Since my first foray into literary translation as a graduate student, I have been fortunate enough to translate some of the most interesting and original writers working in Israel today. I have translated short stories, novels, non-fiction, and the occasional poem. Contending with texts written in remarkably different styles and covering a broad range of themes is the challenge—and the joy—of this profession. Hebrew and English are vastly dissimilar, stemming from histories and cultures with little in common, which means that frustrating instances of “untranslatability” are sometimes inevitable. Yet I find that even when a certain element—a word, a pun, a cultural nuance—fails to successfully cross over from one language to the other, the translation often makes up for this loss by offering a new or different insight into the original.
When asked about my philosophy of translation, or the tricky question of what makes a good translation, I am hard-pressed to come up with a satisfying response that could possibly apply to all cases. Translation is full of gray areas, compromises, intuitive solutions, and case-by-case decisions. If the central issue of translation comes down to “domesticization” versus “foreignization” (which, in my experience, is a debate that preoccupies translation theorists far more than practicing translators), then I would have to say that I have moved back and forth along the continuum in the decade since I began translating, and will probably continue to do so. I believe that a translation should be readable and fluid (subjective though these terms may be), and provoke in the reader whatever responses the original provoked, or intended to. But literature—whether translated or not—should not cater to our fear of the unfamiliar. If, when we read, our perceptions are not challenged, or we do not learn something new or consider a different point of view, then why read at all? And translated literature is particularly well-suited to offering such challenges by retaining a sense of the foreign, even if only in the occasional unfamiliar word, name or concept.
Of further interest:
- Interviews:
“Interview with translator Jessica Cohen” (Targima – newsletter of the Israel Translators Association, October 2010) [In Hebrew]
“On Translation: An Interview with Jessica Cohen” (Journal for Jewish Thought, University of Toronto, April 2010)
“Our Holocaust: Translating the Journey” (Translation Journal, April 2007) – a joint interview with author Amir Gutfreund about my translation of his first novel.
“On Language and Bridges” (Translation Journal, April 2007) – an essay about how and why I became a translator.