Between Hungarian and Hebrew: The Poetic and the Political in Avigdor Hameiri’s Translation, of Imre Madách’s play, Az ember tragédiája (Accepted)

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Abstract (max. 250 words):
The first Hebrew translation of the canonical nineteenth-century Hungarian play Az ember tragédiája (The tragedy of Man) by Imre Madách appeared In 1924, by Avigdor Hameiri (Feuerstein) and was acknowledged by the Hungarian Academy . Hameiri (1886– Austro-Hungarian Empire, 1970 - Israel), the most important representative of Hungarian Jewry Israeli writer, was one of the first modernists in the Hebrew culture, influenced by Ady Endre his personal friend. In 1968 Hameiri was awarded the Israel Prize, the state’s highest honor.

Hameiri’s transposition of a work of Hungarian culture to the Hebrew language, which was undergoing a revival, took place while he was consolidating his Hebrew-Zionist identity, which was characterized by what postcolonialism would term hybridity, because he also identified with Hungarian culture and was torn between the two. His translation in a biblical style attempts to transform the work into an almost original Hebrew work so as to create a symbolic fusion of the two cultures, as happened in the consciousness of the translator and also like that defined theoretically in Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator.” In Hameiri’s translation of the title, he changed the word meaning “tragedy” to a word meaning “vision.” This paper suggests reasons for this change.




Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Dr. Miriam Neiger-Fleischmann is a literary scholar, poet and visual artist. She is
currently visiting scholar at the Hebrew
Literature Department, The Hebrew
University of Jerusalem, writing a monograph about the poetry of Avigdor Hameiri. Miriam Neiger-Fleischmann was born in Komarno-Komarom, Slovakia in 1948, came to Israel in 1949 and lives and works in Jerusalem. She speaks Hungarian fluently.
See more: www.miriamneiger.com