Article
Lisa Katz
Translating: ‘Bring your bathing suit’
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May 22, 2012
We make friends quickly: following the instant poetry of the face, let’s say. The poets themselves, who are the festival celebrities, are expected to be inspiring, not to have to explain. The translators are the ones forced to dive deep into their words/worlds and come up with various rich and sometimes very different pearls: even strange ones, depending on the diver (bring your bathing suit). Lisa Katz is the Poetry International Israel editor.
At the Poetry International Festival in Rotterdam, which I attend as often as I can as a site editor for Israel, I feel at home. I don’t feel like a tourist in the streets around the Schouwburg. I know exactly where to wheel my suitcase from the train station (and I know where the secret garden is – just ask me). But my attachment to the festival isn’t merely geographical.
In Rotterdam, translation is exposed as a serious yet user-friendly undertaking in understanding the Other – an attempt to grasp a coded communication about being human and bring it over to another language and culture. Maybe that’s what makes us translator-editors so heat-seeking and friendly. We’re used to having x-ray vision – what texts say, what they might mean, what they may now mean in another language – so we're pretty analytical and quick on the uptake.We make friends quickly: following the instant poetry of the face, let’s say. The poets themselves, who are the festival celebrities, are expected to be inspiring, not to have to explain. The translators are the ones forced to dive deep into their words/worlds and come up with various rich and sometimes very different pearls: even strange ones, depending on the diver (bring your bathing suit). Lisa Katz is the Poetry International Israel editor.
© Lisa Katz
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