What someone writes clearly says a lot about a person. And so do the books one chooses to translate. For Israeli books that make it abroad to an English-speaking audience, an important and sometimes overlooked subset of Israeli literary society is the translators themselves.<\/p>\n
Himself an accomplished author based in Chicago (his newest book is a young adult novel called Me Being Me is Exactly as Insane as You Being You<\/em>), as a translator, Todd Hasak-Lowy sees it as his mission to bring excellent and innovative literature to English speakers. Motti <\/em>by Asaf Schurr (which also includes an afterword by Hasak-Lowy) is a good example. \u201cYou could change 30 words of it and you wouldn\u2019t know it\u2019s an Israeli book. It challenges what people think of about Israeliness. That\u2019s a book I want Americans to read because it\u2019s great Hebrew literature, someone who\u2019s a product of that society, but it\u2019s not Amos Oz.\u201d<\/p>\n As an American who never made Israel his permanent home, Hasak-Lowy spent a year in Israel after high school, took some Hebrew in college, and then pinned himself to a seat in the library in graduate school deepening his Hebrew knowledge, before spending some additional time in the country. \u201cWhen I graduated high school, I knew around 300 Hebrew words from summer camp; when I got to grad school, I was able to crawl through an early [A.B.] Yehoshua novel over 30 months,\u201d and now he\u2019s a sought-after translator who thinks carefully about which projects he seeks to take on.<\/p>\n Haim Watzman is a translator\u2019s name I had long known, staring at me from the inside front page of some of the most formative books I read about Israel when I was younger, including David Grossman\u2019s first two non-fiction books, The Yellow Wind<\/em> and Sleeping on a Wire<\/em>. The first in-depth look at the Palestinian experience of being under Israeli military occupation, The Yellow Wind<\/em> brought the Palestinian narrative to an Israeli \u2013 and then to a worldwide \u2013 audience; Grossman\u2019s follow-on treatment of Palestinian citizens of Israel was similarly path-breaking.<\/p>\n Watzman and I spoke by Skype, as he and his wife, Ilana, prepared to celebrate their 30th wedding anniversary with a trip to the Netherlands. In talking to Watzman about politics, style, culture and translation, there are some technical points I was reminded of. First, English translations of Hebrew books tend to run about 30% longer. The economics of this for publishers can be daunting, so sometimes translators suggest editorial cuts. Second, because of the gendered nature of the language, Hebrew can afford both more passive tense and longer, meandering sentences. As Hebrew writers have become accustomed to using the passive voice that English writers now eschew as being a bad habit, translators have to take on an editing role: fact-checking and at times asking the writer \u201cwho\u201d did what, exactly? And as for long, drawn-out sentences, English readers prefer theirs short and breezy.<\/p>\n About The Yellow Wind<\/em>, Watzman describes it as his \u201crookie\u201d assignment, which he was fortunate to land. As an undergraduate at Duke University, Watzman had written a thesis on Palestinian citizens of Israel, and as a correspondent for the Chronicle of Higher Education<\/em> covering Palestinian colleges in the West Bank, he felt it important to bring the Palestinian story abroad. And while he\u2019s careful to insist that these are the author\u2019s works, not his own, today he says he\u2019d do some things differently in the translation. Though he thinks \u201cthe translation came out fine \u2013 the public loved it; the editors loved it,\u201d he says he \u201cwas more deferential then. I\u2019d probably be more demanding of the author today, in terms of needling him for clarifications and suggestions.\u201d Stylistically, he pushed to change Grossman\u2019s present tense to the past, and he chose to keep some Arabic terms in the English translation.<\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t until years later and subsequent translation gigs \u2013 including Grossman\u2019s (and other authors\u2019) political petitions published in newspapers \u2013 that Grossman finally asked him whether he agrees with the thrust of his political messages. For the most part, Watzman does.<\/p>\n I couldn\u2019t help but be intrigued by the fact that Watzman leans left-liberal while being Orthodox in his religious outlook. (His Twitter profile photo, for example, is a sketch of Grossman working with Watzman, the latter\u2019s kippa dominating the foreground.) Watzman explains that he came to religious observance \u201cgradually,\u201d having been \u201cvery taken by Shabbat and the intellectual component, including the debate over texts.\u201d Two things \u201cdidn\u2019t work for him,\u201d however: orthodoxy\u2019s attitude towards women, and the tendency within the Orthodox community towards right-wing politics. \u201cI wasn\u2019t going to give up my political principles for religion.\u201d In Jerusalem\u2019s Baka neighborhood, Watzman eventually found a like-minded community called Kehilat Yedidya.<\/p>\n And, while Watzman is committed to liberal democracy and human rights, he is no pacifist. Having tragically lost his son Niot in a military accident four years ago, Watzman tells me how he understands the military to be a necessity. Yet, while \u201cIsrael has to be vigilant and defend itself,\u201d the country should be searching for peace through \u201caccommodation and understanding.\u201d He believes that \u201cyou can be both a Jewish nationalist and a liberal humanist. Not only is it possible, it is essential.\u201d One could say that reading Israeli books, including new literature as well as the kind of searing non-fiction works that Grossman, Tom Segev and others have produced, captures this dualism perfectly: a nation committed to writing in its own land in its own language, while keeping tough questions in the foreground.<\/p>\n