In the world of Jewish translators, Barbara Harshav was a giant – | Metaglossia: The Translation World | Scoop.it
From forward.com - July 8, 4:34 PM

Barbara 'Bobbi' Harshav, who translated works by Agnon, Amichai and Sutzkever, among others, has died at 85


 


In the world of Jewish translators, she was known as a mentor, a friend and a literary giant


Translator Barbara Harshav Courtesy of Yale University


By Aviya Kushner


July 8, 2026


 


Barbara Harshav, widely considered one of the most important translators of Jewish literature of our time, passed away June 24 at age 85. She translated from French, German, Hebrew, and Yiddish — and won acclaim from scholars and fellow translators for her range and high standards. Her curiosity and willingness to tackle difficult material were legendary.


 


“Few people would be able to and feel comfortable translating from French and German alongside Hebrew and Yiddish,” Shachar Pinsker, professor of Judaic Studies and Middle East Studies at The University of Michigan, wrote in an email.


 


She translated giants, including Shmuel Yosef Agnon, winner of the Nobel Prize; Avrom Sutzkever, the towering Yiddish poet; the Israeli novelist Meir Shalev; and the beloved poet Yehuda Amichai. But she was also loved as a mentor and friend to scholars and translators of several generations.


 


“I knew Bobbi Harshav through reading her translations before I met her for the first time, when I helped her carry a suitcase to a room in Berkeley’s Bancroft Hotel in 2005,” Pinsker recalled. “Since then, we have seen each other in Ann Arbor, Tel Aviv, New York and Boston. It was always a thrill to meet her, speak and correspond with her, and learn from her.”


 


Her personality was reflected in the books she translated.


 


“Bobbi had a fierce sense of curiosity and independence that carried her forward. I can’t think of anyone else who would translate the Palestinian author Emile Habibi’s essay ‘Your Holocaust and our Catastrophe,’ alongside poetry by Abraham Sutzkever, Yehuda Amichai, the best of American Yiddish poetry, as well as novels, stories, and plays by Hanoch Levin, Yoram Kaniuk, Yehudit Hendel, Yehudit Kazir, and Leah Goldberg,” Pinsker wrote.


 


Harshav also co-translated many books with her late husband, Benjamin Harshav, including Sing Stranger: A Century of American Yiddish Poetry.


 


Her translations included some of the most challenging books in recent Jewish literature, like Agnon’s fiction. Made up of layers upon layers, with allusions to Jewish texts everywhere, it is notoriously challenging, if not impossible, to translate.


 


“Bobbi took on the heroic task of translating S.Y. Agnon’s Tmol Shilshom (“Only Yesterday”), which many considered untranslatable, and although she was aware of the limitations of Agnon in English, she proved them wrong,” Pinsker recalled.


 


“Perhaps the main thing about this translation is that Bobbi captured Agnon’s sense of irony, because of her own smart and wicked sense of humor.”


 


On social media, scholars mourned this loss.


 


“I just read her translation of The Loves of Judith. It’s a stunning and masterful translation of a book that plays with languages, gender, timelines and so much,” Shayna Weiss, Senior Associate Director of the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies at Brandeis, wrote. “What a loss.”


 


Weiss, in an email, shared that she was reading Harshav’s translation of Shalev’s book because she is speaking at a film festival that is showing For the Love of a Woman, a new film based on this book.


 


Bobbi, as she was known, was famous inside translation circles for her warmth and kindness to other translators, including invitations to live in her home, rent-free, while translating.


 


She was especially encouraging to beginners.


 


When I was a graduate student, she emailed me out of the blue and invited me to participate in a panel at the American Literary Translators Association conference, which was meeting that year in Chicago. I knew no one there, and made a friend — the Yiddish translator Leah Zazulyer, also gone now — while waiting for Bobbi to show up.


 


I did not know it then, but Bobbi was a celebrity in that conference; she was a past president of the American Literary Translators Association. Later she would become the only Hebrew or Yiddish translator in history to win the PEN/ Manheim medal.


 


The Manheim medal is awarded every three years for lifetime achievement in literary translation. Bernard Malamud and Gay Talese donated the initial funding for the award; it received additional support from the family and friends of Ralph Manheim, the American translator of Mein Kampf, who died in 1992, and it is now named after him.


 


The medal recognizes translators “whose career has demonstrated a commitment to excellence through the body of their work.” Prior winners include Gregory Rabassa, translator of A Hundred Years of Solitude, which Gabriel García Márquez famously declared superior to his original, and Edith Grossman, translator of Don Quixote and author of the influential book Why Translation Matters.


 


Harshav published more than 40 books of translation including works of poetry, drama, fiction, philosophy, economics, sociology and history.


 


“I know that the Manheim Lifetime Achievement medal acknowledges the full range of Barbara’s work, including her translations from French and German, but the fact that this award casts the spotlight on Hebrew and Yiddish translation, languages that often are overlooked in the world literary economy, is just monumental,” translator, scholar, and Oxford professor Adriana X. Jacobs said when Harshav won the medal.


 


“In all her translations, Barbara’s voice comes across so clearly and distinctly, even as she is capturing the qualities unique to a specific writer. And what I mean is that when you read Barbara’s translations, her commitment to her choices is evident. And every time I have heard Barbara speak on translation, this has been confirmed,” Jacobs said. “She can tell you why she made one choice and not another, why she chose to translate a particular text and not another, and she always — always — stands by her work.”


 


Harshav’s comments on writing and translation sometimes made it to Twitter and other social media, like this snippet from her talk at Davidson College: “Style is the morality of the mind. And obscurantism is sinful.”


 


She came of age in a time well before AI and before translation apps. Learning a language then was slow hard work. For French and German, she focused on basics, then read newspapers and novels.


 


“As for Hebrew, I started studying Jewish history and realized that I had a serious handicap because I did not know Hebrew at all, not the alphabet, nothing,” she told Rainer Schulte in Translation Review in 2012.


 


Unlike many Hebrew translators, Harshav came to the language relatively late, at 34.


 


“I literally fell in love with the language. There was the exhilarating feeling of learning a new language and a new alphabet at that age. It must have repeated the original childhood sense of learning to read, when the letters suddenly make sense and a new world is opened.” She learned Yiddish last.


 


Scholars and translators saw something distinctive in Bobbi Harshav’s work, in all four languages she translated from. In conversation, she often talked about translation quality; her goal was always excellence.


 


One reason for her excellence was that she was always reading. Another reason was her attitude, toward the text, and toward herself.


 


“I carry books all the time because you never know when the elevator will break down, and I am reading all the time,” she told Translation Review. “It is the element of play that is very important. Humility is also important, and the text is sacred. It is also true for performance. You have to have a kind of humility. I take what I do very seriously, but I do not take myself seriously.”


 


You can hear all of that in her translator’s note to Tmol Shilshom, or Only Yesterday, by Agnon. “If there is some other world, where translators can discuss ‘deviations’ with authors,” she wrote,” I hope Agnon will understand.”"


https://forward.com/culture/836729/barbara-harshav-jewish-translator-yiddish-amichai-agnon-obituary-appreciation/


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