An example for a translation inspired by Brecht and Venuti

The techniques which are described by Brecht and Venuti are similar. It follows, then, that a demonstration of “Brechtian” translation should be similar to a demonstration of foreignising translation. In my translation of three more sections of Hovav’s text I will demonstrate techniques which draw their inspiration from both systems.

text is based on one of Brecht’s most well-known alienation techniques: specifically, the introduction of a narrator who serves to frame the play as a theatrical event, rather than as a ‘real’ one. For purposes of this demonstration, I have chosen to use a simple mode of narration which resides outside the fictional world and functions almost like scenic captions, similar to those used in Brecht’s Mother Courage and her Children and Life of Galileo. In my translation, narration does not criticise social and representational mechanisms because such mechanisms are not a prominent theme of my source text. It does, however, attempt to draw attention to the translational and trans-cultural nature of the target text.

(Hovav 1996: 32-33, my translation) [See Appendix, section B]

And now let me tell you, in your lovely mother tongue, why the young Hovav was taken to his aunt in the Kibbutz.

It is only fair to stop here and explain why my mother was in the mood of a fruit picking machine, and incidentally introduce an unexpected antagonist who had been hidden from sight until now – my maths teacher.

Every summer vacation, when my mother and Rina would be given their children back for keepsake, alongside with their report cards, it became apparent that members of our family were no great mathematicians. Not only not great, as our school specified, but also prone to repeat the school year. Rina and Avi, being far wealthier than my parents, used to call the schoolmaster and converse with him about issues of progress and development. On one occasion they donated a library, on another – a new floor for the young children’s wing, and so it happened that Itamar and Sponsor Girl made their way through twelve classes.

Unlike our rich aunt and uncle, my parents could resort only to promising that the child would perform better. One week after the beginning of summer vacation, I used to be sent to school in disgrace and hop along back home with a bag packed

with a huge bundle of exercises. ‘If you can solve all of these,’ said the math teacher, ‘and I’m sure you can, you will be promoted to the next year.’ So he said, praying silently for his prophecy to be refuted so I could finally drop from his class and rid him of the burden of dealing with a dumb-ass kid, whose multiplication table is riddled with enormous black holes.

Using a different tactic of estrangement, I attempted to “shake” the very materiality of the words in the target text, making them appear odd and out-of-place yet causing only minimal harm to the process of reading and understanding. I did this simply by painting random sections of the text light blue. My decision was largely based on a consideration of balance. A more subtle approach, such as introducing changes to the font typeface, might be missed by readers, or dismissed as unworthy of attention. Conversely, a less subtle approach, such as introducing changes to the layout or the directionality, might be regarded as “concrete prose” or another kind of familiar typographical art, and fail to raise a sense of amazement.

(Hovav 1996: 32-33, my translation) [See Appendix, section C]

I, on my part, used to drag my bag of sorrows back home, position it on the yellow formica table in the kitchen, and watch in horror as the tangents and differentials burst out of it and gambolled around the house, chased by all these dreadful trains which can never leave Tel Aviv and Haifa on time, but for me still insist on crashing into each other in Hadera.

‘This year I’ve got eighty exercises in arithmetics and forty in geometry,’ I informed my family glumly. My father promptly escaped the house (only years later I discovered that the Radio manager had had an “E” in his math finals), and

Mooma withdrew to her room and announced that in the following days she would be occupied in the making of marzipan and ‘if this gazpacho but dares to approach

me with his algebraic inquisitions I shall throw myself in the river. All day long he runs under my feet and pesters me with construction workers and triangles and air-planes and I know not what, and lo, the marzipan turns out crooked.’

Finally, I attempted to follow Venuti and “minoritise” the target text (see Venuti 1998: 10). Hovav’s Family Cooking cannot be said to possess any minority status in Hebrew literature since it belongs to the world of popular light reading. However, its translation may still be linked to other relevant texts that do enjoy minority status. The text I chose to use was the poetry of the widely known but little read Israeli poet, Avoth Yeshurun (1904-92).

Even though he has published poetry since the 1930s, ‘only at old age did Avoth Yeshurun […] find his own unique style.’ (Oppenheimer 2001, my translation). He became known in the 1970s, co-incidentally, the period when the stories of Family Cooking take place. However, Yeshurun’s poetry was still shadowed by that of his more famous contemporaries. Influential scholar and literary editor, Menachem Perry, who published many of Yeshurun’s poems, wrote of Yeshurun’s relative obscurity: ‘my opinion is that Yeshurun is a forsaken poet to this day’ (2009, my translation). This lack of recognition may be a result of Yeshurun’s refusal to obey the socio-poetic norms of his period. Yohai Oppenheimer explains:

Yeshurun [...] refrained consistently from adopting the role which was undertaken by the majority of the poets of his time: to establish an Israeli identity through the experience of military heroism on the one hand and bereavement on the other. His poetry chose to point out the other, unofficial memory, which is related to guilt and responsibility for the fate of the vanquished (2001, my translation).

themes but also because of his avoidance of the conventional use of language. According to Oppenheimer, Yeshurun ‘broke down almost every customary linguistic norm, grammatically and syntactically but also lexically – [considering] the vast usage of Yiddish, Arabic and slang’ (2001, my translation). Zandbank commented about Yeshurun’s effect on his readers: ‘reading the poetry of Yeshurun can draw you in two very different directions; [one is ...] the mimetic side [...], the way in which it reflects Yiddish and follows it; [… the other is] its invented side, the modernistic enclave it creates within the Hebrew language and Hebrew poetry’ (2009, my translation).

I chose Yeshurun’s poetry specifically for the task of introducing a “minoritisng” element into the translation of Family Cooking because it has one typical stylistic element that can be transferred into English quite effectively. This element can be called ultra-deficient spelling, and it requires some explanation. Hebrew includes a system of vowel signs (nikkud) which is used in biblical texts, texts intended for children and poetry. When this system is used, some (but not all) of the letters which normally represent vowels are omitted, because they are no longer necessary. This is called deficient spelling. What Yeshurun introduced was an ultra-deficient spelling. His poems used nikkud, but in some of the lines he omitted all the instances of vowel letters – even vowel letters that would not be normally omitted under such circumstances. Oppenheimer’s description of the effect of this unique spelling brings to mind Brecht and Venuti: ‘he who is familiar with the ultra deficient spelling, which was used by Yeshurun since the end of the seventies, will recognise [...] the attempt to leave an impression on language by making it strange’ (2001, my translation). This was corroborated by Zandbank, who noted that ‘spelling words as Ym [instead of Yom, meaning day] or Dfk [instead of Dofek, meaning knocking] necessarily interrupts fluent reading and draws

attention not toward the signified but toward the very sign, the opaque, and thus poetic, materiality of the words’ (2009, my translation).

Yeshurun’s ultra-deficient spelling can be mirrored by an English text without some of its vowels, as in, ‘it is cmprhnsbl, bt vry wrd.’ I chose to plant this effect here and there in the translated text, as a last demonstration of the possibilities of translational Verfremdungseffect.

(Hovav 1996: 33-34, my translation) [See Appendix, section D]

In short, my mthr undrstd she was left alone again with me and the cosines. To sink into a mood of a frt pckng mchn, then, was the only remaining altrntve.

But this year, aunt Reuma shone in the skies of mth. Reuma was always cnsdrd to be the intllctl aunt, and my mthr, in her despair, decided that the fct that Reuma had read all those deathly brng bks by Brenner surely means that she can hndl these annoying pools with their leaky tps.

In conclusion, the translations of these passages attempt to exemplify techniques borrowed from Venuti and Brecht in an effort to draw attention to the translational nature of the text and to minoritise it within the context of domestic English texts. I did this by framing the narration, by including an example of resistant modification in the texture of the text (in this case, colour) and by introducing a stylistic link with a foreign, minoritised author.