A note on the translation process

So many complicated things are going on in Israeli writer Admiel Kosman’s Hebrew poem “Final corrections.” Kosman, who has lived in Germany since 2003, is professor of religious studies and director of the School of Jewish Theology at Potsdam University, and academic director of the Geiger Rabbinical Seminary in Berlin. His work, including nine volumes of poetry, makes ample use of Jewish texts and concepts, yet expanding them, I would say, into the untutored reader’s ken. The significance of Kosman’s work lies in all manner of areas, including the material world rooted in things and in human bodies.

In Hebrew and in English translation, this poem comes to us in a familiar form. It is a dramatic monologue, in which in this case a male speaker harangues a female text, which he has written. It has taken on a shape of its own and resists the author’s attempt to “correct” it. The poem in both languages demonstrates a frantic approach to ars poetica, to how poets use words, and to gender.

Its broader cultural framework translates. An apologetic and extremely unconfident speaker addresses the poem as Lilith, a mythical figure packed with associations: a rebellious woman, perhaps a demon or maybe just a somewhat ominous bird. While the name appears only once in the Hebrew Bible (Isaiah 34:15) and is omitted in most English Bible translations, including the KJV, where it was translated as “screech owl,” it is nonetheless culturally accessible.

Regarding gender, readers of Kosman in the original will be used to his attempt to overturn the traditional binary sex roles of Jewish tradition. In a poem called “Kiddush,” Kosman finds that his spiritual rank as the man of the house is no higher than that of an ordinary peddler taking stock of material goods like dishes and cutlery. Sexual inequality is not exclusive to traditional Judaism, of course, and so Kosman’s struggle with his text translates.

More of a translation challenge in this poem is Kosman’s singling out of the initial Hebrew letters in several words, in the order they appear in the Hebrew alphabet, in the first stanza. I was lucky that in the second line, Hebrew ahava (love) begins with aleph (the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet) and I could use “amour” for “a” and then brilliant for bina and cheerful for gila (a hard “g” is the third letter in the Hebrew alphabet), and so on, in the order of the English alphabet. Hebrew is a relatively compact language; its main source is itself. Because vowels appear in diacritical marks under or next to the letters, many groups of the same letters have different meanings. The rich English lexicon, drawing on Latin, Greek, French and Germanic Old English, provides numerous translation opportunities. The second stanza was more difficult. The Hebrew speaker says that he is staring at Lilith through serifs — the small strokes appearing on letters in particular fonts, in this case the sixth, seventh and eighth Hebrew letters, vav, zayin and het. However, the seventh Hebrew letter, z-i-n, spelling zayin, also spells zin - a slang word for a penis. The words zayin and zin look the same on the page. And the constellation of these letters in the infinitive, leh-zay-en, is “to fuck” It wouldn’t have made sense in English to use the sixth to eighth English letters- f-g-h, which don’t provide any sexual puns, so I improvised with the set of initials “f”, “u” and “k”. The speaker’s relationship with his work is, of course, open to interpretation in original and translation.

Lisa Katz

In the Classroom