I'm definitely intrigued by parent-child relationships – how we are shaped by our parents, how we accept and rebel and accept and rebel, how often we run as far as we can from our mothers and fathers only to smash right back into them, like children running circles in a forest. My characters have histories, which I always plumb, and whether or not I ultimately include what I learn about their parents and grandparents, I feel that I myself need to know where they came from in order to understand who they are and what decisions they will make.
Once I was grilling a novelist friend about her family. She knew very little about them and I found that astonishing. Then suddenly I realized that her five or six fine novels were bereft of family histories. Her characters are all very much of the present. Mine carry the past on their shoulders.
As a translator and a novelist can you speak to how the two different skills draw on you creatively?
When I'm working on the translation of a very fine novel -- and I have had the privilege of working almost exclusively on those in the past few years -- then the parts of my brain and soul that I use are very close to the parts I muster for writing. It's the same creative excitement, the same feeling of discovery. For the very best of them I am pushed to my limits to come up with fresh new idioms and images. But there is a price to pay for this: so far I have been unable to translate and write during the same period of time. It's one or the other.
Have you translated your own work, or has it been translated by someone else?
I cannot and will not ever be able to translate my own work. As good as my Hebrew is, I came to the language too late for it to feel natural when I write in it. And if I can't write in Hebrew, I can't translate.
As a child I was terribly jealous of people who were exposed to more than one language and could speak them with ease. I was sorry I hadn't been born in Europe, where I was certain I would have spoken three languages by the age of ten. But in the end, I'm thankful that now, as a writer and translator, I know a smattering of languages but have one that will always stand out, one that will always be richer and deeper than all the others and will always feel like the most home of homes. English will always be the language into which I translate and in which I write.
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