Jerusalem, 1969 - An Encounter of Translators

In 1969, Paul Celan visited Israel, where he met old friends from Czernowitz and made the acquaintance of several Israeli poets, one of whom was Yehuda Amichai. Starting from the brief exchange of letters that followed their encounter, this talk traces the relationship between the two poets. I focus on Amichai translation of five poems by Celan, which was published during Celan’s visit. Reading the drafts of these translations, preserved in the Yehuda Amichai archive at the Yale Beinecke library, I show that the translation was a collaboration between the two poets. I use the collaboration between the two poets to think more broadly about the ground that the poets shared, despite many differences between them, a ground constituted by the crossing-over between German and Hebrew.
Vorbereitende Lektüre: Paul Celan: Mandorla. In: Die Niemandsrose. S. Fischer: Frankfurt a.M., 1963, S. 42.

Na’ama Rokem teaches Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago, where she is currently chair of the Department of Comparative Literature and has been the director of the Joyce Z. and Jacob Greenberg Center for Jewish Studies. Her research focuses on the poetics of bilingualism and self-translation. Her book Zionism in Translation: Encounters in the German-Hebrew Archive is forthcoming with University of Chicago Press in October 2026.