Search

There is no agreement over the term ‘Modern Hebrew Poetry’. Although most scholars tend to identify the modern period with the emergence of the Haskala ‘Hebrew Enlightenment’ at the end of the 18th century, it seems appropriate to begin with the towering figure of the philosopher and mystic Moses Hayyim Luzzatto (1707–1746), who was also a gifted poet and author of the first Modern Hebrew treatises on poetics and rhetoric. In the 11th chapter of his book of poetics לשון למודים lešon limmudim ‘A Tongue for Teaching’, Luzzatto proposed three possible poetic styles: a mosaic-lik…

Because of the diasporic multilingualism of the Jews, translation is crucially important in both religious and secular contexts. The transition to new speech areas entailed the need both to integrate influences from the surrounding cultures into Hebrew and to open up to the respective local languages. Here, the traditions of Jewish translations are characterized by a lack of continuity for there is a continuing tension between striving for and rejecting translations, as well as adapting linguistic elements from other cultures.1. IntroductionThe Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) contain…

Aufgrund der diasporischen Mehrsprachigkeit der Juden kommt der Übersetzung in religiösen wie säkularen Kontexten eine zentrale Bedeutung zu. Mit dem Übertritt in neue Sprachräume ergab sich die Notwendigkeit, sowohl Einflüsse aus den Umgebungskulturen ins Hebräische zu integrieren als auch sich den jeweiligen Landessprachen zu öffnen. Dabei sind jüdische Übersetzungstraditionen durch einen Mangel an Kontinuität gekennzeichnet, denn es besteht eine fortwährende Spannung zwischen dem Bestreben na…

Following the traditional periodization of Hebrew literature, the history of modern translations into Hebrew should begin with the emergence of the enlightenment movement ( haskala) in Berlin, towards the end of the 18th century. However, some critics would position the starting point somewhat earlier, at the beginning of the 18th century. As in the case of original Modern Hebrew literature, translated literature emerged against a background of deficiency: apart from a few medieval and Renaissance translations of scatt…