Strange Cocktail: Translation and the Making of Modern Hebrew Poetry (Michigan Studies In Comparative Jewish Cultures)
For centuries, poets have turned to translation for creative inspiration. Through and in translation, poets have introduced new poetic styles, languages, and forms into their own writing, sometimes changing the course of literary history in the process. Strange Cocktail is the first comprehensive study of this phenomenon in modern Hebrew literature of the late nineteenth century to the present day. Its chapters on Esther Raab, Leah Goldberg, Avot Yeshurun, and Harold Schimmel offer close readings that examine the distinct poetics of translation that emerge from reciprocal practices of writing and translating. Working in a minor literary vernacular, the translation strategies that these poets employed allowed them to create and participate in transnational and multilingual poetic networks. Strange Cocktail thereby advances a comparative and multilingual reframing of modern Hebrew literature that considers how canons change and are undone when translation occupies a central position—how lines of influence and affiliation are redrawn and literary historiographies are revised when the work of translation occupies the same status as an original text, when translating and writing go hand in hand.
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Adriana X. Jacobs is Associate Professor of Modern Hebrew Literature and a Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies and St. Cross College. She is also on the steering group of the research program Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation (TORCH/St. Anne’s College). She holds a BA from The College of William and Mary and a PhD in Comparative Literature from Princeton University, where she specialized in modern Hebrew literature, comparative poetics, and translation theory. She has taught courses on translation, modern Hebrew and Israeli literature, Latin American Jewish literature at Yale, the Jewish Theological Seminary, and Hofstra University.
Strange Cocktail: Translation and the Making of Modern Hebrew Poetry, proposes a translation-centered reading of modern Hebrew poetry and its development. Additionally, her articles and book chapters on Hebrew and Israeli poetry have appeared in Shofar, Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History, Studies in American Jewish Literature, Choosing Yiddish: New Frontiers of Language and Culture (2013, Wayne State UP), Narratives of Dissent: War in Contemporary Israeli Arts and Culture (2012, Wayne State UP), and the The Blackwell Companion to Translation Studies (2014, Blackwell Publishing). She is also a contributor to Words Without Borders and Haaretz.
Jacobs is one of the co-editors of Minding Borders: Resilient Divisions in Literature, the Body and the Academy (Oxford: Legenda, October 2016) and co-editor (with Matthew Reynolds) of Prismatic Translation (Oxford: Legenda, forthcoming). With Glenda Abramson, she is co-editing an updated edition of the Oxford Anthology of the Hebrew Short Story (Vallentine Mitchell).
Her translations of the American Hebrew poet Annabelle Farmelant appear in Women’s Hebrew Poetry on American Shores: Poems by Anne Kleiman and Annabelle Farmelant (2015, Wayne State UP). Additional translations of Hebrew poetry have appeared in various print and online venues, including Zeek, Metamorphoses, Truck, and Poetry International, Gulf Coast Magazine and The Ilanot Review. She is the 2015 recipient of a PEN/Heim Translation Grant for her translation of Vaan Nguyen’s The Truffle Eye.
If you would like to publicize your translation-related event at Yale, please contact Harold Augenbraum at translation@yale.edu.
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