Panel: Found in Translation
Copanelists: Nancy K. Miller and Jay Prosser
From an international as well as national perspective, Amos Oz--arguably, Israel’s best known living writer—is an object of both celebration and controversy. Oz’s literary oeuvre to date, comprised of twenty-six novels, continues to be a complex examination of the Zionist project as historical ideal and dramatic reality, and an interrogation and justification of the cultural politics that made possible the renaissance of the Hebrew language. The memoir A Tale of Love and Darkness (2003) is one of the best-selling books in Israeli history, and has been widely translated. Narrated by a precocious boy who declares he wants to “grow up to be a book,” the long, allusive, digressive text intertwines three stories about loss and its legacies: the emergence of the Zionist state out of the Holocaust—an event that displaced hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs in the process—the suicide of Oz’s romantic, European immigrant mother when he was twelve years old, and his own coming-towriting as an unmistakable response to that catastrophic loss.
The memoir was translated from Hebrew into English in 2004. My paper is not concerned with the state of Israeli literature as the source culture of this specific translation, but rather with the target language/culture of this Hebrew source text, as the staging ground for an event whose strange and troubling ramifications merit attention. Sensitized to the highly charged political context of contemporary Israeli Jewish and Palestinian Arab textuality, we might expect any problem of translation to be political in nature. But the fascinating phenomenon that I shall address is explicitly literary, indeed metaliterary: why a chapter from the autobiography has been deleted only in the English translation, and what this reveals about the critical role of translation in the global marketplace. The digressive chapter, which directly takes the reader to task for being too literalist and challenges certain assumptions about reading practices, the nature of autobiography, and fictional truth, is preserved in every other translation. How to measure the effects of such an inconspicuous absence, an absence only made manifest when comparing translations? Given that translation always foregrounds the poetics and politics of cultural difference in changing linguistic contexts, what aspects of the Anglo-American target culture are being “privileged”—and at whose expense?-—in such an over-determined case of “lost in translation?”
Monday, June 23 • 12:30–1:45 • Keoni Auditorium
Keynote Panel: Life Writing and Translations—Word by Word
Copanelists: Mary Besemeres, Manuela Costantino, and Julia Watson
Bella Brodzki is Professor of Comparative Literature at Sarah Lawrence College. She is coeditor (with Celeste Schenck) of Life/Lines: Theorizing Women’s Autobiography (Cornell, 1988), and author of Can These Bones Live? Translation, Survival, and Cultural Memory (Stanford, 2007).