Michaela Kotziers

on translating Martin Luther

My adaptation hones in on Sarai’s point of view — what it meant for a woman to be barren in Biblical times and the maternal despair felt at this point in her story, before the angels have prophesied that she will bear Abram a son. I found it interesting that Abram, who this entire story depends upon (without the need to spread Abram’s seed, Hagar would not have been used as a handmaid), had only one line of speech in the Biblical version. As the root cause of Sarai’s struggle, I decided to make his figure more present throughout the poem with Sarai’s dialogue. My translation oscillates between a narrative and direct address from Sarai to Abram in order to produce a dissonance between what distresses Sarai and what she reveals to Abram.

Words such as “bowels,” “skies,” “dust,” and “seed,” along with archaic pronouns, evoke both the original passage and other Biblical stories. Aber was kept from the German original; there is no clean English translation for the word, and the intensity that it creates in the German seemed too important to omit from Abram’s line.