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Keeping Faith: Translating the Poems of Sarra Copia Sulam

Although Sarra Copia Sulam’s sonnets present various challenges to translators, the opportunity to convey her distinctive voice offers ample compensation. Since translation is an iterative art, the best any translator can achieve is a version of the original, ideally one that combines historically accurate understanding of the era’s context with poetic diction that sounds idiomatic and mellifluous in the target language and target, that is, contemporary, era. Sulam’s sonnets bridge multiple steams of influence—emulation of the magnificent Italian sonnet tradition; echoes of Biblical Hebrew (particularly The Psalms); firm handling of early seventeenth-century poetic trends; and finally distinctive individual talent and style. The English translator must connect these strands while simultaneously conveying the complex autobiographical narratives which prompted and continue to underlay the sonnet content. Her battles with the Italian religious and literary establishment, while exposing her to mortal risk, inspired her best work. Thus, the translator’s chosen phrases and rhythms must also suggest the conscious and unconscious unease of a woman under duress. While her writings often adopt paradigms from the dominant Italian culture and popularized by Christian males, they are enriched by deliberate interweaving of traditional Jewish thought and depiction of the troubled pilgrim as a female Jew, a status which both exposed her to profound exile from Italy’s literary community and enabled her unique contribution to it.