The Wisdom of the Group: Barefoot Interpreting of a Poem
Submitted by:
Lilach Naishtat Bornstein
Abstract:
"Poetry gives most pleasure when only generally and not perfectly understood" (S.T. Coleridge). And indeed, the hundreds of interpretations written about his Christabel since its publication in 1816 do not provide a perfect understanding of it. If it is true, as well, that a poem's literary value may be gauged by its "untranslatableness in words of the same language" (ibid), perhaps it is not so surprising that a group of Israeli female lay readers, in discussing a Hebrew translation of this fragment, offered significant insights into it.
Naishtat-Bornstein, a literary scholar and an activist, had created the first translation into Hebrew of Christabel (Even Hoshen 2011). During the workshop she will present her journey in the footsteps of the poem; the change she went through-- from a professional literary scholar to a 'barefoot reader'; the popular reading group in which she participated and for whose benefit she created the translation and the interpretation that this group wove around this poem. The participants of the workshop will be invited to experience 'barefoot' interpreting, examine various options for translating, and devise creative solutions for translating segments of text from Christabel, that originally exposes the tension between the comprehensibility and the incomprehensibility.