Dov Taylor – The Work and Art of Translation

Dov Taylor will discuss his newly published book, Sound an Alarm!, a translation of Joseph Perl’s Revealer of Secrets and Testing the Righteous – the first Hebrew novels – focusing on the work and art of translation. 

Is it even possible to translate a 200-year-old satire written in an ancient language that has been intentionally corrupted by its author for its comedic effect? Should we translate words or units of meaning? Do the words tell us the meaning of the text or does the text explain the words? Are there any untranslatable words? How is the translation shaped by the audience for whom it is intended? And what, after all, is the goal of a translation?

“Translation as an activity is an endlessly entertaining and illuminating way to engage with a text, and translations as end products give readers the chance to experience that same engagement….” (Damion Searls, The Philosophy of Translation).

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Ordained at the Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion in New York City in 1968, Dov Taylor has served congregations in Concord, New Hampshire, Boston, and Highland Park, Illinois, where he is Rabbi Emeritus. He is now rabbi of Chavurat Ki-tov: A Gathering for Jewish Life and Learning here in Woodstock. Dov has taught at Brandeis University and the Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem. He was a Visiting Scholar at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, and the Daniel Jeremy Silver Fellow at the Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard University. 

In his teaching and preaching, Rabbi Taylor has been an outspoken advocate of reconciliation and peace based on justice between Israel and Palestine. In 2016, he led an interfaith experience of Israel and Palestine to enable participants to meet both Palestinians and Israelis as human beings, and to witness first-hand the Occupation, the confiscation of Palestinian land, the destruction of Palestinian homes and property, and the extra-judicial murder of Palestinians. The experience led to the riveting documentary film, Seeing through the Wall: Meeting Ourselves in Palestine and Israel, by Woodstock’s own award-winning filmmaker, Anne Macsoud.

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From the publisher, Hebrew Union College Press.:

Published in Vienna in 1819, Joseph Perl’s  Revealer of Secrets was the most devastating and best-known parody produced by the Haskalah movement. Its milieu is that of Ukrainian, Polish, and Russian Jewry at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Drawing on forms from the eighteenth-century European epistolary novel, the khsidic holy book, khsidic and rabbinic letters, and the Austrian comic tradition, and drawing inspiration from the masterpiece of biblical parody – The Book of Esther – Perl unleashed a broadside that, in the words of one modern critic, “was to become a classic of Hebrew literature, a masterpiece of invective and the first Hebrew novel.”

Perl’s related volume, Boḥen Tsaddiq [Testing the Righteous], was published in 1838. TR is a sequel to RS, consisting of a discussion of readers’ reactions to the earlier work, including criticism of the author’s use of khsidic sources. Each of the criticisms is, of course, convincingly rebutted, as the entire work is crafted to lend authenticity to RS. Ovadya reappears as the narrator in TR. Its plot revolves around the search for a completely honest man, in the course of which, representatives of the various elements of Jewish society are reviewed and their defects exposed. The parade of failures includes, not only khsidim, but also rabbis, businessmen, craftsmen, and even maskilim. As the search concludes, the honest man turns out to be neither a khsidic tzadek nor even a maskil, but a pious farmer in a Jewish agricultural utopia in the Crimean Peninsula. Perl’s vision of utopia thus rejects not only Hasidism but also the idea of a return to Palestine, envisioning instead a life of productive labor in the Diaspora.