Home Tongue Earthquake: Translating Translingual Rupture in the Work of Avot Yeshurun

• In Event: Graduate Student Lightning Session: Modern American Jewish History

Abstract

This paper examines the translingual resistant poetics of the Hebrew writer, Avot Yeshurun, through a lens of translation. Yeshurun’s work, I argue, demands a highly subversive translational means of reading, resisting official modes of fluency, and pivoting at every measure against the grain of standard language. This is not a matter of breakage (to use a term of Yeshurun’s) of modern Hebrew only— but Yiddish, Polish, Arabic, Aramaic, mishnaic-, and biblical Hebrew, as well. Modern Hebrew serves as the semi-permeable host—a hostile, though pervious coast—upon which the waves of language lash: “all the streams return to the streams” writes Yeshurun, breaking the Ecclesiastes.

I will be reading and exploring Yeshurun’s 1971 Bialik Prize speech, “m’mi lakakhti reshut” (from whom did I take permission), in particular—a fierce ars poetica that challenges the very foundations upon which modern Hebrew language stands, and is understood, until this very day. I have recently completed a translation of this piece to be published in the Jewish Diaspora section of GLOBAL MODERNISTS ON MODERNISM (Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2018), an anthology of multilingual modernist source-texts; and my talk will be accompanied by an annotated reading of this translation, in hopes of cohabiting the work’s insistent and resistant translational discursive space. It is my contention that Yeshurun’s poetics enacts a continual translational (seismic) event—always in the midst of code-switching as a mode of sociolinguistic rupture— which unfolds most erratically and most radically in the translingual margins of language flux.

For the past five years I have been translating Yeshurun’s writings, toward the first long-form selected volume of his work in English. I read and presented on this work last summer at the National Association of Professors of Hebrew assembly at NYU, and last spring at UC Irvine, for a conference on “Translating the Unbearable”; this coming summer I have been invited to read and give a talk on my translations of Yeshurun at the European Institute of Hebrew Studies annual conference at Paris 8 University. It would be my honor and pleasure to present on this work at the 2018 Association for Jewish Studies conference in Boston.

Author

• Ariel Resnikoff, University of Pennsylvania