Dan Ben-Amos

on translating Nathan Alterman

“A Trial Race” was first published on October 15, 1943, in the daily, newspaper Davar in the column Hatur hashevi’i (“The Seventh Column”), so named because of its regular appearance on the seventh column of the newspaper’s second page of the Friday edition. It was reprinted in a volume of Alterman’s collected newspaper poems, Hatur hashevi’i (1948), and later in an annotated and chronological edition of these poems that appeared in 2009, edited by Devorah Gilulah.

Through his mastery of poetic language, Alterman often conceals a poem’s subtle and profound meanings under the guise of colloquial idiom and political discourse, making translation challenging. In this poem two cases stand out: the title and the key word “freedom.” In Hebrew the title refers seemingly to a “practice race,” but the Hebrew word nisayon also means “experience,” “ordeal,” and “trial.” Most importantly, the radical ns”h is the verb that occurs in Genesis 22:1 of the Hebrew Bible, which describes God’s intention and action in putting Abraham through a heart-breaking ordeal of sacrificing his son Isaac. In the present poem, the use of this verb transforms comedy into tragedy. The other key word represents a different translation problem. In Hebrew there are two synonyms, ḥofesh and ḥeirut, that are cognates of the English words, “freedom” and “liberty.” Ḥeirut is of a higher register and occurs in the Mishnah (Pesaḥim 10:5) and in the Haggadah that is read ritualistically on the evening of the first day of the Passover holiday. Ḥeirut is also a charged word in Hebrew because it occurs in an idiom expressing transition from slavery to liberty. Alterman uses both nouns, but in my translation only “freedom” appears, freeing the poem from traditional associations and positioning it in the modern days’ political discourse of Roosevelt, and political situations of Alterman’s time and ours.