Still, it was with great trepidation that Zarhin and I acceded. If not, they would move on and lose nothing of the experience. If something caught their attention and they wanted to know more, they’d look it up. People had access to Google, and those who used e-readers often had the option of googling right there on the page. Not every little thing had to be explained. After a brief bout of anxiety, Zarhin and I realized what we knew in our hearts all along-that they were right. Wise, reigned in our footer horses and suggested cutting most of our notes. Luckily, our editors, Ross Ufberg and Michael Z.
I am not a fan of footnotes, not when I read, not when I write, and certainly not when I translate, but the fear of losing the story in translation got the better of me. Pretty soon we were translating every Hebrew or Arabic phrase that made it into the English version, explaining every pun, leaving nothing to the imagination. The trouble with footnotes is that once you start with them it’s hard to stop. In a back-and-forth with Zarhin, the author, we composed and tweaked these footnotes, trying to focus on each term or reference’s connection to the story rather than give a detailed definition or history. Naturally, a book like this included a myriad references to the politics, events, and culture of the time, and on first inspection it seemed inevitable to include footnotes that would explain these references and their significance to the plot. Instead, Some Day revealed the quieter, more surreptitious conflict between the ruling Ashkenazi class and the silenced Mizrahi Jews, the tensions between socialist values and burgeoning capitalism, and the cultural and emotional melting pot of immigrants and natives. Besides the beautiful writing and engaging plot, what made this book great was how immersed it was in Israeli culture, presenting international readers with a lesser known side of Israeli history, one that wasn’t about the conflict with the Palestinians, or about military culture.
There was so much to that book, set in 1970s and 80s Israel, that an English reader wouldn’t know about: Golda Meir and Menachem Begin, the marginalizing of Sephardic immigrants, pop music and war, the kibbutz movement, Israeli geography, Hebrew poetry. When I was translating Some Day, by Shemi Zarhin, my first published translation, which came out with New Vessel Press in 2013, the question of footnotes was constantly on my mind.