(For the actual translation, see my previous post .)
I’m not a poet, though I’ve written some poetry. And I’m not a translator, though I’ve done some translation. I’m also not a native Hebrew speaker, and the rule of thumb for translators is to translate into your native language, not away from it.
But I am a baseball fan, and I grew up watching the game with a passion. My interest faded as I got married and moved to Israel, but the flame was reignited in 2006 when the local little league was looking for umpires, and I jumped at the chance. Then the following summer, in 2007, the inconceivable happened, and a group of American businessmen launched a summer baseball league in Israel, with a two-month schedule among six teams. I went to as many games as I could manage, assuming I was unlikely to get another similar opportunity (so far, I’ve been right).
That got me thinking about the insufficient connection between baseball and Israel. And at some point it occurred to me that there was, as far as I could tell, no Hebrew translation of the classic baseball poem - and one of the greatest sports poems of all time - Casey at the Bat. Maybe I could do something about that? Plus it would be a challenging exercise for my Hebrew translation skills.
Translating a rhyming poem poses several simultaneous challenges. The translation should, of course, capture the meaning of the words. It should, as far as possible, match the meter and rhyme scheme. It should, in some indefinable sense, reflect the “spirit” of the original.
This is all true in the general case. But translating this poem poses an additional challenge: bridging the culture gap. Baseball is a familiar part of American culture, and indeed the game as depicted in Ernest Thayer’s 1888 poem has changed little from his day to ours. Every American knows what a baseball game looks and feels like, who the batter and pitcher are, how the standoff between them plays itself out. Israelis, by contrast, have likely encountered baseball only through American television and movies. The scene is foreign, the terminology alien. No matter how skillful the translation, few Israeli readers could encounter it with the same sense of familiarity as their American counterparts. How many people were there who understood both baseball and Hebrew?
So I had to define what was the “spirit” of the original poem that I hoped to reconstruct in Hebrew. And I decided that my imaginary reader was exactly that elusive individual who was a native speaker of both modern Hebrew and baseball. The translation would be written as if a native Hebrew speaker had been in attendance at the mythical Mudville match, and had put the very same impressions to paper, as if it was the most natural thing in the world to write an ode to baseball in Hebrew.
That implied a few things: the translation would not explain baseball in any way, even in footnotes. The game’s environment, terminology and setting would be described just as simply and clearly in Hebrew as they were in the original English. Proper names would remain in English transliteration, not Hebraicized - names don’t change when you write about them in Hebrew. (So no “כפר-בוץ”!) But the play of the game would be described in Hebrew terms
The other “spirit” of the poem I hoped to emulate was its register. Casey at the Bat is described as a mock-heroic ballad. Much of it is written in exaggeratedly formal language, contrasting humorously with the mundane subject matter. It references the classic line, “Hope springs eternal in the human breast” from Alexander Pope, then the very next line lapses into slang: “if only Casey could but get a whack at that.” Casey is portrayed as a celebrity, he is described in religious terms, yet he is also shown wiping dirt from his hands on his shirt, to cheers from the crowd. We have formal poetic language such as “Close by the sturdy batsman the ball unheeded sped“ followed immediately by the derisively casual “That ain’t my style”.
These shifts serve to highlight on the one hand Casey’s pretension and haughtiness, and on the other his banality and human weaknesses. He’s an athlete, not a poet. There is an implied critique here of the exaggerated significance society often ascribes to sport.
I copied the text of the poem into a clean document and started to work on it, inserting verses of translation between verses of the original. The poem is structured in rhyming couplets, so I would often work on one couplet at a time, though sometimes I would let a word or phrase move up or down a line between couplets. I started by cobbling together a draft that roughly matched the meaning, but didn’t necessarily rhyme or scan. Then I’d play with it, looking for a better word or turn of phrase, rearranging words or phrases, playing with rhymes and synonyms, until it reached the point where I was happy enough with the result. Linguistic accuracy often had to give way to the constraints of rhyme and meter.
I don’t remember how long I worked on it, though it surely took a year or more, maybe two, when I could find some spare time. After I was satisfied with the words, I invested time in getting the nikud right - a chance to polish my grammatical skills.
I’d like to focus on some of the specific decisions I made as a translator.
The title. How to render “Casey at the bat”? Here, right off the bat (so to speak), I was faced with a term with no easy Hebrew equivalent. Hebrew has words for most baseball terminology, but I’m not aware of a straightforward translation for “at bat”. Even in English, we no longer talk about a player being “at the bat” - he’s just “at bat”. In the end I decided that the flow of the words mattered more than the precision of the language, and I deliberated between “קייסי בא לחבוט” and “קייסי במחבט”. I settled on the winner because it seemed a more direct translation of “at the bat”, even if it has no clear meaning in Hebrew.
“the Mudville nine” . Using “nine” to refer to a baseball team is a bit obsolete - today’s teams have dozens of players, though only nine are on the field at a time. I thought about using קבוצת מאדויל but settled on תשעת מאדויל for fidelity to the original. Eventually (in 2024) I decided to change it to the more grammatically-correct תשיעיית מאדויל, which slightly harms the meter.
“when Cooney died at first”. I wasn’t sure about translating “died” literally - it sounds very morbid. But didn’t it sound that way in English too? So I left it. And what about that “first”? Can I use ראשון in Hebrew to refer casually to first base? I thought it sounded odd on its own, so I went with בסיס ראשון. I continue to wonder whether it wouldn’t more accurately be הבסיס הראשון, but that simply doesn’t scan. By the time we get to third base, I do use שלישי on its own.
“that hope which springs eternal in the human breast”. As much as I would have loved to include all of Pope’s classic line, there’s no way the Hebrew equivalent could fit here. I had to shorten it.
“if only Casey could but get a whack at that”. I wish I could have found a similarly-slangy Hebrew equivalent for this phrase, but I failed. This is not a translation note, but from a baseball perspective it’s hard to understand what the thinking is here. The bases are empty. Even if Casey were batting, the most he could do would be to hit a solo home run and score one run, leaving Mudville still down four to three with one out left in the game. The only way to make sense of this is to suggest that if somehow both Flynn and Blake got on base, and then Casey came to bat, there was still hope for the team. Or maybe the fans were just fantasizing?
“We'd put up even money now”. This is betting lingo for a fifty-fifty wager, and as far as I’m aware it has no simple Hebrew equivalent, so I changed it to “we’d double the wager now”. Though it’s interesting to note that even were Casey to come to bat, the sense was that Mudville still had no more than a fifty-fifty chance to win. When I wrote this translation, sports betting was still illegal in most of the United States, though of course it flourished informally. Today, the Mudville fans could track the live odds pitch by pitch on their phones.
“lulu” and “cake” . These are obsolete slang words. Their precise meanings are not important, as long as they convey a similar sense of derision. I like how they came out. It took a while to find the right words.
“grim melancholy sat”. I found myself forced to shift into the present tense in the Hebrew here, in order to facilitate the rhyme between נוחת and מחבט. It’s clumsy, but I couldn’t find a better solution.
“Flynn let drive a single”. This is the only place I use a transliterated English baseball term (well, almost). I couldn’t find a Hebrew equivalent that would be clear and understandable, not to mention fit in the meter. So a single stayed a single. It felt a bit like cheating, but it works.
“Blake, the much despis-ed, tore the cover off the ball”. I could have translated “tore the cover off the ball” figuratively, but it’s so much a real part of baseball, especially in the old days when baseballs were less tightly-sewn. Yet I couldn’t find a way to describe the event in Hebrew in just half a line of verse, not to mention while maintaining the rhyme. So “the much despis-ed” had to go.
“And when the dust had lifted, and the men saw what had occurred, There was Jimmy safe at second and Flynn a-hugging third.” - It was wonderfully serendipitous that the key words אבק and חבק in these lines rhymed. Just had to rearrange the phrases a bit to make that possible. The meter in the first line is overstuffed in the original English, so I didn’t mind doing the same in translation.
“it rattled in the dell”. A couple of shifts in meaning here to support the rhyme. A dell is a kind of valley, but in Hebrew it becomes a hill. And “advancing to the bat” becomes “approaching the plate”.
“No stranger in the crowd could doubt 'twas Casey at the bat.” I struggled with this line. There are two lines in the poem that contain the title, but the translation misses both of them, in part because of the odd phrasing of the title in Hebrew. And I’m still not happy with the rendition of “no stranger in the crowd could doubt”. To me it feels awkward and a bit unclear.
“dirt” and “shirt”. They rhyme in English, not in Hebrew. I had to change the shirt to pants!
“the writhing pitcher ground the ball into his hip” . Looking at it again, maybe I should use טחן instead of לחץ?
“the leather-covered sphere”. Thayer uses various synonyms and descriptions for “ball” in the poem, presumably both for the sake of linguistic variety and to maintain the high language of the mock-heroic tone. I try to do the same, for both reasons, as well as for “bat”.
“Close by the sturdy batsman the ball unheeded sped” . This verse (at least the first three lines) is very tightly written, with lots of significant words packed into each line. It’s not possible to squeeze it all into the translation. The best I could hope was to keep the essence, along with the cadence and some of the register.
"That ain't my style," said Casey. I couldn’t find a workable translation that fit into the available syllables here. So I fudged it. It’s casual speech, so I figured there’s some leeway.
“Strike one," the umpire said. I decided to leave the umpire’s calls in transliterated English. Partly because it preserves the feel of the game - even in Israel, umpires call balls and strikes in English. And partly because the Hebrew alternatives didn’t feel right: פסילה? הכשלה ראשונה?
“it's likely they'd have killed him”. My version is more tentative about the umpire’s impending doom. Partly out of sympathy for umpires, but mostly because I couldn’t find a better word that fit the line.
“With a smile of Christian charity great Casey's visage shone”. “Christian charity” here is meant to sound exaggeratedly self-important. The high and mighty Casey is generously giving the pitcher another chance before blasting the game-winning hit. But whatever the intention, I couldn’t bring myself to write Christian charity into a Hebrew translation. And anyway, it would be meaningless to a modern Hebrew reader, and it’s inconsistent with the persona of my hypothetical Hebrew-speaking narrator describing the scene. So I looked for equivalent religious imagery from our own tradition, and I settled on the terms חסד וקדושה, along with a reference to the radiance of Moses's face upon leaving Har Sinai.
“And now the pitcher holds the ball, and now he lets it go.” This fortuitous line gave me the opportunity to insert a religious reference not explicitly in the original, but very apt nonetheless. Two verses ago, Casey was playing G-d. Now he discovers that in fact his fate is in the hands of the pitcher. The pitcher holds the ball, and the pitcher lets it go. How could I not think of the the Yom Kippur piyut, כי הנה כחומר! And sure enough, Casey’s arrogance and vanity is about to be answered by baseball’s equivalent of divine punishment.
“But there is no joy in Mudville – mighty Casey has struck out.” This final verse, along with the opening line of the poem (“The outlook wasn’t brilliant…”), are some of the best-known lines in American poetry. I wanted to get it right. This verse suddenly shifts tone, from the intense battle of wills between pitcher and batter, to a serene and romantic idyll with patriotic overtones. Life is beautiful somewhere - but not in Mudville, where Casey isn’t so mighty after all. The mood of the whole town is affected by the prowess of its sports heroes.
No comments:
Post a Comment