Jewish Literary Links for Shabbat
Shabbat shalom.
Posts Tagged‘Translation’
From My Bookshelf: The Property, by Rutu Modan (trans. Jessica Cohen)
These days, motivated in part by space constraints (I live in a New York City apartment and I’ve run out of bookshelves), and in part by financial ones, I think very hard before I buy a book. Generally speaking, I depend on libraries for many of the books that I don’t receive as review copies. And when I do buy a book, I’m often inclined to purchase the Kindle version.
All of this a preface of sorts. Because something unusual happened a few days ago. I began reading Rutu Modan’s latest book, The Property. Translated by Jessica Cohen, this graphic novel depicts a grandmother-granddaughter pair on a journey from Israel to the grandmother’s native Poland, ostensibly to investigate the reclamation of the grandmother’s former home. About two minutes into my reading, I knew that this book was something special. And even though I read the entire book in one setting, I knew that I’d want to read it again. Maybe more than once. Maybe even after it was due back in the library. So I’ve gone ahead and purchased a copy of my own: a print copy.
In short, I loved this book. But instead of writing a more complete review/description/analysis of my own, I’m going to point you to some illuminating items that are already available online. (I’ll also note that, to date, several of the five-star Goodreads reviews that I’ve read echo my own impressions.) I hope that these materials will help convince you to spend some time with The Property, too:
Finally, as a bonus of sorts, you might want to read through Modan’s account of “a week in culture” for The Paris Review (trans. Sivan Ben-Horin).
From My Bookshelf: To Sing Away the Darkest Days by Norbert Hirschhorn
Published by Holland Park Press, To Sing Away the Darkest Days: Poems Re-imagined from Yiddish Folksongs “is the culmination of a five-year project which saw Norbert Hirschhorn source more than one thousand Yiddish songs from several archives and from collections on the Internet, as well as from CDs.” I learned about this book through a post that the publisher contributed to the Jewish Book Carnival Goodreads group, and when I received an offer of a review copy, I accepted.
The book’s first half is devoted to Hirschhorn’s “re-imaginings” (his term) of the old Yiddish songs. Some source material is likely to be familiar to many readers: “Mayn Yidishe Mame” and “Rozhinkes Mit Mandlen,” for instance. But plenty of Hirschhorn’s inspiration comes from material that I hadn’t encountered before.
Beginning on page 57, the book’s focus turns to “Sources, transliterations, literal translations, [and] links to music.” Starting with the book’s first poem and proceeding anew to the last, the reader finds a transliteration of each song’s original Yiddish text, a literal translation into English, historical background and notes, and, where possible, links to audio or video. I’m still trying to decide if I might have preferred having all of this information directly follow each of the poems instead; the format selected requires a lot of flipping back and forth for the reader who wants edification as she goes along, poem by poem.
In any case, Hirschhorn has done something wonderful here, and I encourage readers interested in Yiddish language and literature (as well as in poetry itself) to investigate. I’ll even recommend a place to start: Hirschhorn’s publisher has created a page with links to some of the songs behind the poems. Go over there, and enjoy.
Jewish Literary Links for Shabbat
Shabbat shalom.
Monday Markets for Writers
Monday brings the weekly batch of no-fee competitions/contests, paying submission calls, and jobs for those of us who write (especially those of us who write fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction). (more…)