On Merging Humor With the Bleak: An Interview w/ Jessica Cohen
Jessica Cohen is an independent translator born in England, raised in Israel, and living in Denver. She translates contemporary Hebrew prose and other creative work. In 2017, she shared the Man Booker International Prize with David Grossman, for her translation of A Horse Walks Into a Bar. She has also translated works by major Israeli writers including Amos Oz, Etgar Keret, Ronit Matalon and Maya Arad. She is the recipient of National Endowment for the Arts and Guggenheim fellowships.
Her translation of Yael Neeman’s “Infertility” was featured in our Spring/Summer 2017 issue.
Jamie Kahn: In what ways was 'Infertility' different from some of your other translation projects? What initially drew you in about the story? About Neeman's writing?
Jessica Cohen: Every literary translation project is different, each text poses its own challenges. “Fertility” is the first story in Yael Neeman’s 2013 collection, The Option (in Hebrew: Ktovet Esh), and I knew as soon as I read it that I wanted to translate not just this story, but anything by Yael. I was struck by the deceptively restrained, unemotional tone. The first-person narrator depicts a wrenching, emotionally charged experience (the attempt to conceive through IVF) in a quiet, almost matter-of-fact way. She is a keen-eyed observer, who portrays her own experiences and emotional responses with the same detachment she applies to describing the décor in the fertility clinics. But beneath the surface, we can sense a volcano of anger, resentment, and sadness, which we know will have to erupt, as indeed it does.
What in the original text did you find particularly important to bring into the translation? What qualities were you itching to preserve?
In addition to the muted tone, I also wanted to retain the original’s very dark humor and the persistent frustration and hopelessness experienced by the characters, who can never really see themselves joining the ranks of happy couples with smiling babies. I think this sensibility characterizes a lot of Hebrew writing: the story is brutally honest about the fact that, sometimes in life, there is no happy ending. Or, in fact, no ending at all, but rather a trudging along. Although there are emotional highs and lows in this story, there is no real redemption, no lessons to be learned.
What are some of the most notable differences between English and Hebrew literature in your experience?
As I mentioned, there is often a bleakness that permeates Hebrew fiction, and certainly a much darker sense of humor, a lot of sarcasm and irony, as well as self-deprecation. These are less prevalent in most English writing, and I’ve had the experience of reading from my translations (or being at Israeli writers’ readings) in front of a U.S. audience, and realizing that they are uncomfortable laughing at some of the jokes. Holocaust jokes, for example, which few Israelis would be offended by, do not usually go over well with English-language readers.
Is there a current translation project you're working on at the moment that you're particularly excited about?
I’ve been working for longer than I care to admit on my translation of Rose of Lebanon, a fictionalized memoir by Leah Aini. It’s a monumental novel—in both scope and importance—and I knew before I began that it would be a huge undertaking, but it’s been even more challenging than I expected. Aini is a prolific writer who tackles a variety of controversial and emotionally charged subjects in her writing, and her Hebrew is quite idiosyncratic. Translating her means finding a correspondingly intricate and challenging English prose style, and it feels as if I need to circle around every sentence multiple times until I capture the right tone and structure. But I am finally approaching completion, and I hope to soon have a manuscript to show potential publishers.
I’m also about to start translating Yaniv Iczkovits’s latest book, The Beginning of All Things. It’s a sweeping novel centered around the resentments, suspicions, and betrayals—but also the love—among three childhood friends, although, in a larger sense, it’s about writing and storytelling and dishonesty. I’m really looking forward to losing myself (at least for a few hours a day) in the rich world the author has created.
Is there a Hebrew book you love and wish was available in English but isn't yet? How about an English book not yet available in Hebrew?
It may sound self-serving to name two books I translated myself, but it’s my authors and their incredible books that I’m hoping to serve! Esther Peled’s Pretty Wide Open won the 2017 Sapir Prize, Israel’s most prestigious literary award, and it’s funny, smart, unconventional, unapologetically feminist, and startlingly candid—just like Peled herself. I completed a translation some time ago, and we’re still looking for the right publisher.
Another outstanding novel that I’ve translated in full is The Man Who Got Stuck With a Scowl, by Uri Katz. The title is not the only intriguing and baffling thing about this book. It’s a truly unique piece of writing, which makes it hard to compare to anything else, and I think one of the reasons the translation is still unpublished is that the editors who read it—many of whom were blown away—struggled to classify the novel and, therefore, weren’t sure how to market it. It’s a masterful tapestry of styles, genres and voices, weaving certain thematic and plot-related threads through the entire novel with a dexterity that I’ve rarely seen. I’m still hopeful that we will find an editor who is as captivated by this creation as I am, and who will see its publication as audacious, rather than just risky.
As for an English book not yet available in Hebrew, I’ll cheat a bit and mention a Spanish book—or rather, several books—that I’ve read in English translation. Eduardo Halfon, a Guatemalan author (who spent many of his formative years in the U.S. and currently lives in Berlin) is one of my favorite finds of the past several years, and I read him through the excellent translations of Daniel Hahn, Lisa Dillman, Ollie Brock, Thomas Bunstead, and Anne Mclean. He’s had a couple of short pieces published in Hebrew literary journals, but none of his books have been translated. I find this odd because he writes, among other things, about his Jewish roots and the place they occupy in his personal and familial psyche. But more importantly, he’s a wonderful writer with a very original voice and a perfect balance between the cerebral and the emotional, which I think many Israeli readers would appreciate.
What has been your most challenging translation project yet? What made it so?
The novel I mentioned above, Leah Aini’s Rose of Lebanon, has certainly turned out to be my most challenging translation project. Another contender is Falling Out of Time, a short book by David Grossman that falls somewhere between prose, poetry, and dramatic monologue. It is a heart-wrenching piece of writing about grief and loss (the first book he wrote after the death of his son, Uri, in 2006) and it was very challenging to translate because of the writing style, but also emotionally taxing because of the subject matter.
What are you reading and/or loving at the moment?
I’ve been on a Rachel Cusk kick for a while now, slowly working my way through everything she’s written and loving it all, in particular her memoirs. Her voice is so unusual and, to me, very communicative while at the same time always retaining a bit of mystery. I like prose that makes me stop every so often to admire or puzzle out a sentence, and she certainly has that effect on me.
