Adriana X Jacobs - A gift from Sinai: Translation and nation-building

In the early decades of the twentieth century, as the European literary enclaves of Hebrew literature began to move and consolidate their operations in Palestine, translation reinforced its status as a major, indispensable component of modern Hebrew literary production. In this talk, I will discuss the Hebrew translation economy in Mandatory Palestine and specifically address the role that the translation of poetry played in the development of Hebrew as a national literary language. Drawing my examples from the 1942 anthology, Shirat rusiya (Russian Poetry), I will show how Hebrew poet-translators engaged literary translation as a mode that simultaneously supported and unsettled the nation-building project.