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December 2010/Tevet 5771
A JOURNAL OF JEWISH RESPONSIBILITY
Translation
Todd Hasak-Lowy
The Fear of Getting it
Wrong, the Sound
of Getting it Right . . . . . 1
Joel Hecker
Text, God, and Life
in Translation . . . . . . . . 2
Yehuda Kurtzer
Translation without
Representation . . . . . . . 3
Barbara Mann
The Geniza and Me . . . . 5
Sara Hurwitz
Prayer: Serving
a Purpose. . . . . . . . . . . 6
Discussion Guide. . . . . . 6
Tova Mirvis &
Josh Rolnick
An Illusion of
Seamlessness . . . . . . . . 7
Irene Eber
Sholem Aleichem
in Chinese?. . . . . . . . . . 9
Eli Valley, Corinne
Pearlman, Ilana Zeffren
NiSh’ma ........... 10
Maya Arad &
Adriana X. Jacobs
Another Voice:
Letters on the Art
of Translation . . . . . . . 12
Naomi Seidman
Meet the Makhatonim:
Understanding
Ashkenazic Kinship . . . 14
Or N. Rose
Around the Maggid’s
Table: Translating
Black Letters and
White Spaces. . . . . . . . 15
Mikhail Krutikov
Memory Is Inseparable
from Imagination . . . . 16
Karen Paul-Stern
Sh’maEthics . . . . . . . 20
s an editor, I’m engaged constantly, in one way or another, in translation; so are all the writ-
ers — rabbis, academics, novelists, critics — in this issue. By translation, we mean a few
different things: the act of rendering a work from one language to another — and the act
of negotiating the relationship, rarely straightforward, between author and translator. It also
means, as Joel Hecker writes, “transforming something from one state of being to another.”
This issue of Sh’ma includes a wide-ranging conversation between two writers — Sh’ma pub-
lisher Josh Rolnick and novelist Tova Mirvis — as they explore the magical transmutation of life
into a page of fiction. Naomi Seidman looks at the domestic implications of an untranslatable
Yiddish word. Mikhail Krutikov evaluates the literary career of a Russian Jew writing in Israel.
Yehuda Kurtzer, Sara Hurwitz, and Barbara Mann take the temperature in a room of scholars and
rabbis: How does the work of rabbis — who strive to translate religion and culture into sustain-
able and meaningful forces in our lives — resonate with the work of academics, who have an in-
trinsic interest in Judaism, but who have no interest, per se, in “meaning”? And, Or Rose sits us
down at the table of his teacher, Arthur Green, as he and several colleagues translate for a con-
temporary audience the work of the Hasidic Maggid, Dov Baer.
As a people, Jews have experienced life in a multitude of languages and cultures. In this
issue, and in the pages of Sh’ma every month, we translate the traditions and teachings of
Judaism into a meaningful discourse for ourselves and the peoples around us —S.B.
A
The Fear of Getting it Wrong,
the Sound of Getting it Right
TODD HASAK-LOWY
The moment I sat down as a translator, opened the book for which I was now re- sponsible — Asaf Schurr’s Hebrew novel
Motti — and read the first sentence, I suddenly
realized, with more than a bit of anxiety, that I
had no idea what I was doing.
Now I was, as far as first-time translators go,
at least theoretically qualified. I had to my name
a doctorate in Hebrew literature and two published books of fiction. The languages, narrowly
speaking, weren’t the problem. But as I read and
reread that first sentence, I became aware of
how infinite was my task — not because this
novel is particularly long (it isn’t) or unusually
complicated (it’s not), but because each sentence presented dozens of opportunities for me
to make the absolutely wrong decision.
I feared I would make the wrong decision
because I believed that making the right deci-
sion was a clear impossibility. I was drawn to
this text because I sensed Schurr had done
something new in Hebrew — not necessary rev-
olutionary, but something wonderfully distinct,
something I knew was distinct precisely be-
cause I couldn’t define it as anything but dif-
ferent. I couldn’t simply name or classify this
distinctness and then move on. So my job as a
translator was, I felt, to somehow render this
distinctness in English, even though I didn’t
know what it was.
