Tributes pour in for Israeli author Amos Oz, a “prophet of our time”
Amos Oz’s English translator reflects on the musicality of the writer’s language
THE ISRAELI novelist and academic Amos Oz, one of the country’s most renowned authors, has died of cancer at the age of 79.
Oz was born in 1939 in Jerusalem to a right-wing family but would rebel against his family’s political views, becoming an early prominent advocate of a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians.
He studied philosophy and Hebrew literature at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, and published his first book — a collection of short stories — in his early twenties.
All of his books, Oz once told the JC, are in some way about “unhappy families”.
He admitted in a 2009 interview that he had “censored” the story of his mother’s suicide when he was just 12 for many decades, eventually returning to it in his autobiographical novel A Tale of Love and Darkness.
Oz’s works have been published in over 45 languages.
The actress Natalie Portman, who directed the film of A Tale of Love and Darkness, said her heart was broken. “Today we lost a soul, a mind, a heart, Amos Oz, who brought so much beauty, so much love, and a vision of peace to our lives.”
Emeritus Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks said he was only sad that Oz did not live long enough to receive the Nobel Prize for literature that was “certainly his due”.
He described the author as “a prophet of our time, secular, but with the burning moral passion that made him not only one of the world’s great novelists, but also, at a certain time, one of the world’s great activists for peace”.
While they were “worlds apart in many of our views,” he said, “I loved and respected this man.”
as on a musical instrument. His books are full of allusions to the Bible and other sources, which pose a challenge to a translator. Luckily English has its own store of classical literature and my translations contain allusions of their own. But Hebrew is also constantly changing and he made it his business, by keeping his ears open, to learn the latest teenage slang. His prose is like a tapestry woven with intricate patterns and colours.
A strong autobiographical element runs through his fiction, most overtly in A Tale of Love and
Darkness, where he writes openly about his mother’s death from an overdose when he was twelve and his reaction to it. In retrospect some of his earlier books can be read as literary reflections on this traumatic event. Yet Amos Oz is not one of those writers who write the same book over and over again. Each book is different, responding to a specific literary challenge: a novel with no plot (My
Michael), a novel with no narrator (Black Box), a novel in which the author is one of the characters (The Same Sea), and so on.
The city of Jerusalem, in which he was born and grew up, has a special role in his writing. In My
Michael it is almost a character in the book, and it also serves as a metaphor, with its high walls guarding secret, forbidden places. In this and again in books like
A Tale of Love and Darkness and his last
novel, Judas, he takes us on walks across the city, pausing to observe some detail noticing changes, eavesdropping on conversations.
I am often asked what it is like to translate a writer like Amos Oz. Without any hesitation I can affirm that it has been a marvellously fulfilling and enriching experience. A translator is a reader who is also a writer: I read a text in one language and then write it in another. There is something magical in the way Amos’s stories enter my head in Hebrew and come out again clothed in English words.
In part this is due, I feel, to a deep affinity between us, which grew and ripened over the years like grapes on a vine, but the seeds of which were already present in those romps around the living-room floor, riding imaginary horses.
Hebrew is constantly changing and he made it his business to learn the latest teenage slang.’
When I was little, my ambition was to grow up to be a book. Not a writer. People can be killed like ants. Writers are not hard to kill either. But not books: however systematically you try to destroy them, there is always a chance that a copy will survive and continue to enjoy a shelf-life in some corner on an out-ofthe-way library somehwere in Reykjavik, Valladolid or Vancouver.
A Tale of Love and Darkness The best way to know the soul of another country is to read its literature.
A conflict begins and ends in the hearts and minds of people, not in the hilltops.
When people have peace, they hate it and long for excitement, and when they have excitement, they want peace.
I find the family the most mysterious and fascinating institution in the world.
The kibbutz way of life is not for everyone.
It is meant for people who are not in the business of working harder than they should be working, in order to make more money than they need, in order to buy things they don’t really want, in order to impress people they don’t really like.
The left are people with an imagination and the right are those without an imagination.
Fundamentalists live life with an exclamation point. I prefer to live my life with a question mark.
Facts have a tendency to obscure the truth.
A Tale of Love and Darkness
Every single pleasure I can imagine or have experienced is more delightful, more of a pleasure, if you take it in small sips, if you take your time. Reading is not an exception.
The fact is that all the power in the world cannot transform someone who hates you into someone who likes you. It can turn a foe into a slave, but not into a friend. All the power in the world cannot transform a fanatic into an enlightened man. All the power in the world cannot transform someone thirsting for vengeance into a lover.
Judas