David Grossman, the famous Israeli author, in this episode.

Welcome to Harshanium, Jessica.

Such a pleasure.

Thank you.

It's

really a pleasure to be

here.

Your father, Professor Stanley Cohen, was a human rights activist.

And your mother too, Ruth Cohen, she was an artist and what kind of impact did

your parents have on you as far as your literary sensibilities are concerned?

I'm not sure if it's entirely accurate to describe him as an activist.

He was definitely an intellectual.

And I think his activism was in the form of writing and thinking

and calling things out that he saw.

My mother was more of an activist in the sense that she was sort of out on the

barricades protesting and organizing.

They both grew up in South Africa, and I think developed a sense of the

world and of justice or injustice, what they saw growing up under

apartheid, and that was something they carried with them very much.

And so I think there was a way in which, growing up in that

household, I think I absorbed this sense of the importance of empathy.

With people who were not like us or who were less fortunate than us.

And that's something they both definitely felt strongly about.

And I, the reason I think that's connected to a literary sensibility is that I think.

Good writing necessitates empathy, both on the part of the writer,

definitely, and the reader.

That's really, I think what most good fiction does is allows you

to step into someone else's life, someone who you could never be, but.

might be through reading.

I was born in England, but we moved to Israel when I was seven.

And so my schooling was always in Hebrew and my social life was in Hebrew, but

everything at home was in English.

My parents were both voracious readers.

My sister and I also grew up reading a lot.

The house was full of books everywhere you looked.

And so I definitely, I think was raised with an appreciation for

literature and reading and writing.

And that's something I've always had.

So I assume that.

That in some ways affected my choice of career, to live with literature.

My dad, when I think of both of them, some of their biggest heroes were writers.

Pictures up in my dad's office were Samuel Beckett, George Orwell.

My mother had a framed portrait of Virginia Woolf up on her wall.

Writers were who they looked to, I think, for inspiration and inspiration.

Not just entertainment.

So what made you get into translation?

And, uh, interestingly, your first customer was Microsoft.

That's true.

That's true.

Which is very, it seems very incongruous with what I do now.

Yeah.

I think that a lot of people who has my generation and above who are literary

translators, we all fell into it by chance or through various other previous lives

that we had, that's changing quite a bit now because there are so many more.

Yeah.

Translation programs, and I think Younger Translate is who I meet.

Tend to have more of a conscious decision.

I am going to become a literary translator, but for me and many of

my peers, that was not the case.

I immigrated to the United States right after I finished university.

I had studied English literature, had no idea what I wanted to do when I grew up.

And I really just by dumb luck, got a job at the Microsoft campus in just

near Seattle, where I was living.

They needed someone who spoke Hebrew.

I didn't know the first thing about computing, about tech, it was 1997.

So that was all very big in Seattle area.

But for me, I really didn't know.

I had a lot to learn when I was hired there about just basic

terms to do with computing.

And I was in.

A group that did Hebrew and Arabic software localization.

And so that was the first time that I worked in translation formally as a job.

And it was great.

I learned a lot.

I learned a lot about tech stuff.

I learned a lot about working in an office environment.

Mostly I learned that I didn't want to do it for the rest of my life.

And I did learn quite a bit about translation too.

It was mostly tech things and some legal stuff, but I think that was a really

good basis for any kind of translation.

The understanding the expectations, the timelines, the, not just the

technicalities of translation, but everything that goes with that.

I didn't stay there for very long in that job because we, my

then husband and I moved away.

But then I was once again left jobless and directionless, but I liked translation

and I thought this is something I could do and having Microsoft on my

resume was a good door opener for me.

So I built up a freelance translation business, but still doing all

kinds of commercial translation.

Technical, legal, even medical, mostly those personal documents,

some journalism, stuff like that.

I worked for a lot of agencies.

So that was how I became a translator.

And then literary translation was something that I started doing at

the time, really as more of a hobby.

It was just something that interested me.

I was, I was a translator.

Reading a lot of things, literature came out of Israel by writers who hadn't yet

been translated and thinking, I wish these things were available in English.

And I wonder if I could translate them into English.

So I didn't really know how to go about it in terms of getting rights,

contacting publishers, agents, but I just played around with translating texts.

And I had a mentor in Indiana, where I was living at the time, Breon Mitchell,

who was one of the most renowned translators of German literature.

I met him through the university and he became first a sort of unofficial mentor.

And then my professor, when I went to grad school there, and he was really

instrumental in helping me improve as a translator, but also helping me see

that I did have the skills to do this and that it was what I wanted to do.

And so I very gradually literary translation started to take over

and I devoted more of my time, more of my energy to it, but I still

kept doing commercial translations because that's what pays the bills.

And it wasn't for at least a decade or so that I decided to give up the

commercial translation and focus just on literary, which in retrospect

was a terrible financial decision, but it did make me a lot happier.

Okay.

That's nice.

Now, Brain Michelle.

What is mentorship?

What is the best takeaway from that mentorship?

One of the takeaways, which I've been thinking about now because I'm starting

to dip my toe into a little bit of teaching and I've been doing quite a

lot of mentoring over the time, but I'm planning to teach a workshop.

So one of the most interesting things that I think is surprising

to people who haven't done this is how helpful someone can be when they

do not speak your source language.

Brion, as I said, translates from German.

He does speak some other languages, but not a word of Hebrew.

And so at first I thought, how is this going to work?

What could he possibly have to say?

But in fact, what I realized through working with him is that the key thing

is how your translations sound in the target language, in English, in my case.

And so he and I would, initially our work together consisted of

meeting for coffee or lunch.

I would send him a short story or whatever I'd been translating.

And he would give it back to me with just very bare bones comments.

The things would just be underlined.

There'd be little points here and there.

And he wouldn't necessarily say, I think this is a problem because A, B,

C, here's how you need to solve it.

He would just mark things that stood out for him, that stopped him.

Um, and then I would know, okay, there's something here that needs work.

And very often, and this is still the case when I get back edited work, the

things that are marked are the exact things that I knew were a problem, that

I struggled with during the translation.

And they come back and indeed they need more work because I wasn't quite there.

And so I suppose what he taught me was, yeah, how absolutely crucial it

is that your translations read as a work of literature in the language

that you're translating into, and that you should trust your gut.

And if you know, something isn't quite working, you need to, you need to keep

going with it until you find a solution.

And that solution may be quite far away from the original, which is,

I think that the further, the more I have worked as a translator, the

further my translations get from the original, but that's not something you

can do when you're starting off because you just don't have the confidence.

And so it took me a while to gain that, but that is something I think

he was trying to show me early on.

Now, you lived in Israel for, I think, a couple of decades,

if I'm correct, 17 years.

So how much of living there, you know, help you in translating Hebrew?

A lot.

I, a lot of translators are not purely bilingual in the sense that

the, usually their source language is one they've acquired later in life,

either through living somewhere or learning or a combination of both.

There are a handful of strictly bilingual translators, and it's

certainly not a prerequisite.

But for me personally, control of my fluency in Hebrew is a big part of why

I'm able to do what I do and do it.

I often read and hear translators talking about their approach to translation

and why and how they're doing it.

And they speak of carrying something out of a less familiar environment.

Into their familiar native linguistic and cultural environment.

And for me, it's really much more of a two way street.

I feel as comfortable in Hebrew and in Israel, as I do here in an English

speaking country, not in terms of writing my writing in Hebrew, although

I'm entirely capable of writing.

I don't write all that.

I could not write literary stuff in Hebrew.

I've tried and failed.

So for me, the, having a more or less equal facility.

And comfort with the language is what I think makes me a translator, or at

least the kind of translator that I am.

Yeah, I can't really imagine translating out of a language that I don't feel

as at home in as I do in Hebrew.

So having grown up there, spent most of my childhood, all of my, my, my

adolescence and my very young adulthood, which I think are very formative years.

Of course it does happen that I, there's a cultural reference I may

not be sure of or not pick up on, but for the most part, it's pretty rare.

That I really have no idea what something is referring to or what it means.

The difficulty is finding out or figuring out how to say it in English,

but it's not often happened to me that I will miscomprehend the original.

Sometimes I may need to get more context or ask the author about it.

But yeah, I feel.

very familiar with most of the originals that I'm reading and working from.

Now, Hebrew is spoken in many countries, many countries in

Europe, uh, European continent, and of course in the United States.

And, uh, I presume there will be some difference in dialect and accent too.

So what are the major challenges that you face when translating Hebrew into English?

It's true that Hebrew is spoken in many countries in the world.

In fact, I think It would be difficult to find a country where there isn't an

Israeli at some given time, even in India.

We have, oh yeah, lots and lots of Israelis.

There's travel in India and some of them end up staying there for quite a while.

So there's little expat communities really all over the world,

obviously in the United States, in England, in Germany, which I think

is a sort of irony of history.

There's a massive population of Israeli expats, but I There aren't

really dialects of modern Hebrew, even within Israel, there are some slight

variations in, mostly based on class, I would say, not so much region.

There used to be more differences in different types of Hebrew in

the sort of early years of the state and into the 50s and 60s.

There were quite pronounced differences between the way Jews from North African

and Middle Eastern countries spoke Hebrew and European, Eastern European

Jews, the different pronunciations of certain letters and those sort

of faded over the decades and melded into this one Israeli Hebrew.

So that at this point, it's quite unusual to hear really sharp differences

in, in accent or pronunciation.

So there, there are differences, I would say in register, intonation, a

little bit of an accent difference, but not much, so that's not necessarily

something that presents a challenge in Hebrew the way I know it does for some

languages that have real distinct dialect.

So the challenges, there are many, I would say probably the two main ones from Hebrew

for me, as I mentioned before, register.

So register and I suppose context.

So because ancient Hebrew is one of the oldest languages in the world, and

it is very much the basis for modern Hebrew, you have this really interesting

and quite extreme mixture of different sources of Hebrew and different registers.

So within the same sentence, you might find a biblical phrase and a very

current sort of street, almost slangy phrase, it within one dialogue line.

And it doesn't stand out to Hebrew readers as anything bizarre, or it

wouldn't stop them in their tracks.

But when I try to convey that in English, It's really hard to find a way to do

that without sounding just ridiculous.

Because there's such a stark difference between those two worlds.

It would almost be like combining Shakespearean English with

modern New York slang, right?

It would just sound so incongruous.

But that is so equivalent to what is quite often done in Hebrew.

And so that's something I struggle with, is to try and find, an English

equivalent to this blend of different types of Hebrew, different historical

layers of Hebrew without sounding too odd.

What's your solution

for that?

I think I'm going to end up saying this often in this interview.

I don't have, it's very hard for me to formulate solutions, or even rules of

thumb, I feel very strongly that each case is its own, presents its own sets

of problems, and therefore has its own solution, depending on the context, on

whether it's dialogue versus narrative, on what sort of book it is, who's going to be

reading it, what knowledge can I assume.

I know this is not very helpful for beginning translators to hear

that there is no solution, but it's something that over time and with

experience and I suppose on instinct

you

find, and sometimes I don't find the right solution.

It can be very frustrating, but I try to remind myself that The only people

who would know that I didn't really solve the problem are the people who

also read the original, but there aren't that many people who are doing

that, right, reading side by side.

So often the losses are ones that, that not many people are aware of.

But I would say the other general sort of type of challenge that, that I come

across a lot when going from Hebrew to English, and again, this has to do with

Hebrew being an ancient language and English being newer, although not new,

is that Hebrew compared to English has a tiny vocabulary, but very often a Hebrew

word will carry many layers of meaning.

So I like to think of Hebrew as a depth language, whereas English

is more of a breadth language.

So one of the things I love about English is the almost infinite possibilities

of how to say something, right?

You look in English thesaurus, it's just fantastic.

And you know that you're going to find the perfect word to say what

you mean, but In Hebrew, although the vocabulary is limited, one word

can convey so many allusions and so much context that it's impossible

to get across in any other language.

And that can be really frustrating and often it just means that I have to pick.

And sometimes I'll do that in collaboration with the author.

This word or this term is conveying these three or four different worlds

of meaning, which one of them is more important, because I'm going to have to.

I'm going to have to lose out on some of them.

So that's a big challenge.

So how often you contact authors regarding this?

I always have some communication with authors and it really varies a lot

depending on, on usually on the author's interest or availability or, you know,

often an author just has moved on.

They're deep in another project.

They don't necessarily want to, or feel they can delve back into something

they may have written years ago, but they're always available to me.

And.

Yeah, again, it depends on kind of the relationship that evolves between us.

Some authors have become really close friends of mine.

And then we do speak quite a lot about the work and they will offer solutions.

It also depends on how good their English is.

Most Israelis, pretty good English in some cases, very good.

Sometimes their English is just not good enough to necessarily comment on

the translation or offer solutions.

So yeah, it's, it really depends on the specific case, but I always have some

contacts and at the very least, I will.

Pretty much always have a list of queries that I'll send at some point.

Um, either I'll just get back straight responses or it'll open more

of a dialogue that can be ongoing.

On the day one, when you started literary translation and now

what kind of effect the literary translation had on your English,

I think that it's affected.

my sense of what I'm doing, which is, I would now describe

myself as an author or a writer.

Let's say when I started off, I wouldn't have, in fact, I was just on some,

I forget where I came across this.

I was online searching for something to do with translation.

And I came across this Reddit thread and to do with translators

compensation or something.

And someone said, Translation isn't writing, it's just a work for hire, and

there's no reason why a translator should be, get royalties or anything like that.

And I, I was really outraged, because to me, and I think to every translator,

every literary translator, it's, you know, It goes without saying that we

are writers and you cannot be a good translator without being a writer.

That is what we're doing.

So I'm not doing the sort of heavy lifting of writing and coming up with a

story and developing characters and plots and all of that, which I don't actually

have the interest or I think the skills to do, but I get to do, to take all

that work that someone else has done.

Do the actual work of writing, of playing with language and moving words around

and sentences, which is what I love.

I think going in, especially because I started off with a non

literary translation, I had a different view of what I was doing.

It felt more transactional.

I, here, I take this text and then I put it in this other language

and then I send it in and I'm done.

And now I really, as a literary translator, I really feel that I

am putting a lot more of myself into the work, I live with them,

I really do feel quite a lot of ownership over my work, and without

a doubt my writing has become better.

Because it's what I do all day.

And usually the more you do something, the better you get at it.

Now you translated a lot of nonfiction too.

So if you had to advise the translators who are starting out, what should be the

difference in approach when it comes to fiction and fiction versus nonfiction?

Any key parameters to look at?

This is another thing that I find difficult to articulate

exactly how it's different.

But it does feel as though.

There's a slightly different part of my brain working when I'm doing fiction

versus nonfiction, of course, it depends on what, because some nonfiction can

be very literary and very creative, but on the whole, for one thing,

I do stay closer to the original.

When it's nonfiction, I do everything that I was just saying about making

the text my own and departing is less true for nonfiction.

I might take quite a bit of liberties in terms of the, how a sentence or a

paragraph or even a chapter is structured to make it work better in English.

But as a rule, I'd be sticking much more closely and I would be

keeping the Hebrew, the original.

Open as I'm working all the time when I'm translating fiction.

And this is probably not something my authors would be very happy to hear, but

once I do the first draft, I don't really look at the original very much because

that the original was my war material.

And after my first draft is done, that's it.

I I'm working with what I have.

Of course I do go back whenever there's any question or doubt or

I want to verify something, but really the originals work is done.

Once I've done my first draft.

And that's very much not the case with nonfiction because it's just

a lot more important to do it.

To be sure I'm accurately conveying any factual things, any arguments,

any data, things like that.

Um, so I think that was, that is probably the main difference,

but even with nonfiction there, there is some creativity.

You're still playing with language and finding the best way to say something.

So it might be a slightly different set of sort of brain

muscles that you're employing, but you're still employing them.

Now I'll come to my favorite part, the BCLT lecture.

Probably the best 59 minutes I've heard anybody speaking about translation ever.

That is the reluctant editor translating the unstable originals.

Can you take us through that lecture?

So yeah, first of all, thank you for saying such nice things about it.

It was, I gave a slightly different version of that

talk actually at Princeton.

When I say at online, but for Princeton's series of translator talks, um, it

was, I think about three years ago, somewhere deep in the pandemic.

So that was the basis for the BCLT lecture.

And the way that, that the idea for the talk evolved for me was both from the

way that I saw my own work changing the types of projects that I was getting.

So the lecture, just to give a very brief synopsis is about translation as a form

of editing of the original and the way that so many original works are being

at least in my work, are not necessarily just the final printed book that comes

to me and sits on my desk and I, or let's say in the form of a PDF, and that's

what I'm translating, end of story.

Those are at this point, The anomaly in my work.

Often a book that I'm going to translate will be shortened

before I start translating it.

So there's quite a significant expansion rate when going from Hebrew

to English, 30%, sometimes even 35 or more, which means that a reasonable

length book in Hebrew will start to be not so reasonable in English, and.

Very often if it's an author who has not yet been published in English

and we're going to be going out and pitching and trying to find a publisher,

um, the length can be a deterrent.

It's harder to sell a five or six or seven hundred page novel

than a four or five hundred.

So sometimes that's the reason for shortening it before I even start working.

And I've had that done in quite a few cases and it'll be done either by the

author themself or by an editor that we hire, various permutations of that.

And then there are also, beyond just shortening for length, that once you open

the window for that you start to get into the idea that are there things in this

book that are going to be so difficult to convey to an English reading audience and

will lose so much meaning that perhaps they need to be changed or taken out.

And that's a very tricky thing, which is one of the things I was talking

about in my lecture, because there's really almost an ethical question

here of how much can you change a book and still call it the same book?

And again, there's no real rule here.

And one of the reasons why I don't like to do that sort of editing myself,

either before I translate or as I go, is precisely because the temptation,

even in some sort of unconscious way, there would be a temptation to make

my work easier by cutting out things that are very difficult to translate.

I don't want to do that.

I don't think I should be doing that.

So all of that was, I just felt like those sort of projects that where there's

this elasticity of the original text were becoming more and more common in my work.

And then round about that same time, I read Karen Emmerich's book,

which is called Literary Translation and the Making of Originals.

And she really, she's looking at some case studies, she translates

from Greek, modern Greek.

And she was looking at a few books where this quote unquote original

didn't really exist as such, or at least there was not one definitive original.

And she as the translator, and in some cases along with an editor

and a publisher, author, various other people who were in the book.

the orbit of the book, would have to fish out a version that she was

going to work from among various permutations of the original,

different versions of the manuscript.

Each book, I think many books have this sort of, their own biography, the, all the

sort of incarnations that they go through.

Um, and so reading her book, I think was a way for me to, um, articulate some

of these ideas that I'd had in my head in a sort of vague, unformulated way,

and that's when I started writing, uh, the lecture that you saw at the BCLT.

And it's, I think it was one of those talks where I asked

questions more than answered them.

But for me, that's generally, those are the most interesting things to

read and to hear is the questions, not necessarily the answers.

And a lot of, in addition to the books that So, I translate a lot

of my works that I've had, which is similar to the cases that Karen

looks at, where there's all these different versions floating around.

I also translate quite a lot, and this also relates to your

previous question about nonfiction.

I translate a lot of op eds, essays, short nonfiction pieces that are

not necessarily ever published in Hebrew, or at least they have not

been before I start translating them.

For example, for the past, coming up on three years, I've been translating a

Substack newsletter for Edgar Keret, who is He's a very well known Israeli writer.

He writes short stories, sometimes called flash fiction, and he's

been hugely successful really all over the world in English, but

also in many European languages in South America is very popular.

And he's a great author.

And he started publishing this Substack newsletter, which is

occasionally short stories.

But more often it's nonfiction pieces, little personal essays, his thoughts

about writing increasingly in the last six months or so, it's about current

affairs and things going on around him.

And these are pieces that in many cases are written for the newsletter,

which is going to be in English.

He writes them in Hebrew, he sends them to me.

And so they're not finalized by any means when he sends them.

And our process of working is that I'll do a draft of the translation.

send it back to him.

He might make changes based on that.

And there's quite a bit of back and forth.

And often he will end up publishing the Hebrew scene in Israeli newspaper, or

actually there's, we're currently working on a book that's going to be coming out

of short stories, many of which were taken from our work on stories for the

newsletter and for some other outlets.

So he's almost finalizing the, the originals based on what

happened during the translation.

Instead of the other way around.

So I think that's a really interesting way of looking at this interplay between

original and translation and seeing that it's not necessarily a one way street

and there can be like a reverse influence from the translation onto the original.

Now, I gather that sometimes, uh, even, uh, translators make

some corrections in the original.

It so happens that

Oh, yes.

Yeah, for sure.

In fact, I was just talking about this with someone about translators.

I think most authors who've had this experience will know that

translators are the best fact checkers.

And I cannot tell you how many times I've had an author say that they're

simply astounded that a book had gone through multiple editors, proofreaders,

copy editors, all the process that it should go through before it comes out.

And then I'll find a mistake, either a continuity error sometimes,

or some other little mistake.

I've never found anything glaring, but definitely little mistakes that

they get very frustrated when they realize that was in the original.

And every translator I know.

Has found mistakes or things that should be corrected in there

before we get on to your work Please tell us about author's

guilt which you're part of.

Yeah So the author's guild is an american and us based organization that was

founded originally for authors in the united states We don't have unions.

We don't have unionizing is very much more difficult than in some other countries

and so the author's guild is the closest thing there is to a union full writers,

journalists, the, the other people who work in publishing who are there.

And several years ago, my colleague and friend, Alex Zucker, who translates

from Czech, he's always been very involved in trying to push for

translators rights and advocating and more of a professionalization.

He established contact with the guilds and came up with the idea of

trying to set up a translators group or presence within the organization.

And so he and I and Julia Sanchez, who's also a great translator

who works with us and some other colleagues, have been working with

the Guild for a few years now.

One of, so there are two main projects that we've done with them.

One is to have a survey of literary translators.

And we've done two of those.

One was in 2017 and the other was done last year.

What we really wanted to get some actual data about how translators, or I should

say if translators, are making a living in the United States, literary translators.

The very short answer is no.

Literary translation is simply not a viable way to make a living

as a sole source of income.

There are very few exceptions to that, but we looked, we drilled down into quite some

detail about how, what rates translators were getting and also contractual issues,

are translators getting royalties?

Are they getting their name on the cover?

Are they getting the opportunity to review proofs and changes that are

made to their work, all sorts of things that we feel are essential.

Contract terms that a lot of translators simply either aren't aware of or they

ask for and are denied by publishers.

It's a slow kind of campaign that we're trying to keep moving to, to make

translators more aware and to have more of a conversation with publishers about their

need to be aware of these issues too.

And so the other main project that we did with the guild, with the legal staff,

who are really great, they, one of, one of the things that the author's guild

offers to members is contract review, but they did not have that available

specifically for translation contracts.

They offered it to their author members.

And there are different issues that one needs to be aware

of in a translation context.

So we work together with their legal staff to write a model translation contract for

literary translators that's accompanied by very extensive commentary explaining the

different terms and the different options and why one might want to get certain

terms and how things should be phrased.

So that's available as a resource for anyone.

You don't have to be a member of the guild.

To work with that.

So it's been an uphill battle, partly because we are a very small

constituent within the guilds.

There just aren't that many active literary translators who, you know,

people who've joined the guild and who can agitate for our rights, but we are

trying to continue to work with them.

And also with ALTA, the American Literary Translators Association,

which is a long time organization for literary translators in the States.

And they're fantastic and offer a lot of.

support and networking and they have a great conference every year.

They haven't, they don't really have the resources to do some

of the legal and advocacy work that we've been trying to do.

But I think that might be changing a bit.

Do you think situation in UK is any better for literary translators comparatively?

I think that it is on the whole, even though I was born in England, I have

not lived there since I was a child.

So I go back quite a lot and I belong to the translators association in England.

So I have.

A bit of an outside view of what's going on.

But my impression is that yes, generally speaking, look, I think part of it has to

do with the fact that readers in England.

I'm more interested in reading literature in translation than American readers are.

The American cultural or literary world is quite insular and not outward looking.

Americans do not as a whole feel much of an interest in knowing what's

going on in the rest of the world.

And that's reflected in politics and in cultural consumption.

And England's Brexit notwithstanding is much more of a, uh, I think British people

feel that they are part of a larger.

Worlds, whether it's Europe or beyond and so they consume more literature and

translation and therefore translators are I'm not going to say they're better

enumerated because I don't think they do necessarily make more if you're looking

at actual pay, but I think there's a little bit more of an appreciation of

what they do and the importance of it.

And so that gives them, I think, a bit of a leg up as compared

to American translators.

It's a much smaller country too, so they have the, just technically

speaking, it's easier for them to meet in person to have organizations

like the TA that can offer events.

We have the equivalent here, which is Alta, which I mentioned

do a lot of things, but we're in this enormous country.

So I feel as someone, I live in Denver, Colorado, which is.

It's not really in the middle of anything.

And I know that if I were in New York or perhaps San Francisco, Chicago, I

would have a lot more opportunities to meet other translators, to

go to literary events, readings.

There's just so much going on in those places.

And England, yes, granted, most of it is happening in London.

But first of all, people from the rest of England can get to London

much, you know, more frequently and cheaply than I can get to New York.

So those circumstances, I think, yeah, it makes more of a community and camaraderie

and people talk and know what's going on and what everyone else is working on.

And that does make a difference.

What are you currently working on, Jessica?

So I'm currently, I actually just this week finished first

draft of a book by Maya Arad.

I translated another book of hers that just came out and is currently

getting quite a lot of press.

It's called The Hebrew Teacher, the one that came out.

So Maya.

It has actually been a great personal friend of mine for many years, and I

have been trying to find a publisher for her in English for many years, and have

translated short things of hers here and there, and done some pitches, and

published a couple of excerpts, short stories, but this, the Hebrew Teacher

is the first time she has a book out in English, and the same publisher, New

Vessel Press, which published the Hebrew Teacher, already bought the rights to

her most recent book, which is going to be called Happy New Years in English.

So that's my current project, in plural, yes.

It's not quite a literal translation of the Hebrew.

The Hebrew title, which is Shanim Tovot, which literally translates as

good years, but it's a reference to the Jewish new year, Rosh Hashanah,

on which traditionally people used to send each other or give each other

special greeting cards for the new year.

And those were known as Shanim Tovot, good years.

Which wasn't quite working in English to convey that.

So we went with happy new years because it refers to this greeting

of happy, happy, happy new year.

And that's what I'm working on now.

Other author is David Grossman, whom you translated, I think, quite

extensively and even you won the Man Booker International Prize 2017.

Tell us about his work and any interesting experience you had

with him while translating.

David Grossman has been a huge part of my career.

And when I first started really trying to break into literary translation, after

I realized this is something I wanted to do, I contacted David Grossman's agent.

Deborah Harris, who trans, who represent many of Israel's greatest writers.

She's based in Jerusalem.

And I got in touch with her through a mutual friend.

And she gave me my first book to translate, which was by Ronit

Matalon, who was a really amazing Israeli writer who sadly died at

a very young age, a few years ago.

And then the second book I did for her was for David Grossman.

He was, he'd had the series of different translators for his previous few books.

And he was looking for someone new and they gave me a try.

And I think I did a sample and based on that, they gave me the book, which

in retrospect was a huge leap of faith on their part to be done his agent,

because I wasn't very experienced.

Um, but I did that book.

It was a book of two novellas and I've translated all his work since.

And it's really been, as I said, the defining relationship, I

think, of my career, because I have translated so many of his books.

I've done six, if I'm not mistaken, mostly fiction, but also some nonfiction and

the occasional essay, op ed, lecture, all kinds of things that he writes.

A couple of children's books as well.

Grossman has Within Israel, he has this status of sort of one of

the elder statesmen of literature.

And up until recently, there were three, I would say, who occupied this position

and was sometimes referred to as the trio.

Two of them, Amos Oz and Ebi Yoshua, have died in the last few years.

And Grossman is the last man standing of that.

He's actually a bit younger than those two, but, you know, absolute

main figures of Hebrew literature.

And with good reason.

And I think there's a tendency to view him cynically.

I think a lot of Israelis sort of love to hate him.

Well, not hate him, but I think they poke fun sometimes at this very

serious role that he's stepped into where he's often described as the

moral compass of Israeli society.

And that is not a role that he ever asked for, or sought out, I think, but I think

he, he feels it very admirably and he is.

Having spent quite a lot of time with him, with one on one and

with a group of translators, and I can talk about that in a minute.

He really is a very inspirational person, and I know that sounds,

as we say in America, cheesy.

And I don't often use that word, but it's true.

There is, I think every so often you come across someone who Does really,

there's a sense of thoughtfulness about him, seriousness, but he

also has a great sense of humor.

And I don't think he takes himself too seriously and above all, and what's

most pertinent to this conversation is he's a great writer and he is a

very careful and meticulous writer.

He pays so much attention to the way he crafts every single sentence.

I, I know that when I ask him a question, he will always have an answer.

He will always be able to tell me why this word and not

another, why this comma is here.

And that's not the case with all writers I work with.

Sometimes I think a lot of Israeli writers have really fantastic ideas and

the drive and the source material, but.

They don't necessarily have the sitzfleisch to really create a very

crafted, thought out text, which, which they go over and over and over again.

Israelis are not necessarily, and I say this not with criticism, but with love,

because I count myself as an Israeli, but they're not known for perfectionism.

I think there are social and political reasons why most things

that are done in Israel are done in a way that's good enough.

And then you move on to the next thing.

And that doesn't really work for good writing.

So Gosman is someone who really, and he's known for this, he writes many drafts.

And when I say drafts, he starts each draft from scratch.

The first one being handwritten.

I think he still does that.

And you can tell the, the care that goes in, and so it's, as every

translator knows, it's a pleasure to translate something that's well written.

Which is not to say it isn't difficult or challenging, but I think that

when you have a sense of how much care and attention the writer has

put in, It motivates you to put an equal amount of care and attention.

One of the most amazing experiences I've had through my work with Grossman is

that for the last three books that he's published, he has convened a seminar

over several days of his translators.

Not all of them he's translated into, I think over 40 languages, but in each

of these three, there've been, I think, anywhere between eight and a dozen or

so translators, all working on the same book into their respective languages.

I was not able to be at the very first one because I had just given

birth, so I attended parts of it virtually over Zoom, but for the past

two, I have been there in person.

One was in Germany at a literary translation center and residency

in Strahlen in Germany.

And the last one was in Croatia, because there was a climatic and topical

connection to the book we were working on, parts of which take place in Croatia.

And so, what happens there is that over the course of four or five days, we, as

a group with Horstmann, sit in a seminar room, and we go over the entire book.

And the basis is that he will read us.

The book, he'll just start from the beginning, reading through the

whole book, and whenever there's something that he wants to emphasize

or explain or discuss, he will stop and we'll have a discussion when one

of us has a question, we'll stop him.

And it really evolves into just really interesting conversations about the

themes and ideas that come out of the book about language, about the

different ways that we as translators approach and solve the different issues.

I think it's also been really interesting for him.

And he's talked about how it's.

I think affected the way he looks at writing and language to, to

hear our experiences, bringing his words into our languages.

It's also created a really great little, small, pretty tight knit group

of translators who work with him.

Cause many of us.

I've met several times now in these seminars and also in a couple of other

events around authors that we translate together and it's been very helpful.

Sometimes practically, even though we translate into different

languages, there's still ways we can help each other practically,

but mostly in just yes, feeling this sort of fraternity of translators.

The, that I think is one of the great things about this job and

having this access to the author.

It's very unusual over such an extended period of time.

There's also something and I found this in particular with a host

walks into a bar, hearing him read.

David Grossman started off as a radio announcer, radio plays,

he used to read the news.

He has a very radiophonic voice.

And so hearing him read his own work and personify the characters, especially

those of your listeners who have read A Horse Walks Into a Bar, there's a very,

the main character is a standup comedian.

He's this really interesting voice.

And to hear David reading this.

Was just fascinating and really helpful for the translation because

often hearing the way something is enunciated, the intonation can

change the way you interpret a text.

So it has been very helpful and I know that he is planning to keep doing these,

I think, whenever he can for all his books because it is such a helpful experience.

And I think it also saves him some time and effort where instead of

corresponding with multiple translators separately, often about the same issues.

He gets to do it all at once and get us all on the same page as it were.

So when you say seminar, it pertains to one particular book, is it?

You focus on one particular book and meet all the translators.

Yes, so it's around one book, and that means that all the translators will

be at different points of their work.

In some cases, there might be one or two translators who haven't

even started working, they will have just read the book.

Some have only done the first draft, some have already submitted the

final draft, but they get to come and take part in this as a perk.

But most of us will be at different points.

Some different point along a second or third draft, say, and yeah, but

all working from the same book.

You know, that sounds wonderful actually.

Tell us about this new Vessels Press now, the indie, I guess

they're indie publishers too.

They're based in New York, founded by Michael Weiss and he, and

there was a co founder as well, who I think is less involved.

It's not quite a one man show, but almost.

Michael, he was a journalist for a very long time.

He's been in the sort of literary and cultural world for a long time.

decades.

And yeah, he started this publisher that publishes almost exclusively

translations for many different languages.

He has done quite a few books from Hebrew.

I've published four translations with him, and I'm currently working on my fifth.

Maya Arab is, as I mentioned, a TV publisher.

And he's really, I would say, an old school publisher in that he's very

committed to sticking with his authors and building relationships with them.

And he's not just looking for a hit, uh, he's a small indie publisher.

So he struggles like all small indie publishers do, and of course, I'm sure

he's thrilled when something sells really well and can subsidize the rest

of his books, but I think he knows that the chances of that are not likely, so

he's looking for really good quality literature, and it is important to him

that it come from elsewhere in the world, and I think he, like many of us who are

in this business in the States, he's I really think that it's important to

expose American readers to other cultures, other languages, because when you think

about it, it obviously cannot be true that the only good literature is being

written in English, even though some readers here seem to behave that way.

Yeah, so New Vessel has done some really interesting work, mostly

fiction, European and other languages.

The four that have come out and the fifth that's going to come out I think next

summer, a little over a year from now.

Now I have picked up two books which are recently released for you to

introduce them to our listeners.

The first one is Professor Schiff's Guilt.

Interestingly, the author is also Schiff, right?

Absolutely.

Agur has been a good friend of mine for a really long time.

I did meet him through literature and I translated a couple of short stories of

his that actually came out many years ago.

One came out in two lines.

Which was one of the first literary journals in the United States that

devoted to translation, and I published little pieces of his work over the years.

But New Vessel Press was his first publisher of a book in English.

And it is, as you said, it's called Professorship's Guilt.

And so the main character is, An alter ego of a ghoul of the writers, and

it's a really interesting book, writes, not everything he's written, but quite

a lot of what he writes is political satire, which you would think would

be a very common genre in Israel, and it's not, I'm not quite sure why,

because there's, there's plenty to satirize there, but for some reason.

form of fiction, it's not all that common and he does it and he does it excellently.

He has a great sense of humor.

He's very sharp.

I would say that he is not politically correct and proudly, which has meant,

unfortunately, that he hasn't done all that well in the States with this book.

And I, which I'm really disappointed by because I think people are uncomfortable

with being shown some of the truths that he is showing about Western

hypocrisies and misunderstandings.

He's, he's not afraid to poke fun, firstly at himself, part of the reason

why the main character is named after him.

And the main character is not a particularly, the portrayal is

not so flattering, obviously it's not really him, but he is pointing

out, I think, some of his own blind spots and, and yeah, hypocrisies.

But it's a great novel.

It's interesting.

It's funny.

And I hope more people read

it.

When you say satire, uh, satire, don't you feel it's a bit challenging to translate?

It is.

Humor is difficult.

Satire is difficult.

Yeah, because, of course, if you're not familiar with, you know, the person or

the event or the reference that's been satirized, you're not going to get it.

It's, it loses meaning.

So it can be really difficult.

Yeah.

And sometimes it requires a bit more sneaking in some explication so that

people understand the references.

But yeah, I think it can be done, but it's definitely a challenge.

Like most forms of humor, they're so culturally dependent.

that they don't necessarily carry over well.

Now, the other one is the Hebrew teacher, uh, written by Maya Arad.

Uh, tell us about Maya Arad, the author.

I think this is the second book that you're translating, the Hebrew teacher, or

is it the first one, the Hebrew teacher?

So the Hebrew teacher is, is the first full book of Azbara translated.

And I'm, yeah, and I'm currently working on another one.

Well, she's one of Israel's most successful writers.

both critically and commercially.

I think almost every single one of her books has been a best seller in Israel.

She's very well known.

Now the Hebrew teacher, it consists of three novellas.

Yeah.

So the Hebrew teacher has three novellas.

The first one is the title novella.

It's called the Hebrew teacher.

And it is about the main character is An Israeli woman who left Israel

in the 60s came to the Midwest to an unnamed Midwestern university in

a sort of college town is where it takes place, and she teaches Hebrew.

And has been doing so, she's not an academic, she's not a professor, she's

an adjunct or something like that.

So lowly status within academia.

And she is a dedicated and warm and caring teacher who loves her students and feels

very committed to the idea of exposing students to Hebrew and to Israeli culture.

And even though she hasn't lived in Israel for decades, she still feels

this great sense of pride and love.

And she's out of touch with the times and is confronted.

The main story in this novella is that a young new professor of comparative

literature, who's originally Israeli, comes to teach on the campus and he

Just destabilizes the whole program and confronts her with the opinions

of the younger generation now, which is much, much more critical of Israel.

And she knows this to be true and understands the reasons why, but she

can't really, she's not at peace with it.

And so they, these two professors represent the different extremes of the

arc now of how Americans or American Israelis or American Jews look at Israel.

And she's on her way down and he's on his way up, is the setup.

So that, that's the intergenerational conflict there.

And then the other two novellas, the middle one is about an Israeli

grandmother who comes to California to visit her son who's lived there for

many years and his young wife and their small child who she's never met, her

own grandson who she hasn't seen yet.

And this is a story that I think probably rings true for a lot of immigrant

cultures, not necessarily Israelis, is this experience of the younger

generation who's moved to America and left the parents, the grandparents

back home and they come to visit.

And so there's a culture clash, there's a generation clash, there's

this just, I think, pretty universal experience of kids, young adults

whose parents come to stay with them.

You have this presence in your house of someone who you love and you want to

see them and they're your parents, but it's also a pain in the neck to have

them breathing down your neck, looking very closely at how you live your life.

And so that's what's going on in this story, is her kind of

scrutinizing their lifestyle.

And trying to figure out the cultural codes that she doesn't pick up on, and

why they do things the way they do.

And they have some tension in their marriage too, which she wasn't aware

of, and is trying to understand.

That's that story.

And then the last one is, again, I think pretty universal.

And it's about a mother whose preteen daughter is going through

all the social drama that any middle schooler goes through.

And how to navigate friendships and mean girls and have this struggle

for status at school and people talking behind each other's backs.

All that stuff that every adolescent goes through.

And again, they're a family of Israeli expats.

The parents are Israeli expats.

The kids grew up in America.

So there's that cultural issue as well and the language issue.

And a lot of it deals with these sort of challenges and threats of Of tech of

technology, phones, social media, what that is doing to that generation, how

the parents are supposed to navigate it, the fears that we all have is what

our children I've been exposed to.

This is something that I'm personally very much relate to right now, because

I'm about to get my daughter, her first phone, and there's all this fear of

this horrible world that it's going to open up to her, but it's a world that

is the world, we cannot escape it.

Please read a paragraph from the book, both in Hebrew and in English.

So I chose to read a paragraph that I know this is perhaps sounds like a strange

choice, but it's from almost the very end of the book, but it's not a spoiler.

There, there isn't really any spoiler here.

And it's from this, the last novella that I just mentioned

about the mother and her daughter.

And the reason I chose this is that one of the things But I think it's not often

pointed out about Maya Arad's writing that to me is one of the most interesting

things is the way she writes about friendships, particularly between women.

And I've seen quite a lot written about that.

Just in the last couple of years, it seems to have become a theme that people are

exploring in literature and in writing.

And I think probably Elena Ferrante has given rise to that because that's

the seminal book about And so in this novella, the mother is so desperate to

make sure that her child is socially accepted and that she has friends and

she tries to help her navigate that but without getting too involved.

But really the whole time, as it turns out at the end, she's

realizing her own struggles.

Friendship and her relationship with other women.

And so that's what this paragraph is about.

And it, this is after all kinds of drama has unfolded and she, she goes out for a

walk to try and clear her head and, and think over everything that's happened.

So I'll, I'll read the Hebrew first.

To walk around here alone, on Shabbat in the morning, is a bit like

going to a party at Libby's school.

To admit that you don't belong to any group, that you don't

have a place to sit at a party.

They don't have a place to sit, to be honest, she suddenly realized.

She has colleagues, there are people she knows through Benny's work,

people who had children at a young age, and now, after the children have

grown up, everything is different.

In fact, she understands now, nothing has changed since she was a child.

She doesn't know how to make connections, how to be a friend.

Shabbat shalom.

She found a husband, set up a family with him, called the U.

S.

to help her get through military service, study at the university,

raise the kids, but friends, real friends, don't show up to study with

them for the exam, don't show up to spend time with them in the garden,

the thing itself, she never had that.

Now it's too late.

She can't start.

And

in English, so she's out on this mountaintop thinking about it back

about her daughter, whose name is Libby, who told her how much she struggles

to find friends and she something that her daughter said to her was that.

The mother has suggested that her daughter Libby join some clubs at school

to make friends, and Libby said no.

None of the cool kids join clubs.

If you join a club, that means you don't have real friends,

so she's thinking back on that.

She passes young families with kids, older couples, groups of women her age.

Four mothers from your town's school smile at her.

She's not the only one walking alone, but she still feels awkward.

Walking around here alone on a Saturday afternoon is a little

like going to Libby's school clubs.

An admission that you don't belong to a group.

That you have no one to sit with at recess.

She has no one to sit with, if Wright suddenly thinks.

She has no friends.

She has her colleagues.

People she knows through Benny's work.

Women with kids around her kids ages.

But now that the children are older, those ties have been cut.

In fact, she understands now.

Nothing has changed since she was a child.

She doesn't know how to forge friendships.

How to be a friend.

She found a spouse and built a family with him.

She formed alliances that helped her get through her military

service, college, raising kids.

But friends, real friends.

Not girls to study for a test with, or mums to kill time at the playground with.

Friendship itself.

She's never had that.

And it's too late now.

She can't start at this age.

At a deeply personal level, what does literary translation mean to you?

This is something I think about a lot.

And of course, These are only things that I've understood pretty

recently in the last few years.

These are not in any way conscious thoughts that I had at the time, but in

retrospect, I understand that translation for me has always been a way to,

I, I want to say reconcile, but it's not quite as peaceful as that to, to

negotiate the two hops of my identity.

Which are Hebrew speaking and English speaking.

In some ways I consider myself tricultural because I, I am both English and

American, but also definitely Israeli.

And I, the reason I reconcile is not the right word is because I know that this

is a futile attempt, but it's an attempt that I make through my work and will

continue to make for as long as I do it.

And it's always going to be futile, right?

These, I think every person who is an immigrant or it's

in some way, bicultural knows.

That this can never really be resolved.

It's something you learn to live with and living in Hebrew literature and

English literature that I'm producing at the same time is a way for me to

keep this dialogue going that is going on in my mind all the time anyway.

But I suppose it's a way to externalize it and to put in writing this constant

struggle that I have to make sense of how two such very different

cultures can coexist in my mind.

The term coexistence is thrown around a lot in the Middle East

because there's such a lack of it.

And as an individual, I can say that it is very difficult.

And in some ways, as I said, this is not something that's

ever going to be reconciled.

But translation is by definition multidimensional and many layered, right?

It's a recognition that there is no one voice that is right.

And you have to be able to accept that.

And express this plurality, these different nuances that

come from different cultures.

And so that, I think, is why I do it and how I do it.

Wonderful.

Wonderful.

Thank you.

Thank you for such a lovely conversation.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

It's been a real pleasure.

I appreciate the opportunity to talk through these things.