How Isaac Bashevis Singer’s translator edits without editing
David Stromberg, the Yiddishist behind a new collection of the Nobel Prize winner's essays for the Forward, talks about the challenges of bringing his work to a modern audience
Translations
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Books ‘What she’s doing is anti-translation.’ Why Israeli translators are upset about Rooney’s boycott.
Sally Rooney’s decision to refuse the translation rights of her latest novel to “Israeli-based” publishers has implications not just for BDS, but for the greater dialogue across languages. While Rooney clarified her position to state that she is not boycotting Hebrew, the prospect of a widely-available Hebrew translation not published in Israel seems unlikely. In…
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Fast Forward Sally Rooney clarifies: She’s boycotting Israel, not the Hebrew language.
On Tuesday, celebrated Irish novelist Sally Rooney clarified her stance on Hebrew translations of her new novel “Beautiful World, Where Are You.” “The Hebrew-language translation rights to my new novel are still available,” Rooney wrote in a statement the Forward received from her agent, Tracy Bohan, on Tuesday following reports that she had declined to…
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Culture The monumental effort of translating ‘Harry Potter’ into Yiddish
Read in Yiddish. When Arun Viswanath, the Yiddish translator of J. K. Rowling’s worldwide bestseller “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” was 12 years old, he suddenly had a revelation that made him feel dejected. Although he’s a grandson of the venerable Yiddish linguist Mordkhe Schaechter, the son of the Yiddish poet Gitl Schaechter-Viswanath, and…
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Culture The Refugee War Reporter Who Brought ‘Doctor Zhivago’ To The West
Over the past decade, the remarkable story of the international late 1950s effort to defy Soviet censors and secure publication of “Doctor Zhivago” has focused on the role played by western spies and spooks. But while the CIA secretly worked to smuggle bootleg copies of Boris Pasternak’s masterpiece back into the Soviet Union — a…
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Culture Remembering Sasson Somekh, Who Insisted On Arab Literature’s Place In Israel
Editor’s note: This piece was originally published on September 22, 2012. It was republished on August 19, 2019 after Sasson Somekh’s death at age 86. Translations have the potential to communicate one culture to another, strengthening humanistic ties. Translators can be peacemakers, self-abnegatingly finding compromises in the perilous confrontation of languages. No one exemplified this…
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Culture Q & A: On Primo Levi’s Centenary, Reflecting On A Writer Who Was ‘The Perfect Scientist’
Primo Levi was, by any measure, a remarkable man. The chemist and writer, born in Turin, Italy on July 31, 1919, is most famous in America for his memoirs of his experience during the Holocaust. And those memoirs, foremost among them “If This is a Man,” which surveys Levi’s time in the Italian resistance and…
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Culture He Translated One Of The Greatest Modern Yiddish Writers — And Didn’t Know
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Harold Rabinowitz likes to say that when he pulled into the driveway at the Beacon Inn in Brookline, Massachusetts, his life became like “something from the movies.” It was winter 1979. Rabinowitz, or Heshie, as he calls himself, was a pulpit rabbi in nearby Malden and a…
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