One of my first memories of Amos Oz is of the two of us riding imaginary horses round and round his living room. I had agreed to translate a story he had written about a band of crusaders on their way to the Holy Land. It was some fifty years ago. At that time he spoke hardly any English and I spoke little Hebrew. So we acted out all the details of the story — movements, gestures, facial expressions, and so on.
On the strength of that story I got a contract to translate his novel My Michael. I went to work with him in the kibbutz where he lived. We worked very hard (sometimes as much as 16 hours a day) and laid the foundations for a wonderful working relationship.
How did we work? First he read a chapter to me aloud in Hebrew. He had a beautiful reading voice. I paid close attention to the music of his words. Then I wrote a draft in English, and read it aloud to him. He commented on the sound of the translation, the rhythm and musical tone. He also took me on a walking tour of Jerusalem, visiting the places mentioned in the book, to make sure I had them clearly in my mind.
That was my first full-length translation and I still think it was one of the best, because of that focus on the sound and because we were both learning so much about each other and about the art of translation.
Over the years I translated sixteen more of his books but as his English and my Modern Hebrew improved and as we both became busier, our method of working changed: we tended to work at a distance, by correspondence. But our working relationship continued to grow, as did our friendship. Whenever we could we sat and worked together, as we did with The Same Sea, which is a novel in poems.
Amos Oz was a wonderful storyteller. He also loved words. The Hebrew language has a very long history, going back to the Bible, and Amos plays on the successive layers of the language, as on a musical instrument. His books are full of allusions to the Bible and other sources, which pose a challenge to a translator. Luckily English has its own store of classical literature and my translations contain allusions of their own. But Hebrew is also constantly changing and he made it his business, by keeping his ears open, to learn the latest teenage slang. His prose is like a tapestry woven with intricate patterns and colours.
A strong autobiographical element runs through his fiction, most overtly in A Tale of Love and Darkness, where he writes openly about his mother’s death from an overdose when he was twelve and his reaction to it. In retrospect some of his earlier books can be read as literary reflections on this traumatic event. Yet Amos Oz is not one of those writers who write the same book over and over again. Each book is different, responding to a specific literary challenge: a novel with no plot (My Michael), a novel with no narrator (Black Box), a novel in which the author is one of the characters (The Same Sea), and so on.
The city of Jerusalem, in which he was born and grew up, has a special role in his writing. In My Michael it is almost a character in the book, and it also serves as a metaphor, with its high walls guarding secret, forbidden places. In this and again in books like A Tale of Love and Darkness and his last novel, Judas, he takes us on walks across the city, pausing to observe some detail noticing changes, eavesdropping on conversations.
I am often asked what it is like to translate a writer like Amos Oz. Without any hesitation I can affirm that it has been a marvellously fulfilling and enriching experience. A translator is a reader who is also a writer: I read a text in one language and then write it in another. There is something magical in the way Amos’s stories enter my head in Hebrew and come out again clothed in English words.
In part this is due, I feel, to a deep affinity between us, which grew and ripened over the years like grapes on a vine, but the seeds of which were already present in those romps around the living-room floor, riding imaginary horses.
Nicholas de Lange, Professor of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at Wolfson College, Cambridge, translated 17 Amos Oz books
