Modern Hebrew is blessed with an abundance of literary translators. But can the allusive and often strange language of its greatest masters really be rendered into English? Take, for instance, Jeffrey Green’s struggles to translate the work of acclaimed Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld:
Mainly Aharon and I disagreed about time and memory. The rigidity of an Indo-European language like English, with its complex structure of tenses, forces the translator from Hebrew to make distinctions that the author did not make and may not want to make. I put the novel in the past tense, as though written retrospectively after all the action that it describes has taken place. However, Appelfeld used a mixture of present and past (which is easily done in Hebrew). He wanted me to put the whole narrative in the present, and I maintained that it would sound unnatural in English, given the way the novel is structured. . . . In this battle of Aharon Appelfeld versus English grammar, he loses.
Read more on Tablet: http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/184915/art-of-translation