A few weeks ago, a short story I translated into Hebrew was published in the Israeli online magazine Hamussach. It is a translation of Eudora Welty’s short story “Where is the Voice Coming From?.” The story, which came out in the New Yorker in July 1963, is a fictional monologue by a white supremacist who murders a civil rights activist. A central theme in this story is what you can hold on to, what you “[…] never lost or forgot it, never hocked it but to get it again, never give it away,” and what it means to hold on to one thing instead of the other, what we choose to hold on to and what is dropped as it is “hot to the touch,” to use the words of Welty’s narrator. As a translator of literature, fiction, and poetry into Hebrew, and a scholar working on contemporary Hebrew Literature, I wish to open that question as it is manifested for a translator: how one decides what to translate and when. What position do I occupy when translating, and how might reality influence the things I hold on to? [i]
A year ago, I was relatively new to the United States – living in Durham, North Carolina – when I found a copy of The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty in my neighborhood’s Little Free Library. I did not know Welty, but I took the book with me. I thought reading it could be a good way to get oriented. After reading some of it, I closed the book, but something in that story, “Where is the Voice Coming From?,” asked me to translate it. I didn’t understand why. It is a somewhat problematic story, I thought. I felt uneasy.
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Eudora Welty (1909-2001) was a white writer and photographer born in Jackson, Mississippi. She is considered one of the most important Southern writers of the twentieth century. She wrote plenty about the American South, but the story “Where is the Voice Coming From?” is considered—according to critics and her own account—to be somehow different from her other stories and her books. It was published in a magazine shortly after it was written and only later was it included in her collected short fiction. Moreover, Welty usually did not directly address questions of her time’s specific racial-political reality in her literature.
The background of the story is the murder of Medgar Evers. On June 12, 1963, in Jackson, Mississippi, the civil rights activist Medgar Wiley Evers was murdered by a white man who shot him in the back. Eudora Welty, a resident of the city, heard about the murder and in a short time wrote the story. It was published as early as July 6. The identity of the killer became known a few days before publication: they arrested a suspect who was indeed the murderer – Byron De La Beckwith Jr. – but he was not convicted until some thirty years later! The author stated in an interview that she had to edit the story a little because the details in the fictional text were too close to reality.
The story itself is very unsettling to read. First, because it is somewhat problematic, hinting that the killer is “only a pawn in their game,” to quote Bob Dylan’s song referring to the same murder. Both story and song are also problematic in the same way: pointing at the system, they may be read as diminishing the individual responsibility of the killer for his actions. And, they were wrong, to some extent at least. The most significant difference between Welty’s protagonist and the murderer, Byron De La Beckwith, was their socioeconomic status. Welty imagined a poor white man as the killer, but the actual killer had a higher social standing, a mistake that Welty struggled with and often discussed in interviews. She repeatedly mentioned a remark a friend uttered about her mistakenly assuming the killer was “a Snopes” when in fact he was “a Compson.”[ii] But still, although sensing these complications, something in the story was so fierce that I couldn’t resist translating it. It was a year ago, last spring. I translated it and then did nothing with it. No one asked me to translate it, nor paid me to do it. I for sure didn’t have the time. But most of all, I couldn’t understand why I did it.
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Two questions haunted me and stopped me from sending the translation to any magazine or editor: 1) What am I doing by translating it into Hebrew? and 2) Why now? A third question also emerged: Why did I want to do it, as myself, as a translator, as a Hebrew speaker? What was in it for me?
The Hebrew, Israeli, public discourse back then was centered on what we call inner conflict, which is how in Israel we refer to what is seemingly unrelated to the occupation or to The Conflict with capital C, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The “inner” tensions discuss a legal-political issue: how much power the government, the coalition, should have over the judiciary system, the Supreme Court of Justice, in light of new legislation attempts with revolutionary characteristics. Israel has a – well, seemingly, again, as not all its subjects can vote – parliamentary system. There was a long, lively, public struggle over it for months. The fault lines of the inner, Jewish-centered debate are usually seen as echoing the socioeconomic gap: the liberal “left” is the more robust, and the right-wing the lower classes. Although politically the right wing has been more powerful or prevalent for the last few decades, the “liberal” or “left” (this is how it is stereotyped; I’m not going to correct it here right now) is considered as the old hegemony, Ashkenazi (European), secular, while the right wing is Mizrahi (meaning, Jews from North Africa and Asia and the Middle East) and more traditional or Orthodox.
That was the main discussion, and I wondered whether the story would be read as drawing “easy” comparisons, singling out presumably “easy targets” as the story itself did. Wrongly, as explained. The act of translating added to my doubts, pointing to the fact that as an act, it might be considered in relation to its place and time. I could not decide who could be the addressee of this short story in the then-relevant discussion in a way that was interesting to me. It was especially important in this case as the story is doing something interesting with regard to the addressee. Let me explain.
This is a monologue written in the first person, asking the translator and the reader to read it as such. But the text’s use of speech in the second person adds to the impact, as Welty, in the words of scholar Sarah Gilbreath Ford, “uses second person point of view to include the reader in the story, thereby constructing that reader as racist as well. The reader has to decide if he or she is indeed the ‘you’ of the story. The tools to read against the point of view are embedded […] if the reader can find them. […] The words Welty writes are certainly a radical experiment, but the truly daring action occurs in the space between the page and the reader.” [iii] The use of the second person is a challenge for Hebrew translation, because every “you” in Hebrew is gendered and is also either singular or plural. Still, there are a few “sneaky” techniques I use to allow a less binary language sometimes, and for the sake of rhetorical goals like in this story, conversing with each of us readers. For example, unlike the word “you,” the word/preposition “to you” is written the same in masculine and feminine (singular). And sometimes I use a general utterance or statement instead of the second person, or the past tense where several verbs are written the same for masculine and feminine.
Another element that activates the reader is the title which poses a question and demands that we read the story in its light; and it is not clear whether the question is answered at the end of the story, nor who asks the question. Apparently, I was asking myself exactly that question regarding the act of translating it: where is this voice coming from?
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In order to propose some answers regarding the story and its Hebrew translation, and also hint at a broader thought about these questions, I would like to consider relationships between the translator and their translatees. Of course, there are plenty of fiction writings and literary accounts dealing with relations or relationships between translators and the texts they are working on. Borges’s remarkable story about Ibn Rushd translating Aristotle comes to mind. I have also just started listening to the new novel by Jennifer Croft (the Booker Prize-winning translator of Olga Tokarczuk) which focuses on a translator. Still, I always go back to a memoir I love by Shimon Sandbank, a prominent Hebrew translator (mainly from German and English) and a scholar. His memoir, Avot Ve’Ahim (Fathers and Brothers), is a memoir of a reader and a translator.
The book is structured as a series of encounters between the writer and different characters; some of the encounters are merely literary, while in the background, the writer’s life story is unfolding from childhood to old age. The central theme around which the book evolves is the adoption of figures of fathers and brothers. He explains: “I divide the important figures in my life into fathers and brothers. I had one father, and I had one brother, and I multiply them again and again. I want to write about these doubles.” [iv] These doubles are some of his translatees: Kafka, Hölderlin, Celan. He translated others he did not adopt as brothers or fathers. Sometimes, the narrative explicitly says it is because they are “perfect.” About Rilke, for example, he writes: “I have a problem with poets – maybe with people in general – who are so perfect that you can’t put your finger on some fragile (or fractured) spot in them” (Sandbank, 72). And about Shakespeare: “I could not adopt the man who knew it all as my father. As someone who knew everything, he had no face, and I knew nothing about him. He was not human” (Sandbank, 56).
If I rely here on the assumption that some connection must exist in order to selectively and actively translate a text, Sandbank points at two possible relations to translatees that I can recognize and understand: A sheer appreciation, some distant marvel at the work and its maker, that it is “perfect,” and for that – by definition, they are also “important” or “central.” Or, alternatively, another kind of closer relation, a familial feeling, a familiarity with the types of cracks, fractures, shared imperfections that are part of the texts. Maybe also some shared characteristics, shared fates.
Thinking of my own selections in these terms, this axis system between perfection and closeness or familial feeling, I can relate. There are texts I translated that I think of as perfection (some poems by Elizabeth Bishop, maybe? A Novel by Willa Cather, by Zora Neale Hurston). But more so, I relate to the second alternative. Some kind of proximity is often needed, sensing the fractures or fragility relating also to my own.
Welty’s story surely belongs to something other than the first axis type, as I felt its problems all along and struggled with them (although she is a great writer). But, while with other writers, whether it was Vivian Gornick or Lucille Clifton, I felt close to them and wished to look at them as possible siblings, here I could not feel the same. What ties me to this story? To this literary, beautifully crafted, horrific narrative?
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Months went by, and I did nothing with the translated story, did not send it to any journal, nor worked on the translation — seemingly nothing. But I continued a conversation with it in my head. Regarding its faults, its beauty, and wisdom. Its cringe effect. Then came October and November, 2023. And now I knew where the voice was coming from. Welty was indeed my sibling. Not by choice. But in a specific situation, the decision to take on the killer’s state of mind and monologize it might be your – my – duty. I understood. Among the unbearable difficulty, I felt that adding Hebrew words to the victimizer’s voice is crucial to taking some kind of responsibility while also being careful not to neglect the pain and loss. Speaking in the killer’s voice to some “you” asks the reader to be partly complicit, at least, someone who knows what happened. All of this is more than unsettling. And, without ignoring the devastating fear and pain, I believe we ought to face these parts of our “family” and with their fractures. Fractures that we might not want to identify with, but our language demands us to recognize right now.
Pondering my position when translating now evokes an image of a lonely, deserted, space. I am reminded of Abdelfattah Kilito’s thought-provoking and insightful essay “Dog Words” [v] where he contemplates the state of bilingualism by referencing ancient Arabic literature, tales, and literary figures. Kilito pictures bilingualism as taking the voice of the other, an animal, its speech, in order to find the other tribe, to locate your people, to be saved from being lost alone in the desert. He then thinks about numerous possibilities, including being lost in the “costume” or in the “masked” identity, becoming a dog. I constantly think about that state of in-between, not only as the translator in between languages (which I don’t think is the same as bilingualism) but as a member of a community that, for some (political) reason, is lost in some moral desert at night. What language can we use in order to be found, and where should or could our voices come from? That is, who are the siblings that we could find, to be in conversation with?
Reut Ben Yaakov is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University. She holds a PhD in Hebrew Literature from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is also a translator of fiction and poetry, and the editor of Tangier Publishing House’s translated poetry series, Zarra. She has translated into Hebrew books by Zora Neale Hurston, Willa Cather, Vivian Gornick, Lucille Clifton, Elizabeth Bishop, William Melvin Kelley, and others.
[i] I was invited to discuss translation and world literature in a panel, as part of the Global Jewish Modernism Lab at Duke University. This essay is a slightly edited version of my talk. Thank you, Saskia Ziolkowski and Kata Gellen, for inviting me and the opportunity; and for your impressive project, dealing smartly and broadly with Jewishness and with Modernism, two very charged notions. I thank also Avital Schkolnik, Liron Alon, Michal Zechariah and Hamussach‘s editorial team, and thank you, Stiliana Milkova, for your advice and assistance with the Hebrew translation and/or with the essay.
[ii] Pollack, Harriet, editor. New Essays on Eudora Welty, Class, and Race. University Press of Mississippi, 2020. 167 (Adrienne Akins Warfield) pp 155.
[iii] Sarah Gilbreath Ford, “Serious Daring in Eudora Welty’s ‘Powerhouse’ and ‘Where is the Voice Coming From?’” Southern Quarterly, vol. 51, no. 3, 2014, pp. 25-37.
[iv] Shimon Sandbank, Avot Ve’Ahim (Fathers and Brothers), Bnei Brak, Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2004, p. 29 (In Hebrew. My translation, R.B)
[v] Abdelfattah Kilito, “Dog words,” in: Bammer, Angelika. Displacements: Cultural Identities in Question. Indiana University Press, 1994, pp. 21-31.
Thank you for this.