Jaques Mandelbaum
If there is one field that has not waited for the global market before dispersing worldwide it must be knowledge. People from all backgrounds have been sharing and disseminating learning for ages. Among their number, one particular category – translators – stands out, for without them such exchanges could not happen. In her latest film Nurith Aviv focuses on these passionate bridge-builders, men and women who shun the limelight to spread the written word.
Aviv was born in Israel and started working as a lead camera operator in 1969. Since 1989 she has devoted all her time to documentaries and in the last 10 years she has concentrated on written and spoken Hebrew, and all it involves beyond the reach of linguistics.
The first part of this project, completed in 2004, was Misafa Lesafa: From Language to Language. In it she talked to academics, writers and artists who, as is commonplace in a country with so many immigrants, had plenty to say about being bilingual and belonging to two cultures. This was followed, in 2008, by Langue Sacrée, Langue Parlée (sacred language, spoken language), which analysed the ambivalence of Hebrew, a modern vernacular reconstructed on the basis of a language that had long been set aside for study of the scriptures.
One of the principal merits of the first two parts of this trilogy was to remind us how much language, and consequently its speakers, are coloured by strangeness and open to outside influences: in short, language is both a crucible of meanings and a challenge to purity. Traduire (translate), which rounds off the project, continues this fine endeavour. Aviv talks to various Hebrew translators, modest titans labouring to open up new routes for a language that is historically, theologically and politically loaded.
More than 2,000 years after the first attempt (the Septuagint, the Hellenic Greek translation of the Old Testament by Jews in Alexandria), Hebrew translation is still a major challenge. Our admiration for those who engage in this task is all the greater.
In Brest, France, Sandrick Le Maguer is working on the Midrash (a Jewish commentary on biblical texts) in an effort to throw new light on the Gospel. In Boston, Massachusetts, Angel Saenz-Badillos is investigating the Iberian sources of medieval poets of the Spanish golden age. In Malakoff, west of Paris, Itskhok Niborski is compiling a dictionary of Hebrew idioms in Yiddish. Meanwhile in Tel Aviv, Sivan Beskin is trying to translate the work of the poet Lea Goldberg (1911-1970), a native of Lithuania, back into her mother tongue.
Aviv films these encounters carefully, taking time to listen to each translator in the half-light of their offices, bringing surprisingly passionate ideas to the surface. In Barcelona, Manuel Forcano, who has translated the poet Yehuda Amichai (1924‑2000) into Catalan, acknowledges that the writer has influenced his own poetry. In Acre, Ala Hlehel, the Palestinian translator of the playwright Hanoch Levin (1943-99), explains how he must "murder the language of the father" to render the concise Hebrew wording into flowery classical Arabic.
Traduire, a polyglot exploration of the flesh of language, finds room in its erudite enterprise to explore sensibilities.
This article originally appeared in Le Monde
The guardian
