Adriana Jacobs
Photo by Tahel Frosh
Bio
Adriana X. Jacobs is associate professor of modern Hebrew literature at the University of Oxford, where is she is affiliated with the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies and the research center Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation. She is the author of Strange Cocktail: Translation and the Making of Modern Hebrew Poetry (University of Michigan Press, 2018), which explores the relation between poetry and writing in the development of 19th- and 20th-century modern Hebrew poetry. Her translations of Hebrew poetry have appeared in print and online in Gulf Coast, Anomaly, World Literature Today, North American Review, Seedings, the Ilanot Review, among others, and in the volume Women’s Hebrew Poetry on American Shores: Poems by Anne Kleiman and Annabelle Farmelant (Wayne State UP). She is the recipient of a 2015 PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant for her translation of Vaan Nguyen’s The Truffle Eye, which is forthcoming in 2020 with Zephyr Press.
Project Description
To support the translation from the Hebrew of the poetry collection Avarice by Israeli writer Tahel Frosh. In this debut collection, Frosh (b. 1977) examines how economic policies have shaped Israeli lives for better or worse. At the heart of these poems is the father figure, and Frosh's father in particular, who spends his waking hours far from his family at work and comes home late only to decompress in front of the television. In one poem, “Accountant,” it is not until the father is diagnosed with a terminal illness that his child is finally able to see him. Frosh's own father, the inspiration for this and many other poems in the collection, died shortly after its publication.
The National Endowment for the Arts award is a meaningful affirmation of the value of Tahel Frosh’s poetry and my translation of it into English, but I also don’t want to underestimate the significance of the financial award that comes with this recognition. It is taken for granted that literary translators receive little to no remuneration for their labors, even though translation itself takes time, effort, and resources. It doesn’t escape me that I have been given this award to support the translation of a book where issues of money are central. Frosh herself has noted that we can learn a great deal about the kind of future a society imagines for itself and its citizens from how much it invests in the arts. Indeed, the poems of Frosh’s Avarice ask us to think—really think—about what it means “to make a living.” And while there is much to celebrate about the growing interest in literary translation, the reality is that most translators do not make a living from it. They fit translation in around other responsibilities, in the hours before or after work, after children have gone to bed. Or they juggle multiple translation projects at once, hoping to be paid on time so they can pay for the roof over their head. In fact, we could add translators to Frosh’s observation that “only rich people can be artists writers teachers and not starve to death.” The NEA acknowledges this reality, and for that I am grateful.