Abstract:

In the early decades of the twentieth century, as the European literary enclaves of Hebrew literature began to move and consolidate their operations in Palestine, translation reinforced its status as a major, indispensable component of modern Hebrew literary production. In this talk, I will discuss the Hebrew translation economy in Mandatory Palestine and specifically address the role that the translation of poetry played in the development of Hebrew as a national literary language. Drawing my examples from the 1942 anthology, Shirat rusiya (Russian Poetry), I will show how Hebrew poet-translators engaged literary translation as a mode that simultaneously supported and unsettled the nation-building project.

About the speaker:

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). Her book, Strange Cocktail:Translation and the Making of Modern Hebrew Poetry, was just published by Michigan University Press.