Yoram Kaniuk's final novel: a case of something being lost in translation?

Translation is a tricky business. Taking a book’s setting, physical and cultural, and trying to convey it to an audience unfamiliar with it is challenging. Doing so while maintaining the sense of the original language’s flow is even harder. Yet we rely on translation to communicate and understand cultures different from our own. In shapeshifting one language into another, and in reading the result of such a strangely magical act, a window to empathy opens.

Between Life and Death – the final novel of Yoram Kaniuk, the well-known Israeli writer who died in 2013 – was released this September via Restless Books and was translated by Barbara Harshav. The book is classic Kaniuk in that it is a kind of auto-fiction in which real life and memoir blend with style and language and humor. Cultural references abound, meaning cultural differences do too, but these pale in comparison to the universality of the experience Kaniuk has documented. In the novel, originally published in 2007, the narrator (also named Yoram Kaniuk) goes on a stream-of-consciousness journey around and within the death he plunged into and emerged from during his weeks-long coma following the removal of a cancerous growth in his intestines.

In the months after the coma, having returned from nowhere – which is what he experienced in death – he can barely communicate. He was in an isolation unit for much of that time with nothing but memories, the pigeons on the windowsill, and his drug-induced hallucinations to keep his mind busy. Kaniuk’s book joins a strange genre of books about experiences from inside diseases, such as Over My Head by Claudia L Osborn. But Between Life and Death shares more with The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby, and both share the intensely personal and yet fascinatingly general experience of those who have been incapacitated by disease.

Reading Between Life and Death in translation is a strange experience for someone fluent in both Hebrew and English. Grammatical oddities are immediately recognizable, the original words jumping out of the translation like Jacks-in-the-Box. An example is the phrase “go know”, one of many idiosyncratic Hebrew phrases. “Go know” is the direct, literal translation of לך תדע, and while it is almost “who knows?” and almost “go figure”, it’s not quite either of them. Translator Barbara Harshav has let the wording stand, which to a Hebrew speaker can be maddening, knowing the meaning of the phrase and how it won’t necessarily be understood by a non-Hebrew speaker. And yet the awkwardness of the phrase stands proud and distinct in its otherness, which allows the reader to remember that this is, in fact, a translation from a language with its own unique rhythm.

Other clear markers of translation include street names whose English versions on the actual signs in Tel Aviv are in memory (and Google Maps) different from the spelling used by the translator; knowing that “grave garden” is a massaging of the more literal and cumbersome translation “garden of the dead”; and recognizing that words that are only verbs in Hebrew are both verbs and nouns in English, making them more ambiguous.

None of which is to say that Harshav’s translation is bad – it is, in fact, excellent. And it elegantly brings forth both Kaniuk’s peculiarly beautiful style and the Israeli culture and life that he both disdained and loved. His voice in translation is reminiscent of Israeli expats in New York telling stories of their parents who lived on this or that kibbutz, who left their doors unlocked, who watched the sea from Tel Aviv balconies now blocked by the hotels and luxury condos that have been built there. These complaints and joys are familiar – they sound like ones that anyone in the west could express when talking about “the old times”.

Language and style aren’t the only concerns, though. Politics is hard to translate without providing context, and easy for readers to gloss over, but it needn’t be. Indeed, even in politics of particular places – in this case the Arab-Israeli conflict – there is a seemingly never-changing sense of injustice, which is, after all, not a particular concern but one inhabiting most places.

Similarly, the book’s take on the medical establishment is eerily familiar. In one memorable scene, Kaniuk describes a chief doctor’s excitement at showing a group of nurses and internists how to put in a feeding tube. In another, Kaniuk is washed by two young women who thrust him back and forth between them in a tub, until one of them realizes that he is actually a sentient being. The humiliation that so many experience with disease, the dehumanizing of the elderly, and the frustration of living inside a coherent mind connected to a body stripped of its independence – these aren’t foreign ideas. They’re not particularly Jewish or Israeli – they’re human.

Translation captures voices, moments, and experiences that are often unfamiliar – it’s part of why we read. But it also captures the falseness of our conception of the “other” as we recognize ourselves in countries, hospitals, beds, and beaches far from our own small worlds. This experience is too often relegated to non-English speakers, but translations to English are just as important, especially with the insularity that many English speakers have, trusting as we do to the internationality of our language standing head and shoulders above the rest. Books like Between Life and Death, along with the various famed translated auto-fiction of recent years, from Karl Ove Knausgaard’s struggle to Elena Ferrante’s love affairs, assure us that it doesn’t.