Lunch Lecture Series: Translating Jewish literature

Lunch Lecture Series

Translating Jewish literature: Text, Context, Subtext

Co-hosted with the Russian and Slavic Studies Program

Modern Hebrew literature is composed of layers. It grew out of what may be referred to as ‘The Jewish Library,’ that is, such texts as the Bible, the Talmud, Midrashim, the Liturgy, the Haskalah movement of the last couple hundred years, and the large body of translated literature. In its richest manifestations (e.g., the works of S.Y.Agnon), resonances of that textual wealth can be discerned. Yet, the creative impulse was in transforming the contexts and subtexts of those works to serve a different (i.e., modern) purpose.

BARBARA HARSHAV began her professional career as a History professor. In the late 1970s, she fell into translation and has been in that field pretty much ever since. She has translated works of literature, history, philosophy, sociology and economics. Since she began, she has published over fifty books and numerous articles and essays from Yiddish, French, German and Hebrew. For several years, she taught a course in the problems of translation in the Comparative Literature at Yale University; for the last two summers she has taught translation in the summer program at YIVO in New York.