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36 The Go-Betweens: Leah

Goldberg, Yehuda Amichai, and the Figure of the

Poet-Translator

Adriana X. Jacobs

Questions of fidelity, issues of translatability, and the anxious calculus of loss and gain have freighted the translation of poetry, and its discourse, for centuries. On one side of the coin, we have Robert Frost's assertion, often taken out of context, that "poetry

is what gets lost in translation,'' or, on the flip side, Joseph Brodsky's proclamation that "poetry is what is gained in translation." It is no small irony that these (and

related) maxims have been wrenched out of context or wholly misattributed, but taken together they encapsulate the paradoxical perception of poetry as both translatable and untranslatable. What many translators of poetry across centuries have shown us,

on the contrary, is that translating poetry can be a generative and creative act, argu­ably synonymous with the act of writing itself, but it also confuses the lines between author and translator, translation and original, in ways that are playful and mischie­

vous while also problematic and dangerous. The slippages that occur between transla­tion and poetic invention have made translation an appealing enterprise for poets across various languages and historical traditions; even poets who are not translators

engage translation as an act synonymous with poetic invention. One notable example is Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "Sonnets from the Portuguese" (1850), which uses

translation as a guise for original writing. Contemporary examples of this practice include Christopher Reid's Katerina Brae (1985), Juan Gelman's Los poemas de Sidney

(1969), and Christian Hawkey's Ventrakl (2010). But these "translations" are not mere

masks; rather, these translation strategies, tools, and tactics constitute not only the rich intertextual layers of a poem, but also its translatability: that is, how a poem moves out of a page, "from lip to lips," in the words of the Israeli poet Yehuda

Amichai. Engaging the borderline between original writing and translation, this essay

A Companion to Translation Studies, First Edition. Edited by Sandra Bermann and Catherine Porter.

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

480 Adriana X. Jacobs

will examine how creative, playful, and transgressive translation and translation prac­tices have appealed to the poet-translator in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries,

with a focus on the Hebrew poets Leah Goldberg (1911-70) and Amichai (1924-2000). I argue that what motivates poet-translators who invest in translation is the desire to repave and revise cultural and literary "roads not taken" through the transla­

tion of foreign works in ways that challenge - and even reconfigure - the borders of a literary tradition, thereby calling into question entrenched narratives of influence, inheritance, and canonicity.

The relation between translation and poetic invention is hardly unique to the work of Goldberg and Amichai, or to the practice of writing poetry in general. From Psalm

13 7's language of exile to Anne Carson's bold revisions of ancient Greek texts, the activity of poet-translators often has signaled fundamental, paradigmatic shifts in poetic trends and culture, even the creation of new literary vernaculars. Perhaps

because each poet-translator brings his or her own approaches and sensibilities to bear on the translation of a foreign text, this figure remains elusive to theorization. Yet, as this essay will demonstrate, the tendency of poet-translators to approach the rela­

tion between translation and poetic invention as a creative and transformative encoun­ter constitutes a common ground. Focusing on Hebrew poets, my essay also emphasizes the relation between a poetics and politics of translation and how the practice of

translating poetry in a minor language like modern Hebrew has allowed new poetic forms and traditions to emerge while at the same time exercising change both within and outside of target and source cultures.

For Amichai and Goldberg, translation served as a crucial mode of cultural and linguistic exchange that broke down "the hegemonic voices of cultural authority," thereby also constituting a politics of translation (Kronfeld 2007). Working in a

minor literary vernacular, modern Hebrew poets like Goldberg and Amichai employed translation strategies that created sites of resistance and polyphony in an increasingly

hegemonic and monolingual national context, while simultaneously inscribing their Hebrew writing in more international, multilingual, and heterogeneous mappings of poetic influence and tradition. At the same time, Amichai and Goldberg embraced

translation as a vehicle for mobilizing their ideas on writing, originality, and author­ship, in the process developing a reciprocal poetics of translation that shaped their

own work in a language that is arguably uniquely rich in translational possibilities. For these poets, to write in Hebrew is to engage, albeit sometimes reluctantly, with what Robert Alter has termed the Jewish linguistic "echo chamber" (Alter 1994). In other words, to write in modern Hebrew is always already an intertextual and mul­

tilingual practice, and as these poets move between different registers of Hebrew -biblical, rabbinic, medieval, to name a few - and its multilingual inflections (of

Yiddish, German, Russian, English, etc.), writing poetry in Hebrew constitutes a translational practice.

In the late nineteenth century, translation played an instrumental role in the devel­

opment of a modern Hebrew vernacular at a time when Zionism was activating a platform for the autonomous, territorial national existence of European Jewry. Earlier

The Go-Betweens 481

Hebrew authors largely relied on biblical, talmudic, and medieval expressions that proved flexible in a skilled writer's hand but were limited for articulating modern, industrial life. Lacking a modern vernacular, twentieth-century Hebrew translations were part of the essential "rebuilding" of the Hebrew language in its modern and later national existence. Yiddish-to-English translations, for instance, were undertaken partly with this aim. Yiddish, unlike Hebrew, had a vibrant, ri~h vernacular, and in translating from one language to 3;norher, Hebrew translators were compelled to create equivalents. Translating from a language with an ample, contemporary vocabulary exposed the gaps and absences in the target language.

By the time Goldberg, who was born in 1911 in Konigsberg, East Prussia, arrived in Mandatory Palestine in 1935, modern Hebrew was already well on its way to becoming the national literary vernacular of the emerging state. In this context, translation served the national canon, largely by Hebraizing texts from the western European tradition on behalf of a growing Hebrew readership, but it also, and more ambivalently, mediated relations between the immigrant diasporic world and the emerging Jewish national culture in Palestine. For writers like Goldberg, whose esthetic sensibilities remained deeply rooted in the western European diaspora, trans­lation was a way to remember, reconnect with, and revive her linguistic and cultural past.

In Palestine, Goldberg was welcomed as a member of the moderna, a literary group heavily influenced by western European and Russian poetry of the fin de siecle and early twentieth century, particularly Romanticism and modernism. Led by the Russian­born Hebrew poet Avraham Shlonsky, the moderna poets were instrumental in devel­oping a kind of Hebrew modernism that was committed to forging a national, territorial identity for Hebrew literature and espoused "the rejection of exile" (shlilat hagalut) as a central tenet. At the same time that these poets were invested in devel­oping a pre-statehood, Hebrew modernist poetics that rejected the diaspora, their connection to outside international models - particularly those to which they had a biographical affiliation - nevertheless became a normative element of their oeuvre (Kronfeld 1996, 59). Goldberg, however, was acutely aware of how a "rejection of exile" conflicted with her own, and the group's, engagements and dialogues with European literary cultures, and in this context translation served in her work as a space where she continuously nurtured arid problematized these affiliations. The authors and works she translated into Hebrew are too numerous to recount here, but a partial list would include Petrarch, Anna Akhmatova, Aleksandr Blok, Boris Pas­ternak, Leo Tolstoy, and Charles Baudelaire. With Shlonsky, Goldberg co-edited Shirat Rusiyah (Russian Poetry), a landmark anthology of Russian poetry in Hebrew transla­tion published in 1942, that shaped Russian poetry's reception by and influence on Hebrew readers and writers for decades. A 197 5 posthumous collection of her transla­tions of poetry, Kolot rechokim u-krovim (Voices Far and Near), offers a glimpse of the range of languages from which Goldberg translated and also shows that she was not averse to targum mi-targum, second-hand translation. In the words of her editor Tu via Reuvner: "those well-versed in Goldberg's poetry will easily find an affinity between

I

482 Adriana X. Jacobs

the language of translation and the language of her original poetry according to their publication history" (Goldberg 1975, 243). With its emphasis on the "language" of translation and original poetry, Reuvner's comment suggests a relation of mutual reciprocity between translation and writing in Goldberg's oeuvre. Indeed, a close reading of her poems and writings on translation (though tl:~se are few) demonstrates a preoccupation with that thin line between original and translation and its relation to literary circulation and inheritance.

In 1964, Goldberg participated in the Fourth Congress of the Association interna­tionale de litterature comparee, which took place in Fribourg, Switzerland. The overarching theme of that year's event was nationalisme et cosmopolitisme en litterature, and the conference proceedings included a panel devoted to le probleme de la traduction. Goldberg's presentation, "Certain Aspects of Imitation and Translation in Poetry," focused primarily on sixteenth-century French and Italian imitations of Petrarch (Goldberg 1966). Although Goldberg had written and lectured extensively on Petrarch, this particular document stands out as a rare treatment - in English, no less - by Goldberg on the subject of translation. The questions that preoccupy her include the distinction between translation and imitation, whether or not poets make good translators, and to what acceptable degree, if any, a poet-translator may intervene creatively in the translation process and still call the final product a translation proper. It offers a crucial window onto how Goldberg approached her own translation activity, how she understood translation - that is, good translation - as a generative, creative act, and how she positioned original works of poetry as translations. Although her subject is sixteenth-century French and Italian Renais~ance poetry and the rise of French and Italian vernacular literatures, Goldberg also addresses the way the transla­tion of poetry and its circulation reciprocally encourages a dynamic literary economy where language, images, and ideas are continually in motion, thereby ensuring, through the productive infusion of the foreign, the ongoing vitality of a local literary culture. In the process, poets shape networks of influence and inheritance that often operate outside of hegemonic canonical borders. This understanding of translation was informed not only by Goldberg's commitment to creating a modern Hebrew liter­ary vernacular, but also by her western European and Russian literary background, where poetic translation, particularly in the nineteenth century, was consciously employed as a way to bring new poetries into circulation.

Goldberg's essay opens with the following observation:

Though there are almost as many ways of translating poetry as there are individual translators, we must assume for the purpose of this argument that a translator of poetry is a person who intends to reproduce in another language all the characteristics of the poem translated: i.e., the form, the contents [sic}, the atmosphere, the particular poetic personality of the original author and the style and spirit of his time. (Goldberg 1966, 837)

A translator, in other words, measures the success of his or her translation by its faithful proximity to the original. But Goldberg concedes that "ideal translation" -

-- ---- ---~· ~~~-

translation as a perfec - "scarcely exists in t

If a translator is not of forced rhymes an imitator is free in e' rules are borrowed I inspired poet, he wo manage to refrain f own ideas. So, his f translation. (1966,

Although Goldbe translation and imit~ stands to gain from which a poet-transl2 the work he or she h with remaining faitl what he thinks esse everything which m is a poem that refle< idiom" (1966, 840) his or her fluency " her own, participatiJ and beyond the bot still influence a forei and translation" wi<

Goldberg's obsen poets Louise Labe a also a translator of multilingual netwo

the time that she " published a poetic Tereza di Mun), wh cycle, claimed to l: environs of Avigno her employ. Aside · historical and cult speaker's time, pla1 the increased visibi uted to the poems. origins, Goldberg : also the borderline been destroyed, an

The Go-Betweens 483

translation as a perfect, seamless reproduction of a poem from one language to another - "scarcely exists in reality":

If a translator is not a poet, he would almost certainly be guilty of unnatural language, of forced rhymes and flatness, which is seldom to be found in imitation, because the imitator is free in everything but the self-imposed poetic rules, and~nly some of these rules are borrowed from the model. ()n the other hand, if the translator is a good and inspired poet, he would, for all his intended subordination to the poem translated, hardly manage to refrain from imposing on it his own manner and style, and sometimes his own ideas. So, his final achievement would turn out to be much nearer imitation than translation. ( 1966, 842-43)

Although Goldberg is particularly invested in discussing the distinction between translation and imitation, she is also interested in probing the question of what a poet stands to gain from translating another poet. Goldberg is struck by the extent to

which a poet-translator demonstrates what she calls "a creative identification" with the work he or she has chosen to translate. Whereas a translator proper is preoccupied with remaining faithful to the source material, the poet-translator will "[take} only what he thinks essential for the enrichment of his own poetry and [dismiss] freely everything which might have an effect of a foreign body, or of remoteness." The result is a poem that reflects "the style of the original as if it were [the imitators'] natural idiom" (1966, 840). Through this kind of translation, a poet not only demonstrates his or her fluency with the tradition of the source material but also makes it his or her own, participating in the creation of an intertextual genealogy that branches across and beyond the borders of language, time, and place. A "faithful" translation may still influence a foreign literary culture, but works that lie on this "border of imitation and translation" wield this influence internally.

Goldberg's observations on Petrarchan imitations, particularly those of Renaissance poets Louise Labe and Pierre Ronsard, call attention to the ways in which Goldberg, also a translator of Petrarch, inscribed herself in the intertextual, translational, and multilingual network that she describes in this presentation. Indeed, in 1952, around the time that she was completing her manuscript of Petrarch translations, Goldberg published a poetic cycle under the title "The Love of Teresa de Meun" (Ahavata shel Tereza di Mun), which, in a preface that Goldberg appended to later versions of the cycle, claimed to be the recovered poems of a sixteenth-century woman from "the environs of Avignon" who embarked on a failed love affair with an Italian tutor in her employ. Aside from their famed preface, the poems otherwise provide very little historical and cultural inform~tion that would contextualize more specifically the speaker's time, place, and circumstances; in fact, this information relies entirely on the increased visibility Goldberg gave to the fictive historical context that she attrib-

#"

uted to the poems. By complicating the work's linguistic, historical, and geographical origins, Goldberg straddles not only the line between translation and imitation, but also the borderline between original and translation. Since the original poems have been destroyed, any reproduction of the original must be unfaithful and creative.

484 Adriana X. Jacobs

The relation between "The Love of Teresa de Meun" and Petrarch extends further than the decision to locate de Meun in Avignon or Goldberg's use of the Petrarchan sonnet. One poem in particular, Sonnet VIII, "The strands of rain are like violin strings" (Nimei ha-geshem ke-meitrey kinor), contains a graft of Petrarch's "Pace non trovo," specifically of the language of "fire and ice" that appea.rs in the second line of his poem ("I find no peace, and all my war is done: I I fear, and hope; I burn, and freeze like ice"), which Goldberg -discusses at length in her presentation and recasts in her poem in the last two lines of the second stanza: 1

The strands of rain are like violin strings hanging over a window. Dear friend, please light

. the fire on the hearth. We will sit between light and light, reflections playing between us.

It suits you the grey cast of a rainy day. Your endearing youth in the double light of fall and flame -my heart a blaze, my mind the frost.

(Goldberg 1973, 163; my translation)

In a Benjaminian turn, Goldberg observes that the "freshness" that the "fire and ice" cliche displays in Labe's and Ronsard's imitations proves that "it was not so ste­reotyped before as to lose all original beauty or meaning." Through this intertextual Petrarchan graft, in her Hebrew translation, Goldberg tests her own claim that good translation can breathe new life into language that has become stagnant and cliched. While the multiple translations that Petrarch's work has undergone attest to the original text's translatability, its "aura," what is also at stake is inheritance. As lan­guage moves, even in a very fragmentary form, it carries with it its history and pre­history, inscribing this past into the present context every time it is transplanted. As works and words are transposed into new textual bodies, they become naturalized and integrated over time, until they become, in Goldberg's words, "our poetry" (Goldberg 1950a, 37). These traits, once foreign and external, now move through an entirely different line; in the process, both the source and target literary cultures are altered and reconfigured, and in this way two traditions that were foreign are not only con­nected but also transformed. Goldberg's critique of faithful translation as stasis advances the argument that a degree of infidelity and creativity is necessary in order to transport a poem and that these movements, both inside and outside of its source literary system, are reciprocal.

The figure of the translator as a linguistic and literary progenitor pervades the work of poet Yehuda Amichai, whose career spanned the second half of the twentieth century. Translation also shaped his biography, as it did for Goldberg. Born Ludwig Pfeuffer in Wiirzburg, Germany, Amichai was raised in a religiously observant home where both Hebrew and German were spoken. He emigrated to Palestine in 1935 at

the age of 11 and by 1 tion did - with the H~ in Other Days (Akhshc,

prolific career in poetr) Amichai straddled thE preferred to remain "01

Harshav also notes th: and only gradually rea influences as selected a way, Amichai was abl against the patrilineaL source of "anxiety" fo mode of cultural and l "the hegemonic voice~ it does for Goldberg, tion. The 1962 poem collection Poems 1948 translator, and offers c the relation between c translation are also int tion, which this poerr

And we shall not get excited. QuiE words from one J

unknowingly, lik the countenance though he resem he is just a go-b<

In this poem, the wo1 modern Hebrew meta

preter," a word that b Ionian exile (sixth cer considerably, and it cc Land of Israel and Ba tions could not rely so: the services of a trans manim) would providE not restricted to liten hibited); rather, the ri

The Go-Betweens 485

the age of 11 and by 1946 had replaced his diasporic name - as many of his genera­tion did - with the Hebraic name Yehuda Amichai. His first full collection, Now and in Other Days (Akhshav u-va-yamim ha-acherim), appeared in 1955, and heralded a prolific career in poetry that included a novel, short stories, and translations. Although Amichai straddled the Palmach and Statehood generations of ;Hebrew literature, he preferred to remain "on the boundarjes of affiliation" (Kronfeld 1996, 143).2 Benjamin Harshav also notes that "[Amichai} molded his own voice from the very beginning, and only gradually reached out for the so-called 'influences,' which were not so much influences as selected appropriations of different sources" (Harshav 2007, 179). In this way, Amichai was able to forge his own line in modern Hebrew and Israeli poetry against the patrilineal, monolingual, and national literary model that was a particular source of "anxiety" for his generation. For Amichai, translation served as a crucial mode of cultural and linguistic exchange that breaks down what Kronfeld has termed "the hegemonic voices of cultural authority" (Kronfeld 2007), a process that aims, as it does for Goldberg, to problematize narratives of inheritance, influence, and tradi­tion. The 1962 poem "And we shall not get excited" (Ve-lo nitlahev), published in the collection Poems 1948-1962, is an early articulation of Amichai's figure of the poet­translator, and offers crucial insights on Amichai's thinking about translatability and the relation between original, translation, and translator. These figures and themes of translation are also intimately connected to his ideas of inheritance, legacy, and tradi­tion, which this poem addresses explicitly in its opening stanzas:

And we shall not get excited, for a translator should not get excited. Quietly we pass words from one person to another, from one lip (safah] to other lips (sfatayim],

unknowingly, like a father who passes on the countenance of his dead father to his son though he resembles neither one, he is just a go-between (metavekh].

(Amichai 2000, 313; my translation)

In this poem, the word that Amichai employs for "translator" is not the anticipated modern Hebrew metargem but rather turgeman, Aramaic for "translator" and "inter­preter," a word that has a rich history in Jewish textual tradition. During the Baby­lonian exile (sixth century BCE), the use of Aramaic as a Jewish vernacular increased considerably, and it continued to be a major vernacular of Jewish communities in the Land of Israel and Babylonia in the post-exilic period. As a result, Jewish congrega­tions could not rely solely on Hebrew for religious instruction and liturgy, necessitating the services of a translator or meturgeman (also, turgeman). The meturgeman (pl. meturge­manim) would provide oral translations of Hebrew biblical texts into Aramaic but was not restricted to literal translation (in fact, literal translation was often expressly pro­hibited); rather, the meturgeman would expand the translation with commentary and

486 Adriana X. Jacobs

references to relevant, topical events (Hallo 1996, 165). In the Mishneh Torah, his comprehensive codification of Jewish law, the medieval Jewish philosopher and rabbi Maimonides states that the meturgeman was not to speak over the reader of the biblical text nor, by the same token, was the Torah reader to speak over the translator (Mai­monides 2010). The meturgeman also relayed questions and ~swers between rabbis and their students. Eventually, the role of the meturgeman fell out of favor, as rabbis expressed displeasure with the interpretive freedoms some meturgemanim exercised. When official Aramaic translations of the Bible - targumim - came into official use, the meturgeman

was replaced by textual translation. By employing the word turgeman, Amichai is able to invoke an understanding of

translation that encompasses not only a linguistic crossing over (from one language to another),- but also an understanding of translation as mediation and interpretation. In modern Hebrew, metavekh carries the literal meaning of "mediator." In my transla­tion, I have borrowed "go-between" from an unpublished translation by Kronfeld and Chana Bloch (Kronfeld 2007). An additional meaning of metavekh as "broker," in the financial sense, underscores Amichai's understanding of culture and tradition as econo­mies, as systems of exchange, gains and losses. In this respect, an understanding of contemporary translation, in Kronfeld's view, comes down to "what it means for a human agent, be it a reader, a poet, a translator or a poetic persona, for that matter, to activate, interpret, critique and rewrite the constitutive texts of a culture" (2007). But the poet-translator participates in these exchanges be-sheket, "quietly," and without getting too "excited," as was expected from the meturgemanim. The poet-translator does not lay claim to an original voice or demand that he or she leave a visible historical and cultural imprint. Instead, the poet-translator participates in what Amichai char­acterizes as cultural and linguistic recycling, a process that is derivative - in other words, unoriginal - but also transformative and creative.

In the first two stanzas of "And we shall not get excited," Amichai positions the poet-translator at the center of a chain of cultural transactions and between the past and the future, marked in this poem by the figures of the grandfather and the son. The poet's in-betweenness, in Kronfeld's words, "frees [the poet-translator] to be dif­ferent from his precursor and follower" (2007). In modern Hebrew, the expression klaster panim is a fixed expression often translated as "countenance," but it has an etymology that opens Amichai's klaster panav aviv, "the countenance of his father," to suggestions that the poet is playing with and arguably critiquing ideas of inheritance. Indeed, by rendering klaster panav as "features" in their translation, Bloch and Kro­nfeld tie the expression to the themes of mediation and circulation that shape the poem (Kronfeld 2007). The word klaster is not Semitic in origin, but its linguistic origins are unclear. It is likely a Hebraization of the Greek K.pUcrTa\\oc; (kristalos) or the Latin crystallum, and makes several appearances in rabbinic literature. In one notable instance, in the tractate Berakhot (Benedictions), the expression klaster panim

appears in commentary on Moses and the matan Torah, the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai. In a glossary that accompanies Berakhot, the famed French medieval rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki (Rashi) offers the biblical expression keren 'or panav as a kind

of translation or deJ matan Torah is rela1 panav, an expressio tions, including "tl or "the skin of his

But like Amich: face was shining w

textualization of th standing narrative identity for millern war and post-indef particularly charge culture was motiv~ hand, it remained The presence of th the rest of the pc (Harshav 2007, 1 7: writing, which _A

translation. The words klast1

substantiate an idE literally giving bi shaping new lines c poem the translate progenitor of his O'

tion." In the mishr the female observa cinating discussior is niddah or imprn or not she is requ offers poetic detail one commentary, a of gestation to "fo 1938-65). This p1 that enumerates d occurrence (in this

Our Rabbis taug father and his me are formed the c eye; his mother s flesh, hair, blood the spirit and thE

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The Go-Betweens 487

of translation or definition for klaster panim. In the biblical book of Exodus, where the matan Torah is related, it is stated that as Moses came down the mountain, keren 'or panav, an expression that lends itself to various English translations and interpreta­tions, including "the skin of his face sent forth beams" Qewish Publication Society) or "the skin of his face shone" (King James Version). •

But like Amichai's turgemg,nlfather figure, Moses lo yada, did not know, that his face was shining when he addressed the Israelites (Exodus 34:29). Amichai's recon­textualization of this biblical and rabbinic material invokes but also critiques a long­standing narrative of transmission and inheritance on which Judaism has staked its identity for millennia, bringing questions of belonging and tradition to bear on post­war and post-independence anxieties of influence and legacy that were, and still are, particularly charged in Israeli society. On the one hand, post-1948 Israeli literary culture was motivated to dissociate itself from its diasporic roots but, on the other hand, it remained very much indebted to a textual tradition of exile and diaspora. The presence of the word klaster, as well as the Aramaic expressions that appear in the rest of the poem, also underscore "the ironies of reterritorialized language" (Harshav 2007, 178) and the deeply multilingual layers that shape Hebrew vernacular writing, which Amichai likens here to a practice of linguistic and cultural translation.

The words klaster and turgeman mark dynamic intertextual moments that not only substantiate an idea of translation as mediation but also tie translation to creation, literally giving birth to a new "face" or legacy. Indeed, the role of translation in shaping new lines of influence and tradition is central to Goldberg's essay; in Amichai's poem the translator is not only a progenitor in the traditional sense, but also the progenitor of his own ancestor, whom he revives, through his son, that is, his "transla­tion." In the mishnaic tractate Niddah (Separation), which concerns menstruation and the female observance of ritual purity, the word klaster appears in a graphic and fas­cinating discussion on miscarriage and whether or not a woman who has miscarried is niddah or impure/unclean, and the specific circumstances that determine whether or not she is required to observe ritual purity (Epstein 1938-65). This discussion offers poetic details on the shape of the embryo at different stages of gestation, with one commentary, attributed to Rabbi Simlai, likening an embryo in an advanced stage of gestation to "folded writing tablets" (pinkas she-mekupal) (Niddah 30b, in Epstein 1938-65 ). This preoccupation with the features of an embryo segues into a passage that enumerates the characteristics that parents bestow on a child and marks the only occurrence (in this tractate) of the expression klaster panim:

Our Rabbis taught: There are three partners in man, the Holy One, blessed be He, his father and his mother. His father supplies the semen of the white substance out of which are formed the child's bones, sinews, nails, the brain in his head and the white in his eye; his mother supplies the semen of the red substance out of which is formed his skin, flesh, hair, blood and the black of his eye; and the Holy One, blessed be He, gives him the spirit and the breath, beauty of features, eyesight, the power of hearing and the ability

488 Adriana X. Jacobs

to speak and to walk, understanding and discernment. When his time to depart from the world approaches the Holy One, blessed be He, takes away his share and leaves the shares of his father and his mother with them. (Niddah 31a, in Epstein 1938-65; emphasis added)

For this use of klaster panim (translated here as "beauty of features"), Rashi offers ziv, light, as a synonym, which Israel W Slotki renders as "beauty" in his English transla­tion. In this passage, these intangible features are a divine patrimony, but Amichai's poem suggests that, in addition to eye color and hair texture, non-literal and non­material traits also pass between generations, though their transmission - or transla­tion - is not contingent on linear continuity. Amichai was certainly aware of the politics of continuity that shaped the modern Hebrew literary canon, partic;ularly the official narrative of continuity that legitimized Hebrew's vernacular revival in the late nineteenth century. Asserting an uninterrupted line of Hebrew textual history and linguistic transmission proved critical to the territorial politics of Jewish nation­building in the early twentieth century. In this context, the weight of the word klaster, with its almost Yiddish or Germanic lilt, in a poetic line about inheritance asserts that, from one generation to another, narratives of continuity are fashioned, refash­ioned, and revised. The poet-translator occupies the hinge (or hinges) where a narra­tive turns toward new possibilities, and also where it turns back in an act of rev1s10n.

In my readings of Goldberg and Amichai, I have emphasized sites of translation in original texts; how sites of in-betweenness emerge from within particular linguistic, geographic, and cultural contexts; and how a preoccupation with translation shapes, and becomes synonymous with, the very act of writing. To the extent that poets like Goldberg and Amichai stand firmly in specific cultural and historical contexts that inform how, why, and what they write and translate, they also fashion, as Goldberg's essay argues persuasively, their own unique and personal poetic maps, where "they are citizens of imaginative webs formed by cross-national reading and rewriting" (Rama­zani 2009, 48). Writers such as Amichai and Goldberg, who employ a poetics of translation in their own work - and this is a hallmark of bilingual and multilingual writing, as well as what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari termed "minor literatures" - are explicitly rejecting a "romantic sensibility" that exclusively privileges originality and monologic authority (Deleuze and Guattari 1986).

In the case of Goldberg, between faithful translation and "creative transposition" (Jakobson [1959] (2000), 118) a space emerges that frees a poet to create alternative mappings of affiliation in a period and literary culture freighted with increasingly hegemonic prescriptions for belonging and participation. Amichai engages this "border line" as well, imagining the genesis of the poem as an act of translation, which he also compares to genetic expression. Indeed, it is in Amichai's own "original" poetry that his most extensive and sustained work of translation takes place. This is not the work of a neutral, dissociated bystander, but rather of a poet-translator who occupies the

in-between bodil language to man (2007). 3 Being in a local cultural ec1 cal associations a1 fact, Harshav obs to traditional pre old-fashioned, di~

According to 1 was instrumental writers are invest< ing passage from l ( G ilui ve-kisui ba-

using their uni every opportun words writhe i1 there takes pl& mark, a chang~ (2000, 25)

For Goldberg between the old But as modern I­were taken to t2

moded poetic lar of the moderna. T1 in a 1944 essay origin," she wro1 in which transla1 poetry, though i guage with Heb de Meun," the f her oeuvre, of hi the target cultrn own poetics of 1 the risk of cult1 concludes in the

SEE ALSO CHAP'.

(BERMANN), CH

GtiR<;AGLAR), c

The Go-Betweens 489

in-between bodily, moving language mi-safah le-sfatayim, from lip to lips - from one language to many - in an act that Kronfeld aptly describes as "linguistic-kissing" (2007). 3 Being in between enables Amichai's poet-translator to participate actively in a local cultural economy, while also creating new global linguistic, cultural, and histori­cal associations and relations. But this practice also involves a ietrospective turn - in fact, Harshav observes Goldberg's influence on Amichai's early quatrains and attention to traditional prosody at a time when young poets were beginning to abandon these old-fashioned, diasporic forms in favor of a national poetic idiom (Harshav 2007, 180).

According to the Hebrew poet Chaim Nachman Bialik (1874-1934), whose work was instrumental in the development of modern Hebrew poetry, poets more than prose writers are invested in what is "vital and mobile in language" (2000, 25). In the follow­ing passage from his celebrated 1915 essay, "Revealment and Concealment in Language" (Gilui ve-kisui ba-lashon), Bialik describes how poets activate and animate language:

using their unique keys, [poets} are obliged themselves to introduce into language at every opportunity - never-ending motion, new combinations and associations. The words writhe in their hands; they are extinguished and lit again ... By this process there takes place, in the material of language, exchanges of posts and locations: one mark, a change in the point of one idea, and the old world shines with a new light. (2000, 25)

For Goldberg and her contemporaries, Bialik straddled that translational space between the old European Jewish diasporic world and the emerging national body. But as modern Hebrew rapidly assumed hegemonic national status, poets like Bialik were taken to task by younger poets for their perceived diasporic poetics and out­moded poetic language, and later this category would include Goldberg and the poets of the moderna. Ten years after Bialik's death, Goldberg acknowledged the poet's legacy in a 1944 essay. "He translated our childhood into Hebrew, until it became the origin," she wrote, explicitly using the word "translated" to call attention to the ways in which translating and writing are mutually inclusive practices in modern Hebrew poetry, though in this case it also problematically replaces the origin's original lan­guage with Hebrew (1950b, 186). Nevertheless, in Goldberg's "The Love of Teresa de Meun," the presence of the Petrarchan graft is one example, among many across her oeuvre, of how translation ensures that the foreign text remains "immanent" in the target culture and language. For Amichai, the principle of recycling shapes his own poetics of translation, emphasizing circulation and translatability to challenge the risk of cultural and linguistic stasis in a national context. "Surely," Goldberg concludes in the Bialik essay, "this is the first step toward a new life" (1950b, 186).

SEE ALSO CHAPTER 4 (BASSNETT), CHAPTER 8 (SHREVE AND LACRUZ), CHAPTER 21 (BERMANN), CHAPTER 26 (DAMROSCH), CHAPTER 27 (GALVIN), CHAPTER 39 (TAHIR

GtiR~AGLAR), CHAPTER 44 (DAVIS)

490 Adriana X. Jacobs

NOTES

1 This poem was included in the Rime sparse (Il

Canzoniere), a collection of 366 poems com­

posed between 1327 and 1368 (Petrarch

1976). 2 In modern Hebrew literary history rhe Palmach

Generation (dor ha-palmach) generally refers to

authors who participated in the 1948 Israeli

War of Independence.

3 In Hebrew, safah is both language and lip. In

the plural, the grammatical dual suffix ayim in

sfatayim denot11& two lips. The plural of lan­guages, on the other hand, is safot. Amichai

cleverly plays with these associations, convey­

ing not only the image of lips kissing but also

the doubling or multiplying of languages that occurs in the act of translation.

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