Lectura de información (Objeto) Estado técnico general.

Approaching translation in a Diderotian manner requires the translator to list the external characteristics of the speaking “voices” which are contained within it and to link them to archetypical “voice models” in the target language, literary or otherwise. This can be accompanied by noting typical figures of speech, grammatical structures and other

useful linguistic phenomena which originate from the models. Then the translator can make his or her best attempt to create a linguistic match between the model and the actual target text.

The three major voices which appear in section [A] of the chapter I selected from Gil Hovav’s Family Cooking are: Hovav himself, who functions as the narrator, Leah Abushdid, his maternal grandmother (also known as Mooma), and Drora Ben Avi, his mother. As noted earlier, a good model upon which one may start constructing Hovav’s narrating voice in English translation can be found in the writings of Gerald Durrell. Like Durrell, the narrator in My Family and Other Animals, Beasts, Birds and Relatives, and The Garden of the Gods, Hovav describes his own exotic childhood in a humorous manner, warmly depicting the shortcomings of his family. Hovav’s use of language, like Durrell’s, is rich and fluent. Finding a specific linguistic model for Mooma is more difficult. Being a cosmopolitan, lively, arrogant, hot-tempered and fearless elderly woman, she is defined by her rather unique character. Her idiosyncratic use of language – a funny mixture of Biblical Hebrew, highbrow early modern Hebrew, Ladino and French – distinguishes her linguistic voice even further. In order to portray her, I chose to use some general attributes of early modern English grammar, together with some of the hot-tempered style of Spiro Hakiaopulos, Durrell’s belligerent and tongue-tied family driver in The Corfu Trilogy. A better knowledge of English literature would surely have helped me find more concrete and adequate models for her. Finally, Drora is depicted as a sharp-tongued woman, as energetic as her mother but not as confident, who admires her children and fears irrationally for their lives. Apparently, however, she has no problem threatening them with horrible deaths now and then. One could say that she has honed complaining to an art form. She has been characterised by Hovav as manifesting ‘amused

malice’ (1996: 35, my translation). I chose to link the voice of Drora with the depiction of Durrell’s elder brother, Larry (the writer and poet Lawrence Durrell), who is characterised in the books as an educated, witty whiner who expects his family to do everything for him and is genuinely surprised each time they refuse. Larry exudes an air of decadent calmness, and his utter laziness contradicts Drora’s constant buzzing and frequent changes of mood. For this reason, I ‘seasoned’ my translation with the erratic and amusing epistolary style of a personal friend of mine in order to add the “zest” that is lacking in Larry’s linguistic portrayal.

(Hovav 1996, my translation) [See Appendix, section A] A Yemeni Yidishe Chicken Soup

Every year, in the month of July, with its rising temperatures and falling humidity, my mother would go through a nervous breakdown. The heat waves, her children, her job, her life in general and my father in particular would get on her nerves. At this stage she used to summon me and list the praises of a horseback riding and English grammar summer camp somewhere around the outskirts of Gedera, remind me that my favourite cousins are about to go there, lie shamelessly about me looking like a born rider, and even insinuate kindly that any refusal would be unthinkable, or, if thinkable, would lead to my immediate deportation to a military boarding school or a kibbutz. ‘So have it your way,’ my mother would conclude, ‘you can choose. And don’t forget that all the kibbutzim are riddled with spiders. You haven’t been there, but take my word for it.’

I actually did take her word for it, but still I refused to be sent to a summer camp. For as far as I was concerned, two months away from school were a golden opportunity to spy after Mooma and finally find out how she makes marzipan.

‘Thou shall not let your precious into my kitchen!’, startled Mooma when her daughter informed her that summer vacation had broken out, and that everyone

should share the effort and entertain the boy. ‘This is not a boy, this is an Amalekite! All day long roaming the streets, then strays into my kitchen, dressed as I know not what, hungry as un aborigène and as rude as a coachman. I can bear him not. Thus I swear, Dror, if you do not send him far away I shall go myself and move into a guest house.’

‘I just entered the kitchen for a moment,’ I dared, ‘to see how you cook marzipan.’

‘See how you cook marzipan,’ imitated Mooma in considerable disgust. ‘Do you know what this crazy child did? Three days ago he spilled a potful of marzipan into the meshikela, I thought I would perish and die.’

‘But you asked me to wash that pot,’ I tried to protest.

‘Yes, but without the marzipan, you jackass! No, no, I shall not hear half a word about this vacation. I shall not set a foot in this kitchen until I see you send him to this place or the other. And better make haste, or I throw myself upon the railway.’ So we all drove to aunt Reuma in Wingate.

‘I really hope they installed their kitchen by now,’ said my mother on our way to Wingate. She sat in the car’s front seat, next to my father, chain smoking, one eye watching the speedometer and the other looking at me through the mirror. ‘I really don’t understand how they live a full year with no kitchen. When I merely think of what you, Moshe, would have done to me had I told you to go and fetch soup from some central kitchen, and do slow down, you make me feel sick. Soup! Imagine that. And all the shame for this too, because Reuma can make surprisingly good soup. She really can. Unlike your other relatives, she knows the proper amount of spices to use. And Moshe, I swear that if you don’t slow down now I turn you over to the police at the next junction. But Reuma clearly doesn’t like to cook, and David lets her get away with it. What does he care, home made soup or soup from a central kitchen. He probably haven’t even heard that last year when the children stayed with them they went to fetch food at eight at night and there were frogs outside. Frogs! By all that is holy. Frogs are venomous, aren’t they? And who knows what other beasts live there, and do stop the car right now and let me down. Gili, you are getting down with me. We take a taxi from here. Your father can die by himself.’

picking machine. ‘When your mother is having this mood,’ he explained to me once, ‘I consider renting her out to the kibbutzim for a daily fee. They could use her there as an instrument for picking fruit off the trees. She would walk in the orchards along the lines and shout, and the fruit would fall off by itself, untouched, driven by fear.’

The translation of this passage owes a lot to strategies which were inspired by Diderot’s theory of acting. I consciously avoided delving into the passions which drive the speaking characters, attempted to adopt archetypical literary models and observed my linguistic surrounding in order to fine-tune the outcome.