One day I hope to see my own works translated into Hebrew and other languages. I look forward to being involved in that process, much as I have sat and pondered words and sentences with the authors I've translated.
What is the biggest challenge of translation?
Voice. I'm always obsessed with voice. Each piece has its voice, and when I begin a new translation I wonder how I'll find the comparable voice in English once again. It means becoming somewhat of a ventriloquist, really. Mostly I feel I've found it each time, in each new book, but there was one project I stopped very early on because it was clear to me at once that this voice was so far from my own experience and style that I was simply the wrong person to take it on. I could never have rendered it in a convincing and honest manner.
Your bio indicated you've lived in Japan, Switzerland, Paris and Israel. Just how many languages do you speak? Have you translated in all of them?
When he was a little boy, my younger son used to add a language each time he told someone how many languages his daddy spoke. I put a stop to it at fifteen! In truth, after English I speak a good Hebrew, a very decent French, barely adequate Spanish and miserable Portuguese and Japanese. I translate only from Hebrew to English. Even with French I feel I would miss too many cultural references and have had too little exposure to French literature to be able to knead a text into another language. Anyway, I'm lucky – modern Israeli literature has come into its own, with a huge variety of voices and styles and stories, so I'm at no loss for wildly interesting work.
It is quite a challenge to write a love scene and find the balance between realism and tasteful without falling into graphic, yet you manage to render them artfully in Light Fell. Do you have any tips for those of us who struggle with this?
First of all: thank you thank you thank you. Writing about love is terrifying, because what can you possibly have to say that hasn't been said, and how can you render in words what leaves you absolutely speechless? But there it is, that most awesome, riveting, inspiring, humiliating emotion of them all, which wanders its way into every good book and every good life. There's no getting around it, and no reason to get around it other than fear.
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