Hello all,

I haven’t really started here. Not really. Not laid out what I’m going to use this space for and why I want to do that. Hi. I’m Mordecai Martin. Maybe you know me personally. Maybe you found me through my work or social media. I’m a writer of fiction, poetry, essays, and I translate Yiddish and Hebrew poetry and prose. In this substack, I want to talk about translation, writing, and the larger importance of the languages I work in. Today’s post is about translation and how I came to love and practice it.

I have difficulty discussing translation without broad pronouncements on the nature of language, or writing, or foreignness, or Jewishness. It’s easy and fun to say things like, “Every word has a ghost, a connotation or distant, forgotten root to it. One way to translate is to make as much of that ghost visible in the target language as possible.” Or, “What do I owe the original text when I translate prose, what do I owe the reader of my prose? I owe them sequence and sense. When  I translate it, what do I owe the original poem, the reader of poetry? Beauty.” It is much harder to say concretely what I know, what I have experienced, what I have done. 

It is tiresome, but perhaps I should start with a sort of curriculum vitae. I was raised speaking English, with primary school classes in Spanish and French. In middle and high school I took Latin, and excelled at it, and enjoyed wandering my way through conjugations and declensions. It was the beginning of my training in grammar, which my English or “language arts” classes in middle and high school entirely neglected. I think of grammar as both the necessity of what languages have to do and the structure of how they do it. Every language, and really as a writer, every instance of language, must clarify somehow, for example, when the boy throws the ball, who in the sentence is acting and what is being done and what is being acted upon. In a variety of languages, that clarity may come from word order, or declining suffixes or prefixes that indicate person and case, or conjugation of verbs, or tones, or context, among other options. At the same time as I learned Latin, I learned my Hebrew letters for my bar mitzvah, although it wasn’t until I was 18 that I took any instruction in the actual Hebrew language. 

I learned Hebrew on a Kibbutz north and east of the Gallilee, listening to Israeli military planes swoop through on their way to Jordanian airspace, forced to practice because my fellow volunteers were all Peruvians, descended from followers of a small mass conversion movement in the Andes. They spoke no English, and despite those primary school lessons, I spoke no real Spanish at the time. My Hebrew improved rapidly, and from the kibbutz I moved to Jerusalem to study at a yeshiva. There, instruction was in English, but we were expected to make our way through the text of the Torah and Talmud without recourse to the translations. We would study in hevrusa— a study partnership— for the bulk of the time, and then meet as a class under a rabbi to make sure we had understood the material. When called upon, we would stumble our way through reading the unpunctuated Hebrew and Aramaic text in as fluent an understanding as we had of its interchanges and rhythms, and then summarize or translate what we had said. These were my first translations, awkward with all eyes on me, knowing from the cacophonous open floor plan of the study hall that there were more talented students who had a better grip on the sense I was trying to make. 

Sense is a very odd thing in Talmud, a notoriously curtailed text, where a whole line of reasoning may be summarized by a word or two, meant to stand in metonymically for the proceeding argument, and then deftly refuted by a laconic negation word, followed by three words of reasoning for the refutation, and then resurrected by the same negation applied to the refutation, and so on. Whole arguments between different systems of hermeneutics and law pass in a few inches of print; hypothetical worlds rise and fall. It is dizzying. It is thrilling. As difficult as it is to follow the lines of reasoning, it is harder still to render them into anything like English. When I over relied on specialized Hebrew or Aramaic vocabulary borrowed directly from the text, speaking a mishmosh of Talmud and English, the rabbi would snap something like “That’s how they would say it in Lakewood Yeshivish, try the Queen’s English now.” Chastened, I would try again. And again. And again.

In Yiddish—which I would take sporadically in classes throughout my uneven college career, and finally only polish with the help of an old Montreal Yiddish speaker and an obsession with Duolingo in the early days of the COVID-19 Pandemic— we borrow the German word Sitzfleisch, the power of the buttocks to stay in a chair and study, study, study. That’s what I had for a while with Talmud, and then again later in Yiddish. Sitzfleisch. This is one thing that translation can teach us as writers, or at least, one thing we learn along the way to Translation. The power of staying in the chair. I would add to that, the power of obsession, of diving deeply into a subject. 

Every time I approach a text, it is like I am learning to read and learning the language all over again. First I force my eyes to focus, to sound out the words, and then the words begin repeating in my head, in questioning tones. What does that mean? What if I add the next word to it as a phrase, what does that mean? So on through the sentence, the base unit of real significance. And then the whole sentence is echoing through my head, words are sliding in and around each other, trying to make sense. Do you see how the images come for me? This happens even in English, my first language, but in much higher resolution and much more quickly, so I barely notice it anymore. In Yiddish or Hebrew or Spanish, colors become shapes which become a picture, slowly. Translating and writing prose, I strive for clarity between those images, a clear sequence of events flowing from one sentence to the other. In poetry, I can allow the vibrancy of the colors and shapes to be everything, to consume the reader. This attention to not just what I am reading, but to how I read it, is another gift of translation to me as a writer.

To return to what I wrote in this letter about Kate Briggs, how do you write someone else’s sentence in your own language? Decades before I learned Spanish to speak to my wife and her relatives in their language, before I met my wife, even before I translated Talmud, I read and loved the work of Jorge Luis Borges. In his story, Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, Borges writes about an author trying to arrive, through his own process and power, at the exact text of Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. Borges is very clear on this project: it is not merely copying out the text. Instead, Menard toys with the possibility of inhabiting the role of Cervantes fully, mastering 17th century Castillian, aping points of Cervantes’ biography, trying to obliterate the intervening 300 years of European history. However, he ends up rejecting this course of action as not challenging enough. “Too impossible, rather!, the reader will say.” interpolates Borges’ narrator, Menard’s friend and would-be biographer. “Quite so,” he continues, “but the undertaking was impossible from the outset, and of all the impossible ways of bringing it about, this was the least interesting. To be, in the twentieth century, a popular novelist of the seventeenth seemed to him a diminution. To be, in some way, Cervantes and reach the Quixote seemed less arduous to him - and, consequently, less interesting - than to go on being Pierre Menard and reach the Quixote through the experiences of Pierre Menard.” 

In some ways, I look to Menard as the translator I am trying to be. I want these words to flow from me, my experience, even if it’s just my experience as a reader of the original. Just like in my original writing, I am learning to put my whole self and body behind the words, to stand by them, stand for them. If a character is speaking, I am that character. If I later condemn that character as a villain, or to some unpleasant fate of their own making, it is because I understand them totally, and fundamentally believe they are a villain or victim of themselves. Just as I take it for granted as fact that the words I’m translating correspond to their dictionary counterparts and conceptual bases, I am also taking it for granted that my writing, either in the translation or in my work, is getting at something true. Cynicism, doubts, double checking, hedging is either for revision, or for the person I become later. In the moment, I am the writing.

Have I achieved what Menard did? A few handful of pages in his own hand of certain chapters? I hope so. More likely, I think I have let people peer out at the world through my eyes a little. I like that sensation, of the reader looking out through me. Even if that reader is outraged, or annoyed, or bored. I like knowing they see things through my eyes. Read it in my words. I hope they enjoy it too though. Hope you enjoyed this.

With love,

Mordecai