{"id":432192,"date":"2020-05-26T09:52:39","date_gmt":"2020-05-26T13:52:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/?p=432192"},"modified":"2020-05-26T13:05:39","modified_gmt":"2020-05-26T17:05:39","slug":"aviva-no-by-shimon-adaf-why-this-book-should-win","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2020\/05\/26\/aviva-no-by-shimon-adaf-why-this-book-should-win\/","title":{"rendered":"“Aviva-No” by Shimon Adaf [Why This Book Should Win]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win<\/a> posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2020 Best Translated Book Award<\/a>s<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Adriana X. Jacobs is the author of<\/em> S<\/a>tr<\/a>ange<\/a> Cocktail: Translation and the Making of Modern Hebrew Literature<\/a> (University of Michigan, 2018) and associate professor of modern Hebrew literature at the University of Oxford. Her translation of contemporary Hebrew poetry have appeared in <\/em>Gulf Coast, Anomaly, World Literature Today, North American Review, The Ilanot Review, among others. Her translation of Vaan Nguyen’s <\/em>The Truffle Eye, for which she was awarded a 2015 PEN\/Heim Translation Fund grant, is forthcoming from Zephyr Press.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Aviva-No<\/em><\/a> by Shimon Adaf, translated from the Hebrew by Yael Segalovitz (Alice James Books)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Shimon Adaf\u2019s first two collections of poetry\u2014The Monologue of Icarus<\/em> and What I Thought was Shadow is the Real Body<\/em>\u2014were published in 1997 and 2002 to wide acclaim, establishing him as one of his generation\u2019s most exciting writers. From there, Adaf pivoted to prose, publishing short stories and novels in a range of genres, from detective fiction to sci-fi, and appeared to have put poetry behind him. But then, in 2008, his beloved, older sister Aviva died. Her death was sudden and unexpected\u2014\u201cthe heart is arrested and named mere breath\u201d\u2014and in the months that followed, he was drawn back to poetry. In an interview with Adaf, part of a podcast I produced on poetry of crisis<\/a>, he described this turn as a search for his own language of grief: \u201cI had to find out my rituals, my language, and the only way that I can do it is starting when there is no language. And I think that poetry always starts with no language at all.\u201d From \u201cno language\u201d the poems of Aviva-lo<\/em> took form.<\/p>\n

Yael Segalovitz\u2019s translation Aviva-No<\/em> was published late last year by Alice James Books, but rereading it now in this time of pandemic, I am struck by the timeliness of this collection, how the personal crisis that Adaf explores\u2014in a book first published in 2009\u2014speaks so clearly to the crisis of this current moment (maybe poetry of crisis is always of the moment?). In the days and months after Aviva\u2019s death, the speaker\/Adaf reflects on how \u201cthe whole world has broken so\u201d (Poem 19). Across its 43 poems\u2014the number of Aviva\u2019s years\u2014Aviva-No<\/em> considers the capacity of poetry to open up a space where our dead may live on, while acknowledging how grief disorients our relation to place, to language, to our own living bodies.<\/p>\n

Adaf\u2019s speaker welcomes the pain of grief and even dreads losing it. In the first line of Poem 24, we come upon the declaration \u201cmy heart, don\u2019t cease in sorrow\u201d (Poem 24).\u00a0 Grief is experienced in the mind and body. The physical pain of grief embodies our dead, and so long as we grieve, they remain with us, in us. Poetry is a kind of scratching at this wound, as described further on this poem: \u201cpinch, scratch them some, so that abscess will emerge\/\u2026\/thus I shall not let slip between my hands\/ a sister into time.\u201d Even though \u201cabscess\u201d and \u201ccease\u201d are not etymologically connected in English, or in Hebrew, I want to highlight here how the English \u201cabscess\u201d carries the \u201ccess\u201d of \u201ccessation,\u201d thereby linking to the \u201ccease\u201d of the first line of the poem. This is one of many instances in this collection where Segalovitz seizes an opportunity to allow her English to thread its own linguistic relations in the space of grief.<\/p>\n

The collection unfolds over the course of the first year of Jewish mourning, and in both the Hebrew original and English translation, the months of the Jewish lunisolar calendar are indicated by their Hebrew names. In addition to these references, Hebrew terms for flora and Jewish prayers and rituals appear throughout the translation. Segalovitz\u2019s introduction offers a summary of this material, but otherwise, this Hebrew (and sometimes Aramaic), occasionally italicized, appears without explanation (the book includes no glossary or endnotes). This may not be an issue for readers versed in Judaism and the Hebrew language, but for other readers, words like Tevet (the month corresponding to December\/January), sheizava (from the Sephardic version of the Kaddish<\/em> prayer), Rephaim (an ancient race of giants mentioned in the Hebrew bible) infuse this text like words from an ancient myth or a work of fantasy. Lines in Arabic are transliterated and italicized, but you would need to know what they mean to know whether or not the subsequent lines in Hebrew or English offer a gloss or translation. These multilingual moments, particularly when left unexplained and untranslated, can be unsettling and disruptive, allowing for a personal language of grief to take shape beyond traditional prayers or stock phrases of consolation. These instances also call attention to the texture of this language. Where Adaf\u2019s polyphonic Hebrew creates these effects through neologisms, punning, and onomatopoeia, Segalovitz turns to alliteration, homophony, assonance, and consonance. In poem 4, for example, sibilance knits together a vivid sequence of images: \u201csparrows and bleeding wrens\/ sap seeping out of balsam trees\/ frozen as glass, shining\/ as a plastic scarf.\u201d This line from Poem 19 is a particularly outstanding solution to Adaf\u2019s wordplay in the Hebrew: \u201cthe end<\/em> of time has wakened<\/em>\u201d (my emphasis).<\/p>\n

Adaf\u2019s sister introduced him to the works of Jane Austen, Sherlock Holmes, and the songs of Patti Smith, all of whom make appearances in Aviva-No<\/em>. Translating the collection into English underscores these relations, but it also requires that the translator wrestle with a very particular challenge\u2014specifically, how to translate a poem that is already in English. Poem 28 is an English-language poem transliterated in Hebrew letters (a technique also used by the poet Admiel Kosman in his collection Approaching You in English<\/em><\/a>). When English is rendered in Hebrew script distortions in pronunciation inevitably occur, but rather than produce a phonetic version that would replicate the way English sounds in Hebrew, Segalovitz recasts most of the poem in \u201cstandard\u201d English. But as we read this poem in Roman script, we encounter a few words that feel a bit out of place: \u201cay em def\u201d (I am deaf) becomes \u201cI am deft\u201d, \u201ckeri der do\u2019oters\u201d (carry their daughters) appears as the slightly Germanic \u201ccarry der doters,\u201d also suggesting the figure of a \u201cdoting daughter\u201d (a reference to King Lear<\/em>). Deploying these disruptions sparingly, Segalovitz avoids turning this technique into a gimmick; instead, she highlights startling double meanings in Adaf\u2019s Hebraized English, like the poem\u2019s final words, \u201caz yu go bay\u201d (as you go by), which become, in her poignant English, \u201cas you go bye.\u201d<\/p>\n

Poem 26 opens with a simple, heartbreaking truth: \u201cForty-three years old, you are the woman you will always be.\u201d There are no more poems beyond this number, but by shaping the collection around the Jewish calendar, the cycle repeats again, creating an orbit of time that keeps Aviva close. Judaism discourages the living from making frequent visits to the graves of their dead. There are many possible reasons for this, among them ancient prohibitions against worshiping the dead, but also because the living must continue with their lives, untethered from the dead, and the dead also must release their attachments to the living if they are to move on.<\/p>\n

Throughout the collection, Adaf resists letting go of Aviva, a resistance that recalls the work of the Hebrew poet Avot Yeshurun (1904-1992)\u2014whose presence is felt throughout these poems. \u201c[B]y by the power of my yearnings\/ I am in the family.\/ And if I will not yearn,\/ I am not in the family,\u201d writes Yeshurun in \u201cMemories are a House<\/a>\u201d (trans. Leon Wieseltier), a poem that considers how long memory can hold a family and a home together. If it is the memories of the living that keep the dead in the orbit of life, what happens when we the living inevitably die? Can a poem house our dead, and eventually us\u2014keeping us in life\u2019s orbit through the various readings and translations that poems undergo? These are questions that Adaf\u2019s collection raises, but its translation into English offers the possibility of an expanded orbit, one that pulls in other works that I see in conversation with these poems, like Anne Carson\u2019s Nox<\/em>\u2014also a work about a sibling\u2019s death, memory, and translation\u2014as well as Diana Khoi Nguyen\u2019s Ghost Of<\/em><\/a> and Valerie Mejer Caso\u2019s Edinburgh Notebook<\/em><\/a> (forthcoming from Action Books in Michelle Gil-Montero\u2019s translation).<\/p>\n

Poem 26 closes with the line \u201cpachot basar mi-zikaron,\u201d less flesh than memory. Memory lives on, superseding the body, but Segalovitz\u2019s translation inverts the formula, \u201cmore memory than flesh.\u201d This inversion proposes translation as a kind of insurance against \u201ccessation.\u201d Translation converting less into more, multiplying grief, but also multiplying Aviva, like the stars and galaxies of an expanding universe, \u201cramming against the void.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2020 Best Translated Book Awards.\u00a0 Adriana X. Jacobs is the author of Strange Cocktail: Translation and the Making of Modern Hebrew Literature (University of Michigan, 2018) and associate professor of modern Hebrew literature at the University of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":423572,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67476],"tags":[70932,46676,70902,70912,37876,70922],"class_list":["post-432192","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-best-translated-book-awards","tag-adriana-x-jacobs","tag-alice-james-books","tag-aviva-no","tag-shimon-adaf","tag-why-this-book-should-win","tag-yael-segalovitz"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/432192","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=432192"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/432192\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":432232,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/432192\/revisions\/432232"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/423572"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=432192"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=432192"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=432192"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}