“Astrological Speculum,” and Other Objects Found on My Way to the Ancestors

As I translate, I collect all my incorrect definitions: Astrological speculum. Night-lodging in open air. The colored sand strewn over the writing. A woolly substance growing on stones at the Dead Sea, looking like gold, and being very soft. On my path to an English rendering of an ancient Hebrew text, I inevitably fumble, winding up in unexpected corners of the Hebrew lexicon. This feels equivalent to barging into the bedrooms of my ancestors without knocking. I see their oils and clay vessels, their wools, cloaks, axes, and wineskins hung up, with talk of floods, figs, grains, and wild dogs echoing across the room. My home in the text is forged through my failures. Bewilderment: my trusty compass.

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In reaching for a single word in the Hebrew lexicon, I am shaking a vast web of root words. Nearly all of the ancient language’s lexemes can be distilled to their respective three-consonant roots. Translation is a process of dusting off prefixes, infixes, and suffixes to reveal each word’s seed, pruning the etymology down to the pith, where its meaning still sprouts from. To grab at one word is to tug the silken thread that connects it to every other lexical unit that it shares a root with. There is a unity that thrums beneath this vocabulary, a gossamer kinship quivering between wildly disparate definitions—now, I’m caught there, too.

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Biblical Hebrew poetry contains numerous examples of notoriously ambiguous syntactical moves. Poetic sections of the Torah often defy established conventions and their meanings coalesce through associative links, rather than strict grammatical adherence. It’s my understanding that there may be stranger ways to translate such passages than standard practice might attempt. Some of my mistranslations are my best translations:

In the end, a forest fire will be extinguished; Not by a whisper but by strife, that will be silent.
Proverbs 26:20

Words of a murmurer are like gulping; And abundance went down into the chambers of the belly.
Proverbs 26:22

One who digs a grave will fall into it; And a tombstone will be returned to him.
Proverbs 26:27

I hereby claim this as the root to my own penchant for dizzying leaps in my poetics. Why shouldn’t this be true?

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I slide my finger across each line in the dictionary, tracing a route that will take me straight to my Diasporic Jewish Lineage™. Each letter forms the shape of a footstep, sunk into the terrain of our truest homeland: the text itself, and the map it sings inside us. I must conclude I am family to the ancient Hebrew authors. And gloriously, my relation to the authors of Hebrew texts cannot be proven through blood, borders, observance, parentage, citizenship, or any other test of authenticity or “chosenness.” Let me make this abundantly clear: I am interested in unsettling all myths of Jewish genealogical purity. I am related to these ancient Hebrew poets through the act of translation itself, through the struggle of language. I am kindred to these poets through their letters on the page, which I welcome into my body as sounds just as they did thousands of years ago. My descent from them necessitated brokennesses, and translation stoppers that sacred gap—building a bridge of sound between my body and the bodies of my textual ancestors.

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When one is translating a text from a language that has not been vernacular in nearly two thousand years, it is a weighty task to not only convey basic “meaning,” but also to translate the feeling of  the text: its narrative suspense, ironies, sensory descriptions, metaphors, personifications, and particularly its sonic moves, like repetition, assonance, alliteration, onomatopoeia, rhyme, meter, and beyond. To prioritize an allegiance to the poetics of sound in translation, I hypothesize, is a way of honoring the potential for text to impact embodiment across time and space. The text is a portable technology for transmitting sounds into bodies generations apart. A Hebrew word is an archaic Cup Noodles, designed to withstand centuries. Ignore the expiration date. Just add water (sound) and it can enter a body.

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For my Bat Mitzvah, I was assigned the Torah portion featuring G-d’s instructions for community responses to leprosy. As an awkward, closeted seventh grader, learning this charged portion and making meaning out of it felt socially dangerous, perhaps impossible. But I had always loved the strange ritual of chanting our stories out loud, so I pressed on and practiced my portion with gusto: in the car, in the shower, on strolls around the block with my Walkman. When showtime came around, I busted out my portion from the bimah, singing down onto my relatives and classmates: a gaggle of zitty and befuddled gentiles in ill-fitting button-downs. I stumbled through a speech in which I attempted to link my small life to the communal procedures of a world I couldn’t possibly understand. Throughout my d’var Torah, I mispronounced the word “lepers” as “leapers” nearly fifty times. The hilarity of my verbal slippage lies in the importance of sound: of how we lift words from a page into our lungs, onto our tongues, and into the air. What a risk it is to speak words aloud. My mother could barely keep from cracking up in the front row.

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I want to prioritize sound in translation, but even the smallest roadblocks halt me. I struggle to translate simple words. For example, take the word for “wind.” In Hebrew, the word is ַרוּחַ (ruach). Its final vowel is called a patach, which would usually be pronounced after the consonant, but here is an uncommon example of a furtive patach. The vowel jumps ahead and is vocalized before the consonant instead of after. These two soundings (rucha vs. ruach) feel completely different in the body. This word, ruach, can also be translated as breath. When pronounced correctly, wind is wrenched out of one’s throat. Forced by the furtive patach, the throat stages a performance of breath, an experiencing of the thing itself in a word. What word in English might enact this same ritual?

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For some people, the mouth is where language leaves the body. In Hebrew, the word for “lip” is שָׂפה (saphah). Scanning the dictionary page, my chevruta and I find that its root also encompasses other adjacent meanings: bank, edge, brim, shore, border. Imagine the mouth as a site of crossings-over, where the water meets the sand, a liminal space, the imaginary line drawn between two states. The Hebrew word for “Hebrews” is עִבְרִים (Ivrim) and it comes from the root עבר which means to pass, to cross a border, to swell, to run over. Our languaging crosses the bounds of the mouth. Our identity as Hebrews is rooted in rituals of transgressing imposed boundaries. We, the people of passing over borders, mouth the words to the same stories, for thousands of years. Chanting in unison, sort of.

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We often call ourselves “People of the Book.” I do love to think of us as participating in one of the world’s longest book clubs. Each week, we read a section of the story we’ve read every year since before we can remember, and we discuss it all over again, each time finding new shine in The Book’s pages. Many have challenged this text-based identity, suggesting we might find healing from inherited trauma by becoming “people of the body” instead. I wonder about this binary, what aliveness vibrates between books and bodies. When I translate, The Book guides me back to The Body, to my body. Perhaps The Book was the most convenient way to transport the fraught and multifaceted Jewish body into the future, endlessly. In Judaism, the future means approaching “the world to come,” עוֹלָם הַבָּא (olam haba). The word בָּא (bah) can mean to come, coming, futurity, the possibility of a future. It comes from the root בֹּוא (bo) which means to enter into, to come, to have sexual connection with, to bring, to offer. At its root, the Jewish future is an intimate entering, an offering, a bringing—all acts that require a body. We spell the future with our bodies.