Acclaimed translator Eli Bijaoui visited professor Sara Hascal’s class on Thursday to discuss his artistic process and life projects. Bijaoui has been translating French and English plays, across all genres, into Hebrew for 20 years. He grew up in a multilingual home and today speaks five languages. “Translation is cultural work,” Bijaoui said, “it’s not simply converting language to language. It’s importing culture.” Bijaoui emphasized the creativity needed for translation, specifically for visual art like theater. Hebrew’s unique dichotomy between the modern, secular rebirth and biblical antiquity results in a very layered writing and translation process.
As a Hebrew translator, he is tasked with an additional layer of complexity in converting various ancient places and times into the present moment. When tasked with translating texts such as Shakespeare, he struggled with determining how to convey the past with current themes. The class asked the age-old question posed to translators for centuries: what is lost in translation? “There’s a covenant with the audience and performance to be open to receiving language and culture … the experience of translation is creating access to another culture, and this will always be a greater gain than what you lose,” Bijaoui answered. He emphasized the idea that part of being a translator means working yourself into the translation, balancing the already written work and the new piece you are creating.
In a more technical sense of what is “lost,” Bijaoui described his experience translating “Mamma Mia” into Hebrew, specifically the music. Audiences have listened to ABBA music on the radio decades before the Israeli “Mamma Mia” was produced, building an expectation for a certain rhythm. Hebrew is a more condensed language than English, taking fewer words to say the same thing. Recreating the same English musical rhythm with Hebrew words is very difficult, as is finding translations for words that don’t exist in Hebrew, like “chiquitita.” Bijaoui delivered his lecture in Hebrew and showed clips from a production he translated, “Angels in America,” which is currently still running in Tel Aviv at the Cameri Theatre.
