Almost nothing lost in translation

BY: LILA HANFT, Staff Reporter

Fallenberg traces his love of language to his Cleveland grandmother's influence. (PHOTO / VARDI KAHANA)

Native Clevelander translates Israel's best and brightest writers

Evan Fallenberg didn't plan to make aliyah when he moved to Israel in 1985.

After a childhood spent in University Heights and Novelty, Ohio, Fallenberg attended Georgetown University's “glamorous” School of Diplomacy/International Affairs. His French was excellent - he spent his junior year abroad in Geneva, Switzerland - and after a year living in Japan, he was headed to Paris.

But Fallenberg recalls “feeling so foreign and strange there in Japan” that he found himself “looking to connect to where I came from” - his Jewish roots in Cleveland. So he decided that before Paris, he would spend a year in Israel learning Hebrew and studying biblical texts.

That year has stretched into 20, and Fallenberg, who says he really “had no Hebrew” when he arrived, has become the English translator for some of Israel's most admired literary novelists.

“I have an affinity for language, which I got from my Cleveland grandmother, Esther Gressel Fallenberg Mesnick, who passed away two years ago,” he observes. He also has extended family in Israel, including his first cousin and close friend, the writer Eve Horowitz.

“I'm finally on the path I want to be on,” says Fallenberg. “I'm so excited to get up in the morning and begin translating.” His own first novel, Light Fell, will be published next fall by Soho Press, and he's already at work on a second one.

For Fallenberg, his own writing both nurtures and is nurtured by his translating work. “Translating can be a fairly rote process, but because I've been working on books that are real masterpieces, the part of my brain engaged in writing is also engaged in translation,” he explains. “When the writer is making up words or making new metaphors, that's when (translating) is like writing - exciting and creative.”

Translating Death of a Monk by Alon Hilu - “which won every literary prize imaginable” - was a challenge because Hilu made up new words. Fallenberg made up new English words to correspond to the creative recombination of senses and ideas in Hilu's writing.

Fallenberg recently translated Meir Shalev's A Pigeon and a Boy, a book people “read as slowly as possible (because they) don't want it to end.”

“People just melt when they hear I've translated (Shalev),” he admits happily.

Shalev's writing “threw me (some) curves,” Fallenberg recalls with relish. In one instance, he encountered an expression that meant “a paragon of virtue.” But in Hebrew the words also contained food imagery. Fallenberg translated the phrase as “a tarragon of virtue.”

“When those things happen, it feels great,” he beams.

Living in Israel has been crucial to his work. “There are so many cultural references when you're translating. I can translate (them) because I'm living here and dealing with the reality here Š I have access to sights, sounds and smells.”

Sound is important for finding “the right voice” for the characters - the vocabulary, grammar and syntax that makes a character unique. In Death of a Monk, which is set in the 1840s but recorded in the 1890s, “I decided not to use any words introduced into English in the last 100 years,” Fallenberg explains. He also tried to imitate the style of the author's “long, tortured sentences.”

“When you get praise from the author - that's huge for me. Someone understands what I went through to get this,” he explains.

Unlike many translators, Fallenberg has been able to work closely with some of the writers he's translated. Many translators are not as lucky. A friend who translates the Harry Potter books into Hebrew, for example, “has no way to get access to J.K. Rowling.”

But translating Hebrew bestsellers into English is a different proposition altogether. “Israeli writers know that this is their chance to get access to a huge audience,” Fallenberg says. They're usually “happy to work with the translator” and are “very accessible.”

Fallenberg is the father of two sons; the oldest will go into the army in another half year. He feels “mixed, really mixed. You send your kids out there and hope the powers that be will do the right thing. And they don't always.”

Fallenberg admits that dwelling on the war is “paralyzing.” He listens to the war news like every other Israeli, “but at some stage, I turn on music and try to get on with life.”

His current translation project, Ron Leshem's Im Yesh Gan Eden, is told in the voice of “a 20-something-year-old soldier, really slangy,” says Fallenberg. The Hebrew title would be translated as If There Is a Heaven, he explains, but because the book is already in production as a film under the title “Beaufort,” that's what Fallenberg's translation will be called.

In any translation project, Fallenberg always has “advisers” he relies upon to confirm or clarify translation issues. “On this book, the average age of my advisers has gone way down,” he laughs. “I come to my sons for help.”

lhanft@cjn.org

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