èצӰÏñ

Speaker(s): Na'ama Rokem

Moses Mendelssohn's German translation of the Bible is often described as the inaugurating gesture of German-Jewish culture, setting it on a course to become a "translators' culture." This talk reframes German-Jewish translation, focusing not on the mediation between the German and the Jewish, or between the German and Hebrew languages, but rather on the acts of self-translation through which German-Jewish authors situate themselves in a broader global field of translation. Two exiles - the nineteenth century poet and polemicist Heinrich Heine and the twentieth century philosopher Hannah Arendt - provide us with bookends to a narrative of a German-Jewish culture that crosses, by impossible necessity, multiple linguistic and national borders.

NA'AMA ROKEM is Assistant Professor of Modern Hebrew Literature at the University of Chicago. Her book, Prosaic Conditions: Heinrich Heine and the Spaces of Zionist Literature, is forthcoming from Northwestern University Press. She has published articles on Franz Kafka, Theodor Herzl, W.G. Sebald and Paul Celan. Her current project is on translation as a mode of world-making in German-Jewish writing.