Only two days have passed since they were banished to the boat but already the summer’s inevitable fractiousness has made itself apparent. They know there is always this period of adjustment, this is their sixth year now under this…
I carry her in my fingertips when I’m far from home. Feeling the heat of her skin if I press thumb and index finger together hard enough. I can trick myself into her softness if I brush my thumb…
In late August, his son began to insist aliens lived in the cornfields that stretched west from the outskirts of the town they lived in. Not playacting. Not childlike. They needed, his son solemnly said, to be ready for…
I want to be a better person, so I hide my bad habits. When I lived alone, in a chilly, oceanside city, I let the evidence accumulate like flotsam around me. Now, I’m twenty-seven and I live in my…
Along Route 322, an often-traveled roadway of my childhood, past the turnoffs for Annville, Cleona, and Quentin, a thing of exquisite and recurring beauty—an automobile salvage yard that everyone simply called “the junkyard.” Cars dumped and clumped, leaning affectionately…
Essay by April Yee • How do we reconstruct a self that has been erased? Whether the erasure is the result of forces macro (a police state) or micro (an abusive parent), what remains is the need to fill…
By Mark David Kaufman • James Joyce once observed that he had included so many “enigmas and puzzles” in Ulysses that professors would be preoccupied with the book “for centuries”—an effective way, he added, of “insuring one’s immortality.” Such…
At the time, she was Xandra. The decapitated torso of Alexandra. Her given name was Mary, but do you see Marys anywhere but behind the fluorescent Market Basket checkout, looking depressed and forty? September, seventh grade, the Latin teacher…
That Friday night, on her way back from the library, Jia saw a boy in a baseball cap coming toward her. She listed to the side, knelt to tie one shoe, then the other, hoping he’d walk past. But…
Everything about Shiraz’s mom is dark and shiny, especially her black vinyl coat. Her lipstick is the same deep purple as the polish on her long nails and her high-heeled strappy sandals. I once asked Mom to try on…
Since my arrival to the US in 2015, I have become increasingly obsessed with translation. I do not mean the academic philosophy of translation; not even a remotely textual notion of it. I have simply been reflecting on how to translate my being into an American context. Being surrounded by other foreigners, I quickly realized they were trying to do the same, to learn what to say, when to say it, and how to adjust their volume of speech and appropriate distance from other people’s faces during a conversation.
It’s common in Israel to joke about Israeli confident direct translation into English, resulting in expressions like “it was hot bombs” and “let’s talk postcards,” which will only make you laugh if you have access to the source language. Otherwise, they are just strange. What, then, about the common ugly, bigoted expressions? In this senseless direct translation, they too would lose most if not all meaning.
These thoughts led me to “go live with the Arabs.” In the dominant Israeli right-wing discourse, it has become popular to verbally “send” suspected leftists and other sorts of perceived threats to national security to reside with the Arabs, where their traitorous likes belong. I would need dozens of pages just to explain this expression, including its bitter irony and the sociopolitical failure it epitomizes. Instead, I decided to offer it up as is—senseless.
This was my entryway to convey something of the ever-untranslatable notion of childhood, of girlhood, especially in a foreign context—my foreign context. I decided not to try to properly translate the little girls of 1990s Israel, but rather to let them speak directly, strangely, in an English not their own. The English of those who see themselves as being so close to America that they are virtually part of it, when in fact they are as far as imaginably possible.
LITAL ABAZON is a PhD candidate at the Department of Comparative Literature at Yale University. She works on multilingual literature in Israel and the Maghreb. Her Hebrew poetry has been published in Ma’ayan Magazine. This is her first English literary publication.
