The Expelled by Mois Benarroch Read Free Book Online Page B

introduced me to the group, and I, read Borges behind the waiting room overlooking an office where we sat, I imagined it as an empty and frightening maze. Us, both Spanish speakers. We discussed Borges and Cortázar with the Israelis, who weren't widely translated into Spanish. Thanks to my translations of Jabès they learned to know this writer who is still so unknown in Israel because of a catastrophic Hebrew translation of The Book of Questions that nobody could read and that blocked the translation into Hebrew of his other books.
    I think in 1984 I had translated about 70 pages of that same book and had sent a letter to Jabès, a letter I have kept so well that I can't find it anymore, I did it for my love of art and to deepen my reading of this writer who had become one of my mentors, but they chose another translator although my translation was not only better but also impossible to compare. I even gave a lecture at the University of Jerusalem on what I had translated and that had been published in magazines, as well as other chapters of his work that have never been published in book formats. But at that time, and even today, you couldn't conceive that a Moroccan could be a translator and it wasn't just that, the Moroccan doesn't know languages, he is uneducated and cannot translate, because in addition to not knowing French and even less Spanish, he doesn't really know Hebrew and doesn't know the correct Ashkenazi Hebrew syntax. Language is a weapon of domination and often today, yes, even today, you find an article ridiculing the language of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, who has a fabulous and anti-Zionist Hebrew but does not exactly match with the Hebrew that is considered legal. So all the writers born in Iraq or Morocco are always attacked for their language and for their Hebrew.
    I can already imagine that if I have success in Spain they'll say that I haven't triumphed here because I don't know Hebrew, but I do know Spanish. Of course that is kind of a contradiction because when I try to get a job as a translator what I find most difficult is to convince the publisher that not only do I know Spanish, but that it is my first language. The absence of my entire country, Morocco, of the Moroccan Jews, makes for some comic situations as long as you don't live them personally. When I suggested to one of my publishers, I think he had read my two novels that he had published, to translate a book by Camilo José Cela, he asked me from what language I was thinking of translating it. The best part is that the vast majority of Ashkenazi Spanish translators have learned it in class and rely on English or French translations.
    We started getting there around five o'clock but D-S, who was B-S's close friend, was already there. Occasionally I arrived at noon on Saturday or Friday and the two would sit down to eat a hummus they had bought at a restaurant called Pinati, they dipped the pita in and said "Life is hard" with each bite they took. It was an almost religious ceremony. B-S lived in a room that was a former waiting room to an office and we were not allowed to enter, and in front of that room there was a kitchenette and a restroom. The room was at the entrance of the lobby that started all the way from the end of the stairs on the first floor. There were many other rooms beyond this one, where on weekdays the administration of the Israeli philharmonic orchestra worked.
    Quite often it would just be the three of us. D-S was taking his first steps, huge steps, in Hebrew, and he continued writing in Hebrew and Spanish. B-S was a Sabra, born in Israel, and he had already written some short stories and many poems, especially poems about his family, his mother gone mad and hospitalized in a mental institution and about his dead and foolish father. He lived with his grandmother, an old woman who was really evil, that had come to Israel from Tbilisi at age six and who didn't stop yelling at him. A few times we had meetings regarding the