Any Shilon – How I translated „The book of Whispers” in hebrew

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So, apparently I have to speak about my feelings during

the  translation of „The Book of Whispers” into Hebrew. Not easy, since there are a lot of things which touch the heart, but refuse to become words. And there are feelings, which can not be shared.. Just some of them….

Anyway, the first thing I want to say, I already told Mr. Vosganian during our first phone call. After reading this book, I considered the possibility to translate it as a great honour. Because that in  my opinion, it is one of the greatest books about the 19-th and  20-th century ever written. Because it is in the same time powerful and sensitive, because it presents in the simplest of ways the most complicated situations of life, how people react in limit-situations,their struggle with and against the world and themselves, the most common and in the same time the most sofisticated relationships between people. It is a book about humanity,a book that breathes great human love.

No doubt that it impressed me deeply, and I cried, laughed, was nostalgic, joyous or suffered together with each and every one of the characters, especialy knowing that each of them is – or was – real. Not forgeting that the main character‘s name in this book is Genocide.

 

I suppose, in some way this book’s translation  was harder for me than for other translators – except for the  Armenian translator – and I am sure that for the Israeli reader it will be harder than for others, as well.

 

Belonging to the second generation of survivors from the next genocide, the one which followed the Armenian genocide, I could not prevent my mind from overlapping images and situations.

  While reading about young Maro, the beautiful and delicate girl who jumped into the river, I saw my mother’s sisters too, 17 and 13 years old, two beautiful,wonderful girls, and was thinking about what we know that happened to them, and moreover, about what we don’t know.

I read about „the woman’s crusade” – and it was strange enough to meet the same expression in the memories  of a

German-Jewish lady doctor, trying like thousands of other

Jewish women to save her family.

I saw against my eyes the fiercie deportations, the sending to death of the Armenian people and the diabolic „seven circles of death”, and in the same time I envisioned the concentration camps and the marches to death of the Jewish people in Transnistria or  from Auschwitz to Buchenwald….

  But I smiled too, reading about the wonderful Mr. Hartin Fringhian and his testament.It reminded me of my

father, one of the best people I ever knew. All his life he was certain that one day he will  win a huge prize in the lottery, so in the meantime he made lists that  included people who he wanted to help. And,like Hartin Fringhian, he added every time new names. Both of them were practically pennyless, so  the tragic and in the same time optimistic and benevolent similitude is perfect.

There were other unforgetable thoughts too – about the few brave people who helped and saved lives, about the not many who saved Armenian children, or the old Romanian peasant who, risking his life, saved my father in law from the Iasi ” Train of death”, or the friendly Mr.Stefan Ovanezian from Galaţi, who sent his four  children to stay long hours in row to buy food for the jewish neighbours, in times when jews were not allowed to buy practically anything.  

  And more and more thoughts… the wonderful

narations, the history and the people coming alive again,

and the „air de temps”,as well as my childhood memories.

 I remember the chestnut and walnut trees, with which I am still in love, the fructiferous trees in the  yards, the perfume  of the linden blossom, the smell of the fresh fried  and fine-grinded coffee, the smoke in the yards where housewives prepaired in autumn all kind of vegetable preserves, and „bulion” and „zacusca” and jam for winter, the cities, the streets,the games and pranks –  a wonderful world of childhood, lost in the mist of memories.

  As far as the language used, it is  an extraordinary language, of cristal like purity. I saw today in the

website that somebody already used this comparison, but still I will use it, thus only proving how true it is. The language is perfectly  adapted to each persona, making each character come to life under the reader’s astonished eyes, a wonderful language of slavonic (slavic) and ottoman archaismes, with their unmistakeable and almost lost scent – unfortunately, for a lot of  them  there are no equivalents in hebrew. As for me, they were a big enjoyment…

 I was continuously under the sensation that I am translating a book full of violence and hate, but whose mission is to fight against violence, against hate between people, no matter to which God they pray and if they even pray to any God, regardless of their political ideas, a book written against any totalitarism of any colour…

 

And so, in this state of mind, „Cartea Şoaptelor” became

 „ספר  הלחישות”, 

„The book of whispers”