Episode 16: Towards Another: Na’ama Rokem on Hannah Arendt and Paul Celan
In episode 16, I talk with literary scholar Na’ama Rokem about her work-in-progress, Dispatches in Translation: A German-Hebrew Epistolary Network, which studies the correspondences between mid-century Jewish intellectuals writing in and between German and Hebrew. The project focuses on ambivalences and debates surrounding Zionism from the 1930s through the early 70’s. We discuss and read from Hannah Arendt’s correspondences with Gershom Scholem and James Baldwin, and Paul Celan’s exchange with Yehuda Amichai. We get into two of Celan’s poems, “Discus” and “Mandorla,” as we think about the ethics of orienting “towards another,” of dwelling in the dynamic between presence and absence, or between something-ness and nothingness.
Discus,
starred with premonitions,
throw yourself
out of yourself.
- Paul Celan, trans. Washburn & Guillemin
Texts and events mentioned and discussed
The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem, edited by Marie Luise Knott, translated by Anthony David
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition, On Revolution
Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism
James Baldwin, Letter from a Region in my Mind
Paul Celan, “Mandorla” and “Discus” in Breathturn Into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry: A Bilingual Edition, translated by Pierre Joris
Paul Celan, “Discus” in Last Poems: A Bilingual Edition, translated by Katharine Washburn and Margret Guillemin
Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena, translated by Philip Boehm
David D. Kim: Arendt’s Solidarity: Antisemitism and Racism in the Atlantic World
Emmanuel Levinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, translated by Sean Hand
Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools will Never Dismantle the Master’s House”
Stanford Conference on Hannah Arendt’s Jewish Questions
Na’ama Rokem
Na’ama Rokem teaches Modern Jewish Literature at the University of Chicago, where she currently chairs the Department of Comparative Literature. A scholar of Modern Hebrew and German-Jewish literature, she is particularly interested in translation, self-translation, and language mixing. Her first book, Prosaic Conditions: Heinrich Heine and Spaces of Zionist Literature (Northwestern University Press, 2013) uses the case of the reception and translation of the works of German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine to argue that prose - as a figure of thought, a mode and a medium - played an instrumental role in the literary foundations of the Zionist revolution. Her second project – currently titled Dispatches in Translation: A Network of German-Hebrew Letters – maps a network of correspondences that cross between the two languages in different ways, offering a new perspective on the central role of multilingualism in the formation of modern Jewish literature, and on the poetics of self-translation. She is one of the co-editors of Volume IV of the Critical Edition of the Complete Works of Hannah Arendt (Essays and Short Writings) and has organized a series of events and workshops that deal with Arendt’s thinking about Jewish questions. Together with colleagues in the Department of Race, Diaspora and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago, and with support from the NEH and the Women’s Board at the University of Chicago, she is currently developing a project that uses the Oak Woods Cemetery in Woodlawn as a site for teaching, programming, and researching the history of the South Side of Chicago, with a particular interest in the complexly intertwined histories of African Americans and Jews.
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