I was putting my sweater/jumper/pullover on this morning, and my subject for today suddenly struck me. This was not as random a thought as it might first appear, because I experienced a life-changing event last week.

Throughout our married life, you can probably count on the fingers of one hand the number of occasions when Bernice has seen me getting dressed in the morning. Either I have been getting up for work, or shul, before she is awake, or, since my retirement, if I decided to sleep in, she was getting up for work before I was awake. Following her retirement, since I am more of an early morning person than she is, I have still tended to get up before she is fully awake.

However, for the last couple of weeks, we have been experiencing a rainy spell (although, as I am writing this, I can gaze out at a cloudless, gentle-blue sky and a landscape bathed in bright, if not hot, sunshine). (End of nature notes.) This has coincided with me catching a cold (or, rather, my permanent cold coming more to the fore).

I have therefore not been getting up for shul. To stand outside on a damp winter morning for an hour seems ill-considered. Even worse, I seem finally to have shaken off my internal alarm clock, and I now find that I can sleep past (sometimes embarrassingly past) 6:45AM.

One unexpected result of this is that my getting dressed has become an occasional spectator sport. (Nothing kinky, you’ll be relieved to hear.) As a consequence of this, Bernice has, on more than one occasion, called me over to her side of the bed to straighten the sleeves of my sweater. (See glossary above.) I had not previously been aware of it, but I now suspect that, for most of my adult life, I have been walking around with twisted sleeves. Fortunately, since we came on aliya, I don’t wear sweaters that often.

As soon as I discovered this sartorial lapse, I began taking care, if I dressed before Bernice was awake, to adjust my sleeves. And then, last week, for no obvious reason, I suddenly took it into my head to break the habit of a lifetime.

Even if you haven’t read Gulliver’s Travels, you are probably aware that the world is divided into big-enders and little-enders, one’s affiliation being determined by the end that you tap, or cut off, when preparing to eat a boiled egg.

Well, I now discover that the world is divided into neckers and armsers, depending on which part of your anatomy you put first into a sweater when donning it. At this point, I am starting to suspect that I am the only armser in the world. What is certainly true is that, for as long as I can remember, I have always first put my arms into the sleeves of a sweater, and only then put it over my head.

Anyway, as I say, last week, I suddenly decided (impetuous fool that I am) to go in headfirst, as it were. I immediately discovered that, although it was a little more difficult than usual to find the armholes, getting the sweater over my neck, and also ‘unrolling’ the sweater down my torso (I do hope this is not getting too steamy for you), were much easier than usual. However, what made the experiment little less than thrilling was that the arms of the sweater were not twisted!

So, my question is: why did I have to wait until I was a week shy of 71 before discovering this? (Notice the clever way I dropped in a reminder of the impending birthday, there.) Why didn’t they teach me in kindergarten how to put a sweater on?

Once this struck me, this morning, I suddenly found myself thinking of several other vital pieces of advice that I was never given at kindergarten. As I do with almost anything that springs to mind (or even claws its way into my consciousness) on a Sunday, I have labelled them all grist and am just about to put them through the mill.

First of all, pomegranates. Why wasn’t I told that, if you cut a pomegranate in half, hold one half in your hand upside down over a bowl, with the flesh touching your palm, and hit the skin of the pomegranate repeatedly, all over, with a wooden spoon, the seeds will all drop out? Do you know how many hours of my life I have wasted through not knowing that?

Second, why did nobody give me a commonplace book as a sixth birthday present, and train me to use it? I’m referring to a book in which you jot down interesting ideas you come across and memorable short quotes from books you are reading. Full disclosure: my anger here is principally aimed at myself. I have been aware of the concept of a commonplace book since my teens, and convinced of its value almost as long; it’s just that I have lacked the self-discipline to start.

The result is that, over the last half century, every sentence I have been seduced by and reread several times for the sheer pleasure of it, every thought that has perfectly captured a truth about our existence, every witty or beautiful expression that I have felt compelled to read out to Bernice because I just had to share it: all of them have run through my fingers like sand on the beach, and all because I didn’t have a bucket to put them in.

Now that I have gone public with this, I shall immediately take out one of the four bound notebooks I have accumulated over the years for just this purpose, and start today! If that’s not part of a crescendo (see last week’s blog), I don’t know what is.

Not rectifiable, at this stage, is the fact that nobody explained to me that the mortality of my grandparents, and then my parents, of blessed memory all, meant that, if I did not take advantage of the time that I had with them to ask them about their childhood years, all of that history, which is my history, would vanish forever. One of the most important projects undertaken in Israeli schools is a roots project, as part of which children are required to interview their grandparents and learn about their personal history. In this last year, when the last of my parents’ siblings and their spouses has died, almost the last doorway to that past has closed, for me, for ever.

I feel blessed that I have the letters that my father wrote, throughout his five years of army service, most of them in Burma and India, during the Second World War: both letters to his mother and sisters, and letters to my mother. These letters give me a glimpse both of a life he did not speak about a great deal, at least to me, and of a man much younger than the father I remember.

I also wish someone had said to me, in 1968: ‘You are living through a golden age of British theatre. Spend however much you can afford on going to the theatre as often as you can, because an era like this will not pass this way again.’ In the event, I didn’t do badly, between going to theatre with Bernice and leading school theatre visits to London; but there is so much that I missed.

Finally, and perhaps most painfully: I am the owner of a partial memory. There are certain scenes, moments, events of childhood and youth that I remember vividly (some important in a ‘historical’ sense, others important precisely because they have no importance outside themselves). However, there are many, many others, most of them involving discussions with, relationships with, key people in my life, of which my memory is frustratingly hazy.

What I needed was for someone to sit me down at age 7 and explain to me that I should strive to fill my life with faithful, beloved, honest companions; and one of the greatest of these should be a diary. I envy diarists almost more than anyone else, because their past has not slipped through their fingers; they are in possession of who they were, who they are, who they no longer are, who they have always been. What a priceless possession.

I am not saying that the above are the secret to a happy life. However, they are some of the elements of a perfect life that I feel the lack of. What I need to do immediately, of course, is to write another piece, listing the things that I did ‘learn in kindergarten’, to remind myself of how lucky I am. Just be warned: until I see what is on that list, I shan’t make my mind up as to whether to share it with you.

Meanwhile, someone in Penamacor has just learnt the importance of holding on to what you’ve got!

It must have been some time around 1970 that I lost my faith in self-help books. Of course, the world was a very different place then, and the self-help publishing racket industry was in its infancy. Like so many others, I read Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, which, by the time I came to it, was already 30 years old. I’m not absolutely sure what I was hoping to find in the book, but, whatever it was, I didn’t find it. I think I need to take full responsibility for that, because my expectations were unrealistic. I never really internalized the ‘self’ part of ‘self-help’; the idea that I had to be the change I wished to see sounded too much like hard work.

In the decades since then, I have grown increasingly scornful of self-help literature. The idea that I can turn my entire life around just by reading a 300-page book seems ridiculous. It cannot possibly be that easy, can it? So, when I stumbled across an article in Sunday’s paper entitled The 20 bestselling self-help books of all time — and what I learnt from them, I expected to react with derisory laughter. In fact, I said to myself: ‘Great! I can turn my life around just by reading 2000 words, rather than ploughing through 20 books.’

Of course, my takeaway from this fast-food experience was about as nourishing as such takeaways usually are. However, one instruction, the final message of Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, struck me, and I have been chewing it over today. Covey writes: ‘Live life in crescendo’. He coined this lesson to convey the message that ‘the most important work you will ever do is always ahead of you… Retirement is a false concept.’ I’ve been trying to decide, over the last few hours, whether that is the most uplifting, or the most depressing, thing I have read so far this year.

Part of me argues that the reward for decades of climbing the mountain of everyday life has to be the right to enjoy sitting on the summit and admiring the view. At the same time, I find myself feeling some grudging admiration for the concept of perpetual purposefulness.

You must admit that a constant crescendo is relentlessly exhausting, not least because it requires you to constantly find new challenges. If these are to motivate you, they surely have to mean more to you than the ones you are currently facing, or have just successfully met. It seems to me that there must come a point where you have exhausted all the things you care most passionately about. Do you then have to choose to devote your energies to something that is less important to you?

Take brewing beer, for example, or baking bread. Don’t get me wrong: I fully realise that I could study either of these crafts for a complete lifetime and still have things to learn. At the same time, the three or four breads and two beers that I now make are ones that give me a huge amount of pleasure. I could search for the next 20 years and not necessarily find flavours I enjoy as much, and I’d rather spend those two decades eating bread that I absolutely know I enjoy, if it’s all the same to you.

However, when I think about my blog, I realise there may be another way in which I can live my life in crescendo, without constantly seeking out new challenges. As I have mentioned before, when I started writing, I was full of first impressions of Portugal, exhilaration at spending time with Tslil, Micha’el and Tao, and excitement at this new adventure of house purchase in another country.

As the months passed, and especially over the past 9 months, I have had to rely more and more on other topics, but I have, by and large, felt that I had something to say. Some of these posts are the extended verbalizing of ideas that I have been nurturing for a long time; most of them are topics close to my heart.

However, I appear by now to have got off my chest most of what has been bothering me, and, every Saturday night, the next couple of days loom up with an ominous inevitability. Perhaps this blog presents me with the challenge of writing about stuff that doesn’t really mean that much to me, while being as effortlessly witty and thought-provoking as I have been about the topics that are closer to my heart. That’s a kind of constant crescendo I might be able to take on.

Reading back over those 780 words, I see that I haven’t really managed it, so let’s talk about something else. I have been studiously avoiding the elephant in the room, but this coming week promises to be a big one for Bernice and myself. Wednesday week will mark ten days after our second vaccination, and we will then be free as a bird, and able to enjoy going out for a meal….except there are no restaurants open, going to the theatre….which is, of course, locked down, and generally exchanging not being allowed to go almost anywhere for not having anywhere to go.

Add to this the imponderables. Our chances of being infected are (possibly) negligible, but nobody knows whether we can still infect others. How long will our immunity last? Will our Pfizer vaccine prove effective against the next mutations coming down the pipe?

Of course, there are really only two things we want to do, and two places we want to be, and the big questions are whether, when and how we will be able to get to Portugal, or, for that matter, Zichron Yaakov.  Second things first. Our current lockdown is due to end on Thursday, but will almost certainly be extended for two weeks (as the Health Ministry recommends) or one week (as the Health Ministry may have been aiming for when they proposed a two-week extension).

When we do come out of lockdown, Bernice and I should be able to travel to Zichron to see Esther and Maayan, which will be wonderful. Portugal, however, presents a whole new set of question marks. Will travel insurance be prohibitively expensive? Will Portugal accept us? (Currently, the answer appears to be yes.) Are we prepared to fly with a layover, and, if so, which European airports look like being the least risky and best organized? Will we need to go into isolation in Portugal? When we return to Israel, will we need to go into isolation here, and, if so, will that be at home (not a problem) or will Israel have reinstated corona hostels (which, by all accounts, are a fairly unattractive prospect, not least because you are living out of a suitcase}.

Bernice and I are talking about this more seriously all the time. Sometimes we take the line that it’s all a lottery, and nobody can predict what can happen in the month we are away, so we should stop over-thinking it and just go. At other times we question whether our resilience, and ability to roll with the punches, are perhaps just a tad rustier than they were 30 years ago.

And, of course, with every passing month Tao grows and develops and becomes more and more his own person. We know how blessed we are to be able to chat with him, to see him and interact with him, every week; I am constantly thinking back to our parents, who visited us once a year for two weeks when our kids were young, and especially of Bernice’s parents, whose two daughters were raising all six of their grandchildren in Israel. Audio cassettes and air letters were definitely not even Zoom and WhatsApp video calls.

OK, people. Now I’m getting plain maudlin. I know full well that many of you are going through exactly the same as we are – even some of you who live just a short drive from your grandchildren. There is nothing special about the situation we find ourselves in, but I’m afraid this is not one of those occasions when misery loves company.

On the whole I think I’d better stop now, and start trying to find something uplifting, or at least flippant, to chew over next week.

No videos this week, I’m afraid, but I can give you a glimpse of Tao practising his driving skills in the family’s new acquisition, a pickup truck which will doubtless be put to very good use on the land.

If that title turns you off, just before you go, please jump to the end of the blog, where you will find this week’s dose of Tao….and I promise: no literature next week.
For those of you made of sterner stuff:

One of the unanticipated pleasures that corona has brought with it, for Bernice and myself, is that of, respectively, being read to, and reading aloud. I can’t speak for Bernice, but, for me, there are two pleasures in reading aloud. First, it appeals to the aspiring thespian in me. At various stages of my life in Britain, I was involved in amateur dramatics; I may even bore you with my old stories of treading the boards one week. This, together with bridge, is one of the things that fell by the wayside when we came to Israel, despite Israel boasting a thriving (if often less than cutting edge) amateur English-language theatre scene (and a thriving bridge-playing community).

These days, I find myself musing whether ‘I could have been a contender’ (at drama rather than bridge). Twenty years ago, I think I could have made a decent fist of the role of Martin Dysart, the psychiatrist in Peter Schaeffer’s Equus. I would, I am sure, have been more Peter Barkworth (urbane, and in greater control of his suppressed passions, in a magnificent BBC Radio 4 production from 1980) than Richard Burton (rather more impassioned, in a considerably less nuanced, but still worth watching, film from 1977). Sadly, I cannot find the radio production for you online.

I am grateful for the opportunity to perform for an audience of one, especially such an appreciative one, and we have been remarkably fortunate in our choices to date. We have just finished reading Madeline Miller’s Circe. I realise that we came very late to the party for this novel, but, just in case any of you haven’t read it, stop reading this blog now and order it online.

It is feted as a feminist imagining of the story of Circe from Greek mythology…I can hear some of you saying to yourselves: ‘Well, that sounds like a book I certainly don’t have to read!’, Yes, I would have steered clear of it too, if it had not been so warmly recommended by someone whose opinion we value highly.

What we found, as we started reading, is that in turning the spotlight on what is a minor goddess in The Odyssey, Miller has created someone whose self-awareness, passion and strength in adversity all make her a very attractive character. I say ‘created’ although it feels much more as though Miller has faithfully drawn all of her ideas from the source, and ‘simply’ revealed the full roundness of the Circe hinted at by Homer.

The novel also imagines the world of Greek mythology, and describes it in utterly convincing detail: we feel that this is exactly how it must be to develop your magical powers as a witch; these are surely the authentic details of the logistics of a man’s body morphing into a pig’s; this must be just what it feels like to have the sun god for a father.

All of this is expressed in vivid, clear language, rooted in the world it is describing. Circe is nothing less than a joy to read; I cannot remember any book I have so relished reading aloud. We both found the book so thrilling and so delicious that we strictly limited ourselves to one chapter per sitting. This was exquisite torture since every chapter both recounts a self-contained episode and ends on the kind of edge-of-your-seat cliffhanger that I have seldom encountered outside Zorro or Batman. As we approached the end, we did all we could to eke out the last twenty pages.

The only trouble is: what do we follow Circe with? We haven’t finally decided yet, but we will have to work hard not to feel disappointed in whatever we choose.

In tandem with the novel, and as an appetiser before each reading, we have been selecting a volume of poetry and reading a poem a day. For the last couple of weeks we have been reading Carol Ann Duffy’s wry feminist collection The World’s Wife, an amuse-bouche indeed. Duffy served as poet laureate for a decade until 2019, and for those of us who associate poet laureateship with the likes of Robert Southey, William Wordsworth and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, she represents a bit of a departure.

The World’s Wife is woven around the saying that ‘Behind every famous man…’ It is a series of tongue-in-cheek monologues by the wives of great males of history, from Aesop to Quasimodo, from Odysseus to Elvis, and from King Herod to King Kong. The poems are insightful, witty and delightful.

Having completed this thought-provoking confection (if that’s not an oxymoron), we turned to a book Bernice received as a 50^th birthday present, The Nation’s Favourite Poems. In 1995, a BBC TV book programme conducted a poll to discover Britain’s best-loved poems. Nobody would suggest that this was a scientific survey: the responders were self-selecting, both in choosing to watch the programme and in choosing to submit their choices. However, the final league table of the top 100 poems makes interesting reading (not necessarily the poems themselves, you understand, but the list).

The first point to make (not, I suspect, predicted by the devisers of the poll) is that the most popular poets were less likely to do well if they had written a large body of popular work. So, for example, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Keats, Yeats and W H Auden did less well than you might expect, because votes for them were split between several poems.

The other thing that strikes me, as we start to work our way through the 100 winners, is how respectable and dusty the collection is. Only one of the top 12 poems, and only 23 of the 100, were written by poets born in the 20^th Century. 22 of the top 36 poems are ones I was taught in school, and a further 8 of those 36 are ones I taught 10 years later in school.

What to make of this? Well, I should point out at this stage that, in 1995, most of the viewers of The Bookworm were probably retired. The programme was screened at 4:20 in the afternoon (with view on demand still decades away).

It also appears that most of the poetry that most of the population (even the reading population) read and enjoyed, they first read in school. Indeed, I wonder how many readers, then or now, read poetry regularly or, indeed, at all, in their adult life.

In addition, much of the poetry that we read in school, and that we were required to learn by heart and recite, has an incantatory quality that stays with us. This is perhaps best reflected in the two most popular poems in the poll. If I tell you that they both rely heavily on recurring structures and language, that one is overtly character-building, and the second is steeped in English mythology, you might possibly be able to guess that topping the poll was Rudyard Kipling’s If, with twice as many votes as the runner-up The Lady of Shalott.

If that second choice elicits from you the reaction: ‘The Who of What?’ there is no need to feel embarrassed. Tennyson’s poem has, with considerable justification, slipped out of the public eye in the last half-century. I haven’t even bothered to give you a link to the poem online. If you don’t know it already, I see little need to inflict it on you at this stage. Bernice, who did not remember ever hearing or seeing it before, was singularly underwhelmed by it, despite a magnificently sensitive and evocative reading by yours truly.

Number 3, however, was a different story. This was, again, one Bernice didn’t recognize, although I remembered it very clearly. I thought I knew it from primary school, but I may be over-estimating the sophistication of myself and my peers. Whenever I met it, its mysterious quality, and its sense of an underlying and undisclosed narrative, have stayed with me over the years. It is Walter de la Mare’s The Listeners, and, if you do not already know it, I feel it is worth a visit.

As I looked through the entire list, I noticed that none of the poems that I grew up with (1958–1968) were anti-establishment. Many were apolitical – dealing with nature, recounting historical events without commentary, or capturing and analysing human emotion – and those that were political were jingoistic, pro-establishment and conservative.

When I fast forward to the poems I taught in Britain (1976–1986), I find that almost all of them inhabit the contemporary world of the poet, and many of them are political with a small ‘p’, exposing and addressing social problems of the age. Far too often, the tone is bleak, the mood one of the world’s failure.

This starts with the First World War, whether in the wistful sadness of Wilfrid Owen’s Anthem for Doomed Youth or the dark cynicism of Siegried Sassoon’s The General. It continues through the Second World War, as condemned in Louis MacNeice’s Prayer before Birth. It goes into the post-War Britain of the Welfare State, and its failed promise, with Charles Causley’s Timothy Winters. It bemoans the nuclear family, with Philip Larkin’s This Be the Verse (Warning! Contains strong language). All in all, it’s a pretty bleak read.

So there is this very strong contrast between the two ages of poetry in the first half of my life. This is not poetry written then, but poetry promoted in the public sphere then. I can think of no better way of conveying this shift, this contrast, than by putting alongside each other two poems by two contemporaries. Rupert Brooke (1887–1915) and Wilfred Owen (1893–1918). In 1914, before he had seen any action, and a year before he was killed in action, Brooke wrote the stirringly patriotic The Soldier, calmly facing the possibility of the ultimate sacrifice, and the recognition that, if it is a sacrifice for one’s country, it is to be embraced with grace.

The Soldier
If I should die, think only this of me:
      That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
      In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
      Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam;
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
      Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
      A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
            Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
      And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
            In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

By the time Wilfred Owen wrote Dulce et Decorum Est (It is Sweet and Fitting… [to Die for One’s Country]), he had seen horrific action on the Western front, spent a long convalescence In England, during which he recovered from shell-shock, and was preparing to return to the front, where he was to meet his death just one week before the armistice was declared.

Dulce et Decorum Est
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime. –
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, –
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Your reward, gentle reader, for staying the course, is to learn the exciting news that, after a one-month hiatus, Micha’el and Tslil have just released the latest video on their YouTube channel. You may want to watch it because of the clarity with which Micha’el explains how things are going, and sheds light on their approach to life in general and the challenges they are facing. You may, on the other hand, just want to watch it because of the opportunity it gives you to see Tao throwing himself into work on the land. Either way, from where I’m sitting, it’s a worthwhile watch. Liking, subscribing and commenting are also warmly encouraged. Here it is:

Welcome to a topic that has, in the last decade or so, very much captured my interest: the art (some would say the dark art) of translation. An art, because translation is not just a matter of ingesting the original text at one end and excreting a translation at the other. Oh no! There’s a lot more to it than that.

You do not have to get very far into a text for translation before you encounter a lexical gap – a word or phrase in the source language for which no equivalent exists in the target language. Take, for example, the words for the different stages in the life of….well, how far do you have to read in the following list before you know what we are talking about?

Egg, alevin, fry, fingerling/parr, smolt, adult.

What is being described here is my old favourite, the salmon. English has a single word for each of the six stages in the life cycle of this magnificent silver leaper. However, I am prepared to guess that the Sango language of the Central African Republic lacks some, if not all, of these words; indeed, I would not be surprised if it has no word for salmon at all. So, the distance from ‘fingerling’ in English into Sango represents a lexical gap.

Of course, there are ways around the problem. You can use the Sango for ‘silver river fish when it starts to move downriver towards the sea’. However, you will agree that this loses something in the translation.

Let us, for a moment, assume that there is a word for ‘fingerling’ in Sango. Although the denotation (the dictionary definition) of the Sango word matches exactly that of ‘fingerling’, unfortunately it (my assumed Sango word) fails completely to reproduce the connotation (the associational and emotional weight that a word carries). ‘Fingerling’ carries within it the following connotations (for me at least):

• An indication of the size and delicacy of the salmon at this stage (finger);
• An affectionate suggestion of diminutiveness (ling);
• A feeling of folk, rather than scientific, classification (both ‘finger’ and ‘-ling’ originate in Old English, and have none of the scientific or official flavour that words from Norman French and Latin roots tend to have in English).

I am sure that, despite being (I wager) no more fluent in Sango than I am, you will concede the fact that the likelihood of finding a connotative match for ‘fingerling’ is approximately nil.

Of course, nobody consciously considers these connotations when using a word in everyday conversation, although when we choose to say ‘hearty’ rather than ‘cordial’ or ‘home’ rather than ‘domicile’ or ‘friendship’ rather than ‘amity’, we are probably aware, at some level, that we are making, in each case, the ‘warmer’ choice.

A quick task for you (an interactive blog, no less). Rank the following words in order from positive to negative connotation: THIN, SLIM, SKINNY.

I expect that you, like me, ranked SLIM as positive, SKINNY as negative and THIN as neutral. I just fed these words into Google Translate, and received the following translations into Spanish: DELGADO, DELGADO, DELGADO; Russian: Тонкий, тонкий, тонкий; Arabic: نحيف ، نحيف ، نحيف; Hebrew: רזה, רזה, רזה. I am a great fan of Google Translate, but this little experiment demonstrates that the app is a lot better at capturing denotation than it is at conveying connotation.

Douglas Hofstadter, in his book The Mind’s Eye, made the very good point that the most accurate ‘translation’ from America to Britain of Nancy Reagan was probably Denis Thatcher, because the fact that he was a man whereas she was a woman was not, for either of them, their significant characteristic; it was, rather, that they were the spirited (if over-shadowed) spouses of the two strong leaders of the Western world.

Even if the translator manages somehow to bridge the lexical gap, there are other challenges. Imagine, for example, translating traditional poetry. As well as translating the meaning (denotation and connotation) of the source word, the translator will want to retain the rhythm and rhyme of the original, and, ideally, the weight and effect of the vowel and consonant clusters. Let me give you two quick examples.

I don’t, for the most part, ‘get’ Emily Dickinson; I fail to understand what the admirers of her poetry see in it. Yet every so often I catch a glimpse of her power. Perhaps her best-known poem, A Bird Came Down the Walk, ends with a description of how…

Butterflies, off banks of noon,
Leap plashless as they swim.

Any translator must strive to find a combination of consonants that forces the reader to hang in mid-air for a moment, like a butterfly, between the closing ‘p’ of ‘leap’ and the opening ‘p’ of ‘plashless’.

Similarly, in the middle of Tennyson’s The Lotos-Eaters, the drug-induced languor is described as follows:

There is sweet music here that softer falls
Than petals from blown roses on the grass,

What sonic challenges does the translator face here? First, the need to reproduce the phenomenon of almost every word being separated from its predecessor by a combination of closing and opening consonants that requires the reader to pause. Read it aloud carefully and you will experience the impossibility:
There is|sweet|music|here that|softer falls|Than|petals|from|blown|roses on|the grass

There are also eleven breathy, drawn-out, ‘th’, ‘s’ and ‘z’ sounds, and seven long vowels. The translator must aim to reproduce this soft, slow language.

Finally (although this is not an exhaustive list), even if the target language has an adjective to describe flowers that have shed their leaves, it should ideally be a monosyllable with the same long vowel sound as the word for roses.

During the Renaissance, Italians were very disappointed with inadequate translations of Dante into French, some that failed to capture the beauty of the original, and others that failed to capture accurately its meaning. The Italians coined the phrase Traduttore, traditore, which literally means Translator, traitor. In other words: All translation is unavoidably a betrayal of the original.

I hope that you relish the irony that the phrase is a meta-phrase, in that it is an excellent example of itself. No translation of it into English can preserve the parallel of the two words in Italian, identical in sound and stress except for one vowel-sound in the middle of each word.

So, clearly translation is an art, but why do I call it a dark art? Well, faithful reader, that is because, against all the odds, and in wonderful ways, translators actually manage to translate successfully, which seems to me to suggest some diabolical power. I thought I would share some of those that I have come across in Israel.

First, I want to single out Ehud Manor, a much-loved Israeli songwriter, who was awarded an MA in English Literature from Cambridge University and spent considerable time in New York. He became the leading translator into Hebrew of musicals, including Hair, Sweeney Todd, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Les Misérables, The Threepenny Opera, Cabaret, Blood Brothers, Chicago, West Side Story and Porgy and Bess. Bernice and I saw Cabaret and West Side Story in Tel Aviv, and in both cases we had to keep reminding ourselves that these were translated and not original lyrics.

As an example, here are aome of his lyrics to the title song from Cabaret. This is not an easy song to translate, not least because each syllable has a different note, so that the metre of the Hebrew has to match that of the English.

My non-Hebrew-reading followers will have to take my word for it that the metre and rhyme are faithful, and the translation ‘back’ from the Hebrew shows you how Manor kept the spirit and concepts of the original, even when he was not able to translate with literal accuracy.

Next, let me offer you the cleverest translation I know of a film title into Hebrew: The 1959 film Never on Sunday. This is a classic case of denotation and connotation. In Greece, where the film was made, and in the English-speaking world, where it was very successful, Sunday is (as the title song states) [the] ‘day of rest’. However, if you translate the title into Hebrew literally, you lose the entire connotation, since Sunday is, in Israel, the first day of the working week.

However, you cannot simply map the title to its equivalent connotation in Israel, because then it becomes Never on Saturday, thereby changing its denotation, and thoroughly confusing the Israeli audience watching the film. The solution found was an excellent example of lateral thinking: Only on Weekdays (רק בימי חול). Elegant, no?

And now for the pièce de resistance. (That’s another way to avoid the pitfalls of translation, of course: simply import the phrase wholesale from the source language.)

One challenge for the translator that I haven’t yet touched on is wordplay such as puns. These can hardly ever be translated literally while still retaining the humour. In Israeli film subtitling, the translator often gives up, translating the sentence literally and adding in parentheses: a play on words in English.

Not long after we came on aliya, Israel TV screened Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective. (Potter is worth a post to himself; indeed, The Singing Detective is worth a post to itself!) Fortunately, being a words man rather than a pictures man, I was reading (or, more accurately, was unable to stop myself reading) the Hebrew subtitles. At one point, the leading character, speaking about himself and a prostitute with whom he had a complex relationship, says:

It was a case of tit for tat. She was all tit and I was all tat.

This is, let me point out, a double pun:

‘Tit for tat’ meaning reciprocally;
‘Tit’ being an informal term for breast;
‘Tat’ meaning a worthless scrap (of material).

So, how on earth do you translate that? Here’s what they came up with:
עין תחת עין, היא כולה תחת, ואני כולי אַיין.
Literally: An eye for an eye. She was all arse and I was entirely a non-entity
where the word ‘for’ is a homonym of the word ‘arse’ and the word ‘eye’ is a homophone of the word ‘non-entity’.

I do realise that the above pedestrian explanation has murdered the joke, but I hope that, for my non-Hebrew-speaking readers, it has indicated the brilliance of the elegance with which both puns were captured while the denotation was accurately conveyed. If that’s not evidence of dark arts, I don’t know what is. You can’t come up with something like that (and certainly not on the salary of a subtitle-creator in Israel TV at the time), unless you have previously sold your soul to the devil.

Meanwhile, in Portugal, someone is honing other skills. Less strict parents might have started their son on something a little more yielding, like a potato or carrot. But Tslil and Mucha’el run a tough boot camp!