Israel in Translation

Rosh Hashanah begins on Sunday night—it is the beginning of the Jewish new year. And to usher it in, we read an excerpt from Etgar Keret's short story, "Ladder," published in his brand-new English language collection, "Fly Already."

Text:

Fly Already, by Etgar Keret, translated by Sondra Silverston, et. al. Riverhead Books, Sept. 2019.

Yesterday, Yonatan Berg's first poetry collection appeared in Joanna Chen's English translation, Frayed Light, published by the Wesleyan Poetry Series.

The poems in this collection gather all of these experiences—religion, settlements and the Palestinian neighbors they displace or live next to, military service—into heartfelt narrative poems.

Berg was born in 1981 in Jerusalem to a religious family and grew up in Psagot, a settlement in the West Bank. After serving in the military, Berg gave up the religious lifestyle. He now lives with his wife, the poet and essayist Geula Gertz in Jerusalem, with their young daughter.

Text:

Frayed Light by Yonatan Berg, translated by Joanna Chen. Wesleyan Poetry Series, Sept. 2019.

Previous Podcast Featuring Yonatan Berg

Israeli elections are just one day shy of a week away, and now might be a good opportunity to examine the use of stereotypes to shut down important conversations that we might have, as we elect the people who will represent us.

Today, Marcela reads a lyrical essay from a graduate student in poetry at Bar-Ilan's Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing. Her name is Hiba Ghannan, and this piece will appear in her thesis entitled "Leftovers."

Text:

"My Essay on Stereotypes" by Hiba Ghannan

Yesterday something wonderful happened—Etgar Keret's newest short story collection, Fly Already, appeared in the world, in English, translated by a ridiculously talented cast of translators.

This collection contains all the charm, the absurdities, the intelligence and surreal sense of Keret's previous collections, but this time, most of the stories are somewhat longer.

Today, Marcela reads the shortest piece in the book, and the final story, Evolution of a Breakup.

Text:

Fly Already, by Etgar Keret, translated by Sondra Silverston, et. al. Riverhead Books, Sept. 2019.

Today Marcela reads a story containing the writer Yossel Birstein's two great loves: Buses and Shoes.

Birstein was born in Poland in 1920. Having moved to Melbourne, Australia and later to Israel, he changed languages, continents, countries, towns, as well as professions, more than once or twice. Not many people work both as a shepherd and a national archivist in their lives. He wrote most of his life in Yiddish and began to write Hebrew later.

"He didn't call himself a writer, but rather a craftsman," Haim Be'er says about Yossel Birstein. Be'er continues: "We would be walking in Jerusalem and talking about our profession. He said that he had learned to sew from his father. That if a thread in a shoe tore, you had to start everything from scratch, because where would the knot be? If you make it on the upper part of the shoe, it will be visible, and if you make it on the sole, it will make walking uncomfortable. In his writing, he realized this ability to connect the threads without the stitch being visible."

Text:

"Customer On the Way" from And So Is The Bus. Jerusalem Stories, translated by Margaret Birstein, Hana Inbar, and Robert Manaster. Dryad Press, 2015.

On this week's episode, Marcela excerpts from a fairy tale written by Leah Goldberg. She was a prolific Hebrew-language poet, author, playwright, literary translator, and comparative literary researcher. Her writings are considered classics of Israeli literature.

Text:

The Rose Garden (a Fairy Tale) by Leah Goldberg. Translated by Leanne Raday.

Naji Daher, a writer, poet, and playwright, was born in Nazareth and lives there. He works as a creative writing teacher and writes literature reviews. He has published more than fifty books, including six novels. Daher's works have been translated into Hebrew, English and other languages. He is the winner of the 2000 Prime Minister Prize.

Text:

"Nightly Lament" by Naji Daher. Translated from the Arabic by Peter Clark and published in The Short Story Project.

Gali-Dana Singer is a bilingual poet, translator, an artist and photographer, born in St. Petersburg, who immigrated to Israel in 1988. To Think: A River, her first book of poems in Hebrew, in translation from the original Russian, appeared in 2000. The most recent of three volumes written in Hebrew, Translucent, was published in 2017. She's published seven collections in Russian.

In a 2003 interview with Lisa Katz, Singer notes:

I always emphasize that I haven't switched from Russian to Hebrew, rather that I am moving back and forth from Russian to Hebrew and Hebrew to Russian. I have tried to reconstruct how the transfer took place, a process which is still vivid in my memory. It seemed to happen one way, but then I remembered that the process actually began much earlier, when someone tried to translate a poem of mine [into Hebrew] and I didn't like the result and I started to write it myself and I saw that it was impossible to translate it as it was in the original, and not worthwhile, because what works in Russian doesn't work in Hebrew. Even if I have a raw translation in front of me I don't know exactly which way I'll go.

Text:

Poems by Gali-Dana Singer, translated by Lisa Katz

On Monday, the literary world lost one of its bright lights with the passing of Tuvia Ruebner. He was 95 years old, and passed in his home on Kibbutz Merhavia, where he had lived since arrival from Nazi occupied Bratislava as a teenager in 1942. He loved his home on the kibbutz so much that he even refusing Lea Goldberg's invitation to move to Jerusalem and work with her at the Hebrew University.

Born in 1924 as Kurt Erich in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, Ruebner grew up in a German-speaking Jewish family. Nazi race laws forced him to leave high school before graduating. In 1941 he immigrated to Israel with the Zionist youth movement Hashomer Hatzair. His family members, who remained behind, were murdered at Auschwitz.

The poem "Postcard from Pressburg-Bratislava," found in the volume "Late Beauty," is his goodbye to his home town and its devastation during the war.

Text:

In the Illuminated Dark. Selected Poems of Tuvia Ruebner. Translated and introduced by Rachel Tzvia Back. Hebrew Union College Press, 2014.

Late Beauty. Translated by Lisa Katz and Shahar Bram. Zephyr Press, 2017.

Music:

Green Sun Again - Lyrics: Tuvia Rivner | Composer: Mooney Emerilio | Execution: Nathan Slur

Oh Aesthetics - Lyrics: Tuvia Rivner | Composer: Mooney Emerilio | Performer: Yigal Sadeh

Previous Ruebner Episodes:

In Transit: Poems by Tuvia Ruebner

The Cloudy Skies of Tuvia Ruebner

Israel Bar Kohav was born in Israel, the grandchild of Russian immigrants who were among the founders of the city of Tel Aviv. His ancestors took part in what is known as the Second Aliyah, an influential, ideological wave of immigration that took place between 1904 and 1914.

Bar Kohav himself grew up in Givatayim and Ramat Gan, in the greater Tel Aviv area, and his poem refer to these areas. One of the most predominant themes in his work is childhood. He's written about this period in nearly each of his 11 books. The writing is not nostalgic or romantic, but often filled with the terror and anxiety of a child confronting uncontrollable and enigmatic forces.

Text:

Israel Bar Kohav on Poetry International Rotterdam.