Translation

American Poetry Review, The, Jan/Feb 2004 by Grushka, Reesa

Maybe that is the reason that I understood, after two hours of talk in which words flitted like small birds around me, the third man to address the panel during the question period. he rose, wearing blue jeans and white running shoes, and said slowly and clearly, but with raw energy, "This is a conference about hospitality." It was a question, and everyone nodded and muttered affirmatives. "But..."

The bad Bezeq wine burned in my throat. I felt suddenly heavy, as if all evening, I had been a marvelous balloon in Bohumil Hrabal's warehouse, floating near the ceiling among hundreds of others, and suddenly the foreman, walking along far below, had yanked the string with my nametag hanging off it, and pulled me down for the first time near the factory floor, among the machinery and dust. "But why," asked the man from the audience, "all this talk about hospitality without any address of the lack of hospitality in this country for Arab-Israelis?" For two or three minutes the panel shuffled the question back and forth among themselves, and the audience coughed and ruffled its programs. Finally, Jacques Derrida raised his white head to speak into the microphone, and said, he was sorry but he could not understand the speaker's English. "Can you please repeat your question?" asked the panel. And the student did-for he was clearly a student-and Derrida repeated his question. Back and forth they went, the panel growing into a chorus of incomprehension, the young man growing red, Jacques Derrida growing silent. The air in the hall was as thick as the ancient tar that sucked in dinosaurs and mastodons, preserving only their bones and tusks. The moderator, a woman averagely groomed and tailored, said at last, "Please step away from the microphone and allow someone else to speak," and the rest of the evening passed in an efficient fever.

No one said anything about it later in the sherut taxi back to Jerusalem. I said nothing. The moon shrugged its crescent beyond the open window of the darkened van. Below it, palm trees hung their heads in the metallic light of streetlamps, casting wild shadows on the road. The shoulders of prostitutes flashed sometimes between those shadows, and the stars were, each one, singly white. I could feel the road through the floor of the van, the way it used to be in the cars of my childhood, humming at the soles of my feet and up along the tibia to the knee. Orlando and Harvard had their heads pressed close together like lovers. The evening bound them together in its fusing pressure. I could smell the ocean pulling away from us as we turned East again toward the hills.

There was a button in the pocket of the light coat I had worn to Tel Aviv, and into its concave surface I pressed go-nowhere thoughts: Not only nominally distinct languages, but dialects as well require translation, I thought. Even different experiences that transpire within the circumference of the same word, set off from one another by the speakers' statuses, can make strangers of expressions that, from the outside, look identical. 'Freedom,' 'virtue,' 'happiness'; what a sham their likeness is between one mouth and another. Derrida's deafness was not therefore a moral failing, I argued to my button, but a mechanical mishap, a failed code.