Yehudith Dashevsky

on translating Dahlia Ravikovitch

Translating Dahlia Ravikovitch’s “Sinking rising,” or, as it is more commonly called, “Waxing, Waning,” posed several complications. The first was the lack of inflection in English. In inflecting languages such as Hebrew, the subject and tense is implied in each verb, so more is said in fewer words. Here, the inflecting property lends a sort of minimalist quality to the poem, with most lines having two words, and at the same time allows it a density, both words being verbs. Because the minimalism is tied to the content of the poem, I chose to emphasize that quality over the density in the translation, leaving out near-synonym verbs when the lines became too long.

The second challenge was presenting that minimalism as being tied to the content of the poem, which is a simple observation of how the physical waxing and waning of the moon looks to us. The waxing and waning moon is an eons-old and content-laden metaphor in the Hebrew consciousness, and yet here it is presented with a bare simplicity, the matter-of-fact tone reverberating in each of the images. Ravikovitch’s gaze at the moon, while hinting at its rich metaphoric roots in language (the word for “middle of the month” is Biblical) and theme (an ever-returning moon), is mostly observational, seeing the moon as an intriguing, disappearing object in the sky, instead of as a metaphor. That simplicity is expressed in the original in the small number of words used as well as in the rising and falling sound of the vowels chosen (many of them have an ey-ah sound). As previously noted, I tried to mimic that minimalist tendency by keeping the lines short, but also by removing much of the punctuation. I did capitalize some letters despite the fact that Hebrew does not have capitalization to preserve the ebb and flow of the cadence. With regard to the rising and falling sounds that reflect the waxing and waning of the moon, I tried to transmit the way the poem physically reflects the focus on the moon’s physical shape with the shape of the poem (in its rounded lines and curving shape as a whole) instead of sound.

One last note is about the title: I chose “Sinking, rising” as opposed to “Waxing, waning” because the latter is too closely associated with moon allusions and metaphors. Because the words sinking and rising are not usually associated with the moon, they seemed a better fit for describing a layperson’s observation of the physical phenomenon.