Interview with Gali-Dana Singer

January 18, 2006 Gali-Dana Singer was interviewed in April 2003 in the apartment she shares with her husband, the artist and writer Nekoda Singer, and their dog Deca, in the Nachlaot neighborhood of Jerusalem, its narrow residential streets with their narrow two and three storey buildings bordering the center of town. They have lived in Jerusalem since 1988, when they emigrated from St. Petersburg, where Dana, as she is known to friends, was born; Nekoda grew up in Novosibirsk. Two books of Dana’s poetry have appeared in Hebrew and three in Russian; Nekoda’s work is regularly exhibited in Israeli galleries. An art installation which they produced together, the Procrustean Bed of Israeli Art, is part of the Israeli Object exhibit currently on view in Haifa. Dana will be participating in the Moscow Poetry festival in the fall.

Lisa Katz: What is it like for a poet to switch from one language to another?

Gali-Dana Singer: I always emphasize that I haven’t switched from Russian to Hebrew, rather that I am moving back and forth from Russian to Hebrew and Hebrew to Russian. I have tried to reconstruct how the transfer took place, a process which is still vivid in my memory. It seemed to happen one way, but then I remembered that the process actually began much earlier, when someone tried to translate a poem of mine [into Hebrew] and I didn’t like the result and I started to write it myself and I saw that it was impossible to translate it as it was in the original, and not worthwhile, because what works in Russian doesn’t work in Hebrew. Even if I have a raw translation in front of me I don’t know exactly which way I’ll go.

Lisa: It’s also a sign that you fit in here, that you can bring yourself into Hebrew poetry.

Dana: Possibly, because the language has entered deep inside me and taken control. After the first book I continued to write in Hebrew rather than translate. Things started rolling along in Hebrew, and that dictated what followed. [A poem] isn’t an idea but a sentence, a word, and if they are already in Hebrew they go on in Hebrew. And so my new book was written, Blind Poems. [The Hebrew word for “blind” in the title (ee-vreem) sounds like the word for “Hebrew” (ee-vree-eem), although the V-sound in each word is in fact produced by two different letters. --LK] I always used to say that my Russian poetry was untranslatable because it was so rooted in the language, with word play, not for its own sake but because that’s the essence of language, until I learned that perhaps this isn’t so.

Lisa: So it’s possible to translate?

Dana: It’s possible, but only if you can create something parallel.

Lisa: Create a parallel universe?

Dana: Yes. And I think that, paradoxically, the fact that I am so close to language in my Russian poems is what caused my proximity to Hebrew. I accepted the new language in exactly the same proportions. Of course I’m the same poet but I write different things in a different language. What moves me to write is mainly the experience of language. If I wanted to express only my personal experience, my life, I wouldn’t need to write in a different language.

Rami Saari: Most of the Hebrew poets for whom Hebrew wasn’t a mother tongue arrived in the country when they were very young—Yehuda Amichai, Natan Zach, Agi Mishol...

Dana: Meir Wieseltier...

Rami: Yet the modern Hebrew language was created by people for whom Hebrew was their second, third or fourth language—Chaim Nachman Bialik, Shaul Tchernikovsky, Rachel, Lea Goldberg...

Dana: But you know even in this earlier generation some of these writers learned Hebrew at home even if they lived, or were born in Latvia or Lithuania, some to parents who were Zionists who spoke Hebrew. I came to Israel as an adult but for me the musical and syntactical elements provided the impetus to write. The words began to speak themselves in the new language.

Rami: Have the deep sources of your poetry changed since coming to Israel?

Dana: No, the sources are the same.

Lisa: Which texts are you having a dialogue with – Israeli, Anglo-American, Russian?

Dana: Only the Hebrew is new. The sources are so deep that it’s impossible to say they’ve been deepened. My sources are inside me as well as what is around me. And what surrounds me is the entire world.

Rami: The small and jealous “community” of Israeli poets has received you with open arms and a warm hug. Do you think outsiders are usually so warmly accepted, and, if not, why are you the exception?

Dana: It’s nice that someone thinks I’ve been accepted, but the truth is that the Israeli poetic community doesn’t seem small and jealous to me. I’ve been treated well and with interest. After the fear of the Other subsides, it is followed by interest in the Other, and if there’s a common language...

Lisa: You don’t think you’re an exception?

Dana: I was translated because of a workshop together with my friends writing Russian in Israel. It’s not that so many people took an interest in me. Most of the poets in Israel aren’t involved in translation, and as you know this is a different kind of interest.

Rami: Over the last forty years, poetry written in English has affected Hebrew poetry much more than Russian has. Do you think this is a temporary trend? Will all mankind use English for poetry?

Dana: I’m not so afraid of the influence of English because I think everything comes in its own time; there have been periods with other poetics and aesthetics. The main impetus for poetry is the language that a person feels. Chaim Lensky wrote in Hebrew in St. Petersburg and in exile in Siberia. It doesn’t matter where we live or even which language we hear.

Lisa: When did you start to write?

Dana: When I was 14 or 15. Real junk.

Lisa: Were you perhaps a member of a writing group?

Dana: No, it was a terrible time. I belong to a generation that isn’t. People my age simply didn’t feel part of a group. Perhaps if I’d gone to a better school, but even there people would have been estranged. Not that they didn’t make friends, but there was no common language, no common experience of a generation.

Lisa: Who read your poetry?

Dana: I read my early work to my father and to an older friend.

Lisa: Who published it?

Dana: It was never published in Russia. In 1985, people wanted to publish me, but I remembered the experiences of the people who had nurtured writers who then left the country. Those who helped them had problems at work. I knew I wanted to leave, and I didn’t want to put people in this difficult position. When I arrived in Israel I quickly became part of the small group of Russian writers and began to publish.

Lisa: Why did you leave St. Petersburg? To me it looks like a poetic city. Why did you come here?

Dana: That’s a complicated question. In Russia I was a Zionist.

Lisa: I once said to Rami that in a way it’s beneficial, the way the Jews are often sitting on their suitcases, ready to move from place to place.

Dana: I always imagine what it would be like to be born in one place and live your whole life there but our world is so imperfect that we can’t have this perfect experience; maybe in the world to come.

Lisa: Nekoda [Dana's husband], what is the point of translating from Russian to Hebrew or vice versa?

Nekoda Singer: Well, Hebrew is an eternal language... (laughing). Translating, as Dana has said, is the way we read. Not merely to read but to read deeply is to translate into your mother tongue. When I translate I really read, to the end, I understand more.

Rami: Dana, do you feel that your poetry and Nekoda’s art fulfill each other in any way?

Dana: There’s no connection. Nekoda’s into his painting and I’m into my poetry; they don’t mix or connect. These are two areas that we do separately, while there are some things that we do together – the magazine Nekudatiim [Hebrew for the punctuation mark “colon”], and sometimes translations, or illustrations, but even for that we have a special technique. Nikoda does the drawing and painting; I do collage.

Lisa: Do you have anything to add?

Dana: No, I think I’ve talked a lot.

Interview by Lisa Katz with Rami Saari participating via email.
Complete interview in the Spring/Summer 2003 issue of The Drunken Boat