In this workshop, participants will explore writer Leah Falk's methodology for poetic translation of scriptural texts, regardless of prior experience or linguistic familiarity.

Together, we will meditate on a liturgical text in the original Hebrew alongside a “literal” translation and discuss what different pathways, ideas, and associations it brings up for us. Here, fluent Hebrew speakers will be welcome alongside those who never finished learning the alef-bet. We’ll read some classic and contemporary poems that use such texts as departure points, either as faithful translations or adaptations that seem to stray far from the source material. Finally, when we are all friends, we’ll spend some time creating our own messy, imperfect, collaged versions of these texts that invite our distractions, doubts, and humanity in.

When we engage with religious texts, whether praying or learning, we are not always paying complete attention. We may be preoccupied by the news or something our children did, a secret a family member revealed, or the way our sweater scratches the back of our neck. If our texts are in a language we don’t understand perfectly, we may pause on the words we know, free-associate, or feel shut out completely by their opacity.

In Ignorant Translations, a generative workshop around liturgical texts (mostly, but not strictly, Jewish), these distractions, associations, and preoccupations are not a cause for shame. Neither is the imperfect knowledge of Hebrew or other Jewish languages with which many contemporary Jews enter Jewish ritual. Instead of suppressing these attributes, we’ll write them into the holy texts themselves.