Theodor Herzl's Palestine Interpreter and British Translator

 

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” ─ William Faulkner

Few people are aware of how far the current tragic conflict in the area once called Palestine or the Holy Land stretches back. Its seeds were sown long before the state of Israel even existed, in fact to the late nineteenth century when it was part of the Ottoman Turkish empire.

Theodor Herzl, the Austro-Hungarian writer who was the father of modern Zionism, arrived from Vienna by rail and sea at Jaffa, on the Palestine coast,  on October 8, 1898. He had come somewhat reluctantly, because the choice of Palestine as a new homeland for Jews was not his but that of the delegates at the meeting of the first Zionist Congress. However, the German Kaiser Wilhelm II was scheduled to pay a show pilgrimage visit to the country and Herzl didn’t want to miss an opportunity of meeting him on favourable ground and pressing his case. His plan was to proceed by train on the railway to Jerusalem that had been constructed recently by a French company.

Meanwhile he went on a side trip with his four travelling companions to the prospering settlement of Rishon LeZion.  Today it’s the fourth largest city in Israel, eight kilometres south of Tel Aviv and hence not far from Jaffa, but in 1898 it was an agricultural settlement with a population of about 350. It had been founded in 1882 by Jewish immigrants from Ukraine. By 1889,under the guidance of agronomists sent by Baron Edmond James de Rothschild, it had become “a pretty little hamlet surrounded by vineyards and orange groves.” Its citizens were encouraged to speak Hebrew. In 1886 the Haviv elementary school was established as the first modern school to teach exclusively in Hebrew. So Herzl went there and prepared a speech. And then he struck a problem. His speech was written in German  and he couldn’t speak any Hebrew. Once again interpreting came to the rescue: “He delivered his speech in German and one of the villagers stood next to him and translated as he spoke.” We know nothing more about that interpreter and therefore cannot say that he (or she?) was a natural translator, but it’s certainly a case of an NPIT interpreter.

 Sources

Amy Dockser Marcus. Jerusalem 1913. New York: Penguin Viking, 2007. 225 p. Available from the usual booksellers. This is a ‘must read’ for anyone interested in the origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Theodor Herzl, LL. D.. A Jewish State: An Attempt at a Modern Solution of the Jewish Question, translation of Der Judenstaat, Leipzig and Vienna, 1896, by Sylvie d’Avigdor, London: David Nutt, also 1896. Modern re-editions available from booksellers and on Kindle. A copy of the 1896 edition was recently on offer at $5,000. There are other translations.

Sylvie d'Avigdor, born 1872 at Nice, was the scion of a distinguished French and British Jewish family and was an NPIT Native Translator who, according to the British Library catalogue, didn't publish any other translations. Where did she learn such good German and how did she read the book so soon? David Nutt was a prominent publishing house but also a bookseller of foreign books, so maybe she obtained she book from them. Nutt himself had died years earlier. Unlike Herzl, she lived to see the Jewish state established. Notice she changed the opening German definite article Der to the more tentative English indefinite A. Noteworthy too is that the translator appears prominently on the title page, something exceptional in her time and unusual even today; perhaps her family’s prestige had something to do with it.

Rishon LeZion. Wikipedia, 2021.