Translator's Introduction to Recognizing the Body — Web Exclusive
By Becka Mara McKay
The translation included here is from That Which I Thought Shadow Is the Real Body (Keter, 2002) the second collection of poetry from the Israeli writer Shimon Adaf. I recently finished translating the entire collection, having spent the fall of 2004 in Israel working with the poet face-to-face.
Shimon Adaf is a poet, translator, essayist, and musician. He received the Israeli Ministry of Education's Award in 1996 for his first collection of poems, The Monologue of Icarus. His work has been translated into English, Dutch, Italian, and Spanish. This fall he published his first novel, which has received singularly positive reviews.
As a poet, Adaf is necessarily a student of his native language, a particularly fluid subject when the language is Hebrew. In his own words, "In having been resuscitated as a spoken language, modern Hebrew was faced with the need to choose one normative syntax from among the several syntax systems used over the centuries since the biblical era. In my poetry I try to integrate these older, abandoned systems into modern Hebrew, producing thereby anomalies which will, I hope, turn the reader's gaze onto the workings of the language. "
It is precisely this engagement with language that makes translating Adaf into English both necessary and perilous. His poetry is far removed from the Israel that appears daily in the media. His themes, while universal—the sorrow and beauty of the world, the everyday threats of modern life—are still uniquely Israeli in their execution.
Adof writes difficult poetry—for readers of Hebrew as well as readers of English—but its rewards are many. He pushes his language to the very edge of what he believes it capable of expressing, wrenching Hebrew grammar into new and surprising configurations, rendering millennia-old vocabulary into something entirely fresh. It is dense, personal and internal—often verging on private. His imagery reflects both the Old Testament and Greek myth; his rhythms are those of pop music and of his family's Sephardic roots.
Moving Adaf's language from Hebrew into English requires all the tools in my translation toolbox, and then some. How does one translate syntax that is meant to sound awkward in its original language, or convey biblical allusions to an audience that lacks a Jewish education? One of the biggest challenges is that much of this poetry is hard to parse and deliberately strange in its original language. Thus I am faced with a typical translator's dilemma: I want to maintain this strangeness, which is intrinsic to the nature of the poetry and important for the reader's experience, yet at the same time, I must do all I can to prevent "bad translation syndrome." English and Hebrew grammatical structures have very little in common, so there isn't really a way to mimic how Adaf breaks grammar. And Hebrew vocabulary is relatively sparse compared to English—a single word can have perhaps a dozen meanings, and often the poem doesn't give clues as to which is intended. These poems sometimes test my tolerance for ambiguity. This is not the broadly painted, metaphor-rich poetry of Yehuda Amichai—which is widely translated and often unfairly asked to represent all of Israeli poetry. This is poetry that we have not seen before, in any language. As a poet and as a translator I am eager to introduce it to the wider world.
Every poem in That Which I Thought Shadow Is the Real Body explores the poet's struggle between the insubstantiality of language and the limits of the coyoreal. At times, he seems to be saying poetry is embraced by the miracle of the human body, but most of the time the two are locked in combat, distracting each other, getting in each other's way, weakening each other.
Becka Mara McKay teaches translation and creative writing at Florida Atlantic University. Her first book of poems, A Meteorologist in the Promised Land, was published by Shearsman Books in March 2010. Her translation from the Hebrew of the novel Laundry by Suzane Adam was published by Autumn Hill Books in 2008. She has received awards and grants from the Seattle Arts Commission and the American Literary Translators Association, and a Witter Bynner Poetry Translation Residency. She has published her work in American Letters & Commentary, ACM, Third Coast, the Iowa Review, and elsewhere.