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There are a few ways I manage to get around them. Unless they are funny, or artistic in some way, I’d rather not include them in the first place, or include them as minimally as I feel is possible. They pull me out of the flow of reading, and when I choose to skip them I feel guilty, as if I’ve just cut a corner. They view them as the subtext of the story, an underlying narrative of facts to enrich the plot. Of course I understood the references in the Kashua book, set in Israel, but the Agualusa book, set in Angola, presented more of a challenge. Their translators trusted readers to either look things up or not, to generally just go with it. These books, both chock-full of explosive politics, different languages and jargons, complex geographies, did not include a single footnote. A few months later, when I read Mitch Ginsburg’s translation from Hebrew of Sayed Kashua’s Second Person Singular, and more recently when I read A General Theory of Oblivion, by José Eduardo Agualusa, translated from Portuguese by Daniel Hahn, I saw that I shouldn’t have been afraid. It’s hard to imagine not knowing what you know and to decide how much truly needs to be known.
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Still, it was with great trepidation that Zarhin and I acceded. If not, they would move on and lose nothing of the experience. If something caught their attention and they wanted to know more, they’d look it up. People had access to Google, and those who used e-readers often had the option of googling right there on the page. Not every little thing had to be explained.
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After a brief bout of anxiety, Zarhin and I realized what we knew in our hearts all along-that they were right. Wise, reigned in our footer horses and suggested cutting most of our notes. Luckily, our editors, Ross Ufberg and Michael Z. I am not a fan of footnotes, not when I read, not when I write, and certainly not when I translate, but the fear of losing the story in translation got the better of me. Pretty soon we were translating every Hebrew or Arabic phrase that made it into the English version, explaining every pun, leaving nothing to the imagination. The trouble with footnotes is that once you start with them it’s hard to stop. In a back-and-forth with Zarhin, the author, we composed and tweaked these footnotes, trying to focus on each term or reference’s connection to the story rather than give a detailed definition or history. Naturally, a book like this included a myriad references to the politics, events, and culture of the time, and on first inspection it seemed inevitable to include footnotes that would explain these references and their significance to the plot. Instead, Some Day revealed the quieter, more surreptitious conflict between the ruling Ashkenazi class and the silenced Mizrahi Jews, the tensions between socialist values and burgeoning capitalism, and the cultural and emotional melting pot of immigrants and natives. Besides the beautiful writing and engaging plot, what made this book great was how immersed it was in Israeli culture, presenting international readers with a lesser known side of Israeli history, one that wasn’t about the conflict with the Palestinians, or about military culture. There was so much to that book, set in 1970s and 80s Israel, that an English reader wouldn’t know about: Golda Meir and Menachem Begin, the marginalizing of Sephardic immigrants, pop music and war, the kibbutz movement, Israeli geography, Hebrew poetry. When I was translating Some Day, by Shemi Zarhin, my first published translation, which came out with New Vessel Press in 2013, the question of footnotes was constantly on my mind.