Stingy Kids

Peter Parasol #2

Peter Parasol #2 went live this week and features poems that, in very different ways, are inspired by or interact with an artwork by S. Lariviere.  The piece "The Gasp Mechanism" is a vibrant hybrid of tapestry, quilt and collage.  Bits of text and images come together through what seems to be a very spontaneous and intuitive process.  But cutting and stitching these materials also take time, and I began to wonder how these "pauses" determined the placement of certain elements.  In Bobbi Lurie's poem, the speaker observes that "the material of a painting allows the brain another region to believe in."  This is beautifully stated.  There is a long standing, productive exchange between the visual arts and poetry.  In "The Gasp Mechanism," for instance, the visibility of the seams and the way in which ribbons created internal frames sparked new ways of thinking of line, break and juxtaposition in poetry.

My contribution to this issue is a poem titled "Mechanism" (and includes an audio reading of the poem).  I didn't set out to describe the piece but rather to take certain visual juxtapositions and see what could happen to them in the "blank" space of the poem.  Somehow this fused with the myth of Cassandra.  The image that appears in this post is a snapshot of one of my favorite details, "the rooster becomes a scythe."

Peter Parasol is currently accepting submissions for issue #3.

What goes on here

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.

Translating With

Some of my translations appear this month at Kritya, an online journal of poetry and translation, which is published in India (NB: Because of the way the page is formatted, some of the line breaks in the translations are incorrect.). About a month ago, Eran Tzelgov, one of the founding editors of Daka (literally, "minute"), a relatively new Israeli literary journal, approached me with the opportunity to translate some poems from the first two issues. The result is some of the poems on the Kritya site. Other poems will make their appearance at the 2008 Austin International Poetry Festival and, hopefully, in other journals. Translation is always a collaboration to a degree. There are people I approach, for feedback and comments, at the beginning of a project and others at the end, depending on the requirements of the particular project. But ultimately, it's my name that appears after "translated by." This was the first time, however, that I shared credit. The line between "what is mine" and "what is yours" is often blurred in co-translation (or collaborative translation) but it becomes very clear at which point you've crossed from "feedback and suggestions" to actively building the translation together. I've long admired the work of co-translators Chana Kronfeld and Chana Bloch, who have collaborated on Yehuda Amichai's last book Patuach sagur patuach (Open Closed Open) and a collection of poems by Dahlia Ravikovitch (forthcoming), but always wondered how exactly co-translation happens. I have some sense of it now but I'm interested in reading more on the topic and pursuing collaborative projects in the future.

In print

My translations of three short stories by the Israeli author Reuven Miran are now on line.  I'm very proud to be part of Zeek's commitment to promoting Modern Hebrew writing through translation.  Miran's texts, which were more like prose poems, were such a pleasure to work with.  From my Translator's Note:

The idea, expressed in the story "Meteor," that a meteor is only fully perceived at the moment of its death – when it bursts into flames through the Earth's atmosphere – could apply to the work of translation. The meaning and spirit of a text are most vulnerable when the original and target language come into contact, but this instant also offers a tremendous opportunity for understanding the text in new and productive ways.

Translation is often spoken of in terms of metaphor and simile, and often personified.  Translations are traitors, assassins, les belles infidèles.  (For more on this topic, I recommend Lori Chamberlain's "Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation" [reprinted in Venuti, The Translation Studies Reader, 2000, 2004].)  While thinking about the process of translating Miran's stories, I found myself reaching for analogies, all of them unsuitable, until I realized that the metaphor I needed was in the very story I had translated. "...if it had not fallen through space and – thanks to that unavoidable friction – burned against the atmosphere, the meteor would have continued to spin through endless space for tens of thousands of years more, perhaps even forever" ("Meteor").