Bilingual Pen Friends, Translation Amiss

Israel in Translation

Host Marcela Sulak breaks 'Israel in Translation' custom by devoting this episode to Nell Zink's English language novel, Sailing Toward the Sunset by Avner Shats. Nell Zink, an American, began a correspondence with Avner Shats after she moved to Israel in 1997. Zink was unable to read Shats' Hebrew, but she resolved to write a book that would mirror his remarkable style. For fifteen years, Shats was the only reader of her literary output. Zink once said, "Avner and I just began writing for each other. The first thing I wrote for him was a novel called Sailing Towards the Sunset by Avner Shats. It never crossed my mind anyone else would ever read my writing."

Here is an excerpt from Sailing Towards the Sunset by Avner Shats:

"Mary and I went down to the old port to look at Mr. Pickwick. The old port of Tel Aviv, with its dusty cats, scabby dogs, flaking concrete, deep and opaque berths for ghost ships, etc, is surely worthy of treatment in pose-poetry, that bastard child of television. The style of montage, of snapshots succeeding each other, is similar to the way an inexpensive documentary, where the tripod is carried from place to place while the camera is turned off, might be perceived by someone who is not really paying attention. Certain parties I have attended present themselves to my memory with the benefit of similar editing techniques."

Sailing Towards the Sunset by Avner Shats is Zink’s faux-translation of Shats’s 1998 novel Lashut El Hashkia ("Sailing Towards the Sunset"). Work by Avner Shats was previously featured on the show.

Text: "Private Novelist," by Nell Zink. Harper Collins Publishers, 2016.

Music: Homeward Bound Instrumental - Simon and Garfunkel The Boxer (Instrumental Cover) - Whalebone