Strange Cocktail: Translation and the Making of Modern Hebrew Poetry by Adriana X. Jacobs

Abstract

Reviewed by: Strange Cocktail: Translation and the Making of Modern Hebrew Poetry by Adriana X. Jacobs Roni Henig Adriana X. Jacobs. Strange Cocktail: Translation and the Making of Modern Hebrew Poetry. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018. 344 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009419001065 In recent years, Hebrew literary scholarship has become increasingly engaged with the multilingual layers of Hebrew literature and the ways in which multilingualism, as a condition of modern Jewish life, played a constitutive role in its formation. The question of linguistic diversity and the growing awareness of the traces of a variety of languages in the fabric of Hebrew have sparked discussions that pertain to such pressing issues as the politics of language, the place of Hebrew within global and transnational networks, and its affinity to world literature. In Strange Cocktail: Translation and the Making of Modern Hebrew Poetry, Adriana X. Jacobs joins these scholarly efforts by positioning translation as a focal point for understanding Hebrew poetry and its essentially translational poetics. Strange Cocktail, which offers a series of "translation-centered" readings of Hebrew and Israeli poetry, argues that translation is enacted in Hebrew poetry as a creative mechanism repeatedly employed by poets in their own writing. The figure of the translator-poet is posited at the center of this inquiry, and Jacobs skillfully shows how in the work of several major Hebrew poets, translation functions as a generative practice that infuses their writing with new, often unexpected joints, thereby creating new legacies and traditions within a supposedly set and delineated cultural realm. "The poet-translator," Jacobs argues, "occupies the hinge (or hinges) where a narrative turns towards new possibilities, and also where it turns back in an act of revision" (22). It is this range of new possibilities and relations that the book seeks to unravel, through its dynamic readings of the works of four Hebrew poets: Esther Raab, Leah Goldberg, Avot Yeshurun, and Harold Schimmel. The book chapters, which are organized around each of these poets, are abundant with references to additional sources, including works of French, Italian, German, Russian, and American literature. Jacobs's reading weaves an incredibly rich net of associations, generating a fluid yet delicate movement between times, languages, and cultures, in a manner that carries the sensibilities of a poet-translator (indeed, performs a translational poetics) into her own prose. After providing a brief historical contextualization of the ways in which translation was perceived and practiced in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Hebrew literature, Jacobs moves on to examining the work of poet Esther Raab and her unpublished translations of Charles Baudelaire. In this groundbreaking chapter, Jacobs confronts the traditional reception of Raab, who has often been seen as the first native Hebrew poet, with her multilingualism and the cosmopolitan affiliations that stir her writing. She compellingly shows how Raab's first poetry collection, Kimshonim, was shaped by her engagement with Baudelaire's text. That engagement, along with Raab's experiences of living in Cairo and frequently visiting Europe, Jacobs argues, allowed her to both break away from the poetic norms of her generation and assert the then-privileged status of an immigrant destined to resettle in the promised land. Jacobs's meticulous reading of Raab's poems in light of her emulation of the transformative immigrant position, reveals not only [End Page 212] the tensions that inhere in her assumed "nativeness," but also the centrality of translation to the construction of nativity in Hebrew literary imagination. The following chapter, which focuses on the work of Leah Goldberg, further explores how translation might blur the borders between "native" and "foreign." In her reading of one of Goldberg's most canonical poems, "'Oren," Jacobs shows that the poem's iconic pine tree is fundamentally a figure of translation, which travels and reappears in a variety of poems written across changing cultural contexts, from Heine to Lermontov. "The figure of the pine is transplanted—indeed, translated—over time, and ultimately read as a native element within the new linguistic and cultural contexts in which it is received" (113). Like the pine, a foreign remnant received as native, translation is reworked in Goldberg's poetry into a mode of writing, which she cultivates...