Translating Women Writers: Language, Politics, and Aesthetics

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Abstract

This roundtable will look at questions of sexual and racial difference in the history and practice of translating women. All five panelists are working translators in Jewish languages and grapple with the complex gendered and racial histories of these languages. We will discuss how these histories intersect with translation, and how they relate also to our target language: English. Gaining access to English, is a lifeline for living writers to reach an international audience, and it allows for historical writers to enter into literary canons. Jessica Kirzane will discuss her work as a translator of Yiddish literature by women writers such as Miriam Karpilove, Yenta Serdatsky, and Rokhl Luria. In particular she will consider the gender politics in translations of texts deemed popular or middlebrow, as well as how incorporating such writers into her teaching and scholarship has reoriented her understandings of Yiddish literature as a whole. Adriana X. Jacobs will discuss her translation of Vaan Nguyen’s The Truffle Eye (Zephyr Press) in the context of current debates—both in Israel and globally—on the gender and racial politics of translation. Her comments will also address the ambivalent status of translation as scholarship in academia. Aviya Kushner will discuss her translation of Yudit Shahar and Rina Soffer, with a focus on the pleasures and perils of translating poets from marginalized backgrounds. She will also consider expectations of femininity, as well as the assumption that Israeli poets will write about geopolitics. Allison Schachter will discuss her translation of the Yiddish modernist writer, Fradl Shtok, and the sexual politics of American Yiddish literary history. She is also interested in Jewish translation and nationalism. Bryan Roby is working on a project on Blackness in Israel with a focus on queer and Black-identified Israeli poets from the Mizrahi and Beta Israel communities, including Adi Keissar and Jenet Belay. Our moderator, Maya Barzilai, is working on Leah Goldberg’s translations of Rosa Luxemburg. She will engage the shared questions among all of our work and her own overlapping interest in gender and translation.

Sub Unit

• Gender & Sexuality Studies

Discussants

• Jessica Anne Kirzane, The University of Chicago

• Bryan Karle Roby, University of Michigan