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Translation
Bibliography
Haim Watzman’s translations of non-fiction
books and articles on a wide range of subjects by well-known
Israeli writers have been published in major academic
journals and general periodicals such as The New
Yorker and The New York Times. Read his
translation of Amos Oz's story "Heirs" in
The New Yorker here.
Published book translations include:
| Tamar El-Or,
Reserved Seats: Religion, Gender and Ethnicity in
Contemporary Israel, Wayne State University Press,
in process. |
| Menachem Klein,
A Possible Peace, Columbia University Press, 2007. |
| Hillel Cohen,
Army of Shadows: Palestinian Collaboration with
Zionism, 1917-1948, University of California Press,
2007. |
| Yaakov Lozowick,
Hitler's Bureaucrats: The Nazi Security Police and
the Banality of Evil, Continuum, 2003. |
| Menachem Klein,
The Jerusalem Problem: The Struggle for Permanent
Status, University of Florida Press, 2003. |
| David Grossman,
Death as a Way of Life, Farrar Straus, 2003. |
| Igal Sarna,
The Man Who Fell into a Puddle, Knopf, 2002. |
| Tom Segev,
Elvis in Jerusalem, Metropolitan, 2002. |
Tamar El-Or,
Next Pesach: Literacy and Identity among Young Orthodox
Jewish Women, Wayne State University Press, 2002. |
| Menachem Klein,
Jerusalem: The Contested City, Hurst/NYU Press,
2001. |
| Tom Segev,
One Palestine Complete, Metropolitan, 2000. |
| Oz Almog,
The Sabra: A Portrait, California University Press,
2000. |
Tamar El-Or,
Educated and Ignorant: On Ultra-Orthodox Women and
Their World, Lynne Reinner, 1993. |
| David Grossman,
Sleeping on a Wire, Farrar Straus, 1993. |
| Tom Segev,
The Seventh Million, Hill & Wang, 1993. |
| David Grossman,
The Yellow Wind, Farrar Straus, 1988. |
Haim Watzman on Translation
“As a translator
who works mostly on non-fiction, I will not express
an opinion here about the right, or responsibility,
of a translator confronting a work of fiction to alter
the original. But in non-fiction — in particular,
scholarly and academic non-fiction — such alterations
are not only inevitable but are in fact a sacred duty.
This does not imply any disparagement of non-fiction
as a genre. Quite the opposite — my opinion is
that the quality of the writing in non-fiction today
is in many cases much higher than that in what is termed
“literature” by those for whom that term
is synonymous with fiction. No writer in any field sits
down to write a book or article without investing time
and thought in his writing. Most of my clients consider
their books to be literary works even if they are not
novels or stories.
“There are,
however, fundamental differences between a novel and
a book of non-fiction, say a work of history. A writer
of fiction can choose a complex style, make use of symbols,
of a variety of techniques; in short, he can impose
upon his reader in all sorts of ways, and that is considered
art, whether successful or unsuccessful. But a person
who writes a history that no one understands misses
his target. So a fundamental axiom of the translation
of non-fiction is that the translator has to get the
writer’s message across clearly, and sometimes
that demands certain changes in the text — in
its style, in its choice of words, sometimes even in
its contents. So the translator of non-fiction is actually
doing the work that a good editor at a respectable publishing
house does — bridging between the writer and his
audience, negotiating between the need of the author
to express himself as he sees fit and the right of the
reader to receive a comprehensible manuscript.”
From: “Translating
in Nabokov’s Shadow: Some Thoughts on Translating
Non-Fiction,” by Haim
Watzman
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