Denis Ferhatovic
on translating Samuel M. Elazar (compiler)
I do not know exactly why this cantica spoke to me. It seems like it sprang to my attention like its characters, the gently competing plants. I have attempted to reproduce some of the delicate balance of tone, the sense of importance of the rose, carnation, and rue tempered by their joint praise of the Creator. The echoes became important to keep since they highlight the individual strengths of the speakers and fold them into the larger structure of God’s creation and the assembled cantica itself: “It is my turn to praise.../ I am praised”; “Great is my renown./ I am the rose of…”; “They love me like their souls./… I guard their soul.” While I could not maintain the inconsistent yet fascinating rhyming sequence (likely resulting from the composite nature of the cantica), I included some alliteration and assonance to give coherence and delicacy to the text. Incidentally, the letter r occurs in almost every line of my rendition.
The plants argue for their centrality in human lives as they appear in crucial life events like courting, wedding, and childbirth. They can heal sore eyes and protect from the evil eye. The rose — entering like a mighty queen with the direction “All of you step aside” (“Todus kedin a un ladu,” literally “All [of you] stay on one side”) – underlines her role in cosmetics and cuisine. Nehama-Cantera’s Judeo-Spanish/French dictionary confirms that the rue protects against the evil eye according to Sephardic folk beliefs, adorning women in childbirth and children to ensure their health; our present-day encyclopedias, however, warn that the plant in large doses can act as an abortifacient, damage liver, and even lead to death.
about the author
* The text comes from Samuel M. Elazar’s El romancero judeo-español (romances y otras poesías) (Sarajevo, 1987; reprinted Paris, 2008). Judeo-Spanish is here written using the Serbo-Croatian/Croato-Serbian Roman alphabet: č = ch; j = y; nj = ñ; š = sh; ž = zh (or j in French).
In his endnotes, Samuel Elazar reports that he compiled “Cantica de Floris” from folk-song fragments he received from Gina Finci and Rikica Gottesman and those he found in the collection of Nina Škoro-Levi, which had probably been recorded by her sister, the foremost Bosnian Sephardic woman intellectual, poet, and playwright Laura Papo Bohoreta (1892-1942).
Born in Gračanica and living in Sarajevo for most of his life, Elazar (1902-1989) was a pharmacist by training with a strong interest in art, history, and philosophy. During World War II, he hid with his family in Zenica where he worked as a pharmacist for a mine; the rest of his and his wife’s family perished in the Holocaust. After his retirement, he dedicated himself to collecting and preserving oral tradition in his mother tongue, Judeo-Spanish. Elazar’s continuous study of medicinal plants, attested in his scientific publications, must have inspired him to assemble “Cantica de Floris.”
about the translator
Denis Ferhatović (b. 1980) is a Bosnian-American scholar and writer, working and playing with English, French, Turkish, Indonesian, South Slavic microlanguages, and medieval Germanic and Romance languages. His essays, poems, reviews, translations, and co-translations have been published in Rumba under Fire, Index on Censorship, The Riddle Ages, Iberian Connections, Turkoslavia, Trinity Journal of Literary Translation (JoLT), DoubleSpeak, and Asymptote. His scholarly work appears in various journals and essay collections. His monograph Borrowed Objects and the Art of Poetry: Spolia in Old English Verse came out in 2019.
photo by Sanaa Patel
