Foreign Coins in Hebrew Gold: Yaakov Fichman and the Gendered Economics of Translation

In the first decades of the twentieth century, Hebrew writers and thinkers debated the topic of translation, considering the necessity for and best methods of translation into Hebrew. This essay explores writings by the poet and translator Yaakov Fichman, alongside those of his contemporaries, focusing on the economic and gender metaphors used to describe the activity of translation. I argue that through his metaphoric language Fichman sought symbolic justification for translation, in view of the anxiety surrounding the status of translated works in the nascent Zionist culture. Fichman posited translators as powerful stylistic and linguistic “billionaires” who stood to enhance and reform the language. Moreover, to bolster the status of the Hebrew translator, Fichman masculinized this activity, imagining the translator as a warrior who can conquer both the foreign work and the Hebrew language itself. Through this gendered economics of translation, Fichman strove to establish the productive value of translation within Zionist Hebrew culture, accomplishing his goal by using a patriarchal rhetoric of exclusion and subjugation.