Two publications of mine that I forgot to mention:
In December, Zeek: A Jewish Journal for Thought and Culture published my translation of an excerpt from Maya Arad's novel in verse Makom acher ve-'ir zarah (Another Place, A Foreign City). From Adam Rovner's introduction to the translation:
Arad’s novel pays homage to Pushkin’s masterwork, using Onegin stanzas to tell the story of two young lovers, Orit and Jay, against the backdrop of Tel Aviv in the early 1990s. In these eleven stanzas excerpted from Canto II, we meet Jay, an immigrant from Canada who is ambivalent both about his military service and Orit, the love-struck soldier assigned to help him acclimate to Israel. Through Adriana Jacobs’ graceful and witty translation, the serious complexities of Israeli and Jewish identity emerge with a sense of the same playful irony as in Arad’s original
The first question I am asked regarding this particular translation project is "will you keep the rhyme and meter?" The answer is "yes" and "no." The formal properties of Arad's sonnets are pretty consistent, but I made it a point to observe when Arad allowed herself to shift, change or ignore elements of form and prosody. These moments allowed me to determine my own ways of dealing with rhymes and rhythms that don't always work well in English (to my ear, at least). My approach, so far, has been to keep a sense of the form and prosody but without feeling tied to or obligated to a pattern that was designed to work in another language. I thought in terms of cadence and rhythm over meter, and my rhymes often rearranged the Pushkin pattern. And yet, the more I worked "loosely" with the structure of the poem, the more things started to fall into place, the more formal the translations became.
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This month, my friend Miranda Gaw launched Peter Parasol, an on line, literary zine. It's gorgeous, and I am honored that she included one of my poems, "It's enough that the child live." The title of the poem refers to the last words Pocahontas spoke, "All must die. 'Tis enough that the child liveth." The child in question was her son with John Rolfe--Thomas.
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