1The main challenge of “My Japanese Fan” is the gender ambiguity of an illustrated figure on a Japanese Fan, which stands at the center of the poem. This ambiguity, rooted in the physical and prototypical characteristics depicted on the fan (Gordon Ginzburg, “Queering” 380; “Nursery” 51–52), is initially introduced through the word “friend”: “I have a friend, a little friend / Who lives upon a fan.” (Richards, “My Japanese Fan” ll. 1-2)
2Translating this ambiguity into Hebrew is particularly challenging due to the marked gender distinctions in Hebrew grammar. Unlike English, whose nouns lack gender marking, Hebrew assigns most nouns to a single gender—either grammatical or biological. Hebrew offers two equivalents to “friend” in the same register: ḥaḇer (חָבֵר) or yadīd (יָדִיד) in the masculine form, and ḥaḇerā (חֲבֵרָה) or yedīdā (יְדִידָה) in the feminine form. Thus, while English conveys gender ambiguity through “friend,” the Hebrew equivalents explicitly denotes gender.
3In order to maintain the poem’s inherent ambiguity, I opted for a contextual approach and utilized the abstract noun yedīdūt (יְדִידוּת, ‘friendship’) in a colloquial phrase instead of the initial occurrence of “friend”: anī b-īdīdūt (אֲנִי בִּידִידוּת, “I have a friendship,” lit. “I am in a friendship”). Additionally, I employed a more general Hebrew noun, dmūt (דְּמוּת, “character”), which is grammatically feminine in Hebrew but can signify both male and female individuals.
4This approach was used to resolve the same issue in the translation of the verb “lives” in the second line. Since in Hebrew the verb is another element that marks the gender of the agent of the action, “lives” can be translated into the masculine ḥay (חַי) or the feminine ḥayyā (חַיָּה). By presenting the Hebrew dmūt (דְּמוּת, “character”) as the agent, the feminine verb ḥayyā (חַיָּה) maintains agreement with its grammatical feminine gender, hence keeping the gender ambiguity even further.
5To ensure Hebrew agreement between the feminine noun – dmūt (דְּמוּת, “character”), and its referential pronoun – hī (הִיא, “she”), I rearranged the order of the third and fourth lines. In the English original, the uncertainty regarding the friend’s gender begins with a masculine pronoun accompanied by a feminine noun (“Perhaps he is a woman” [l. 3]). However, since I chose to use a feminine Hebrew noun, I employed a feminine pronoun and a masculine equivalent noun in that line: yittaḵen še-hī ʾīš (יִתָּכֵן שֶׁהִיא אִישׁ, “perhaps she is a man”).
6“My Japanese Fan” typically adheres to an iambic meter. While most English vocabulary comprises one-syllable lexemes, the average number of syllables in Hebrew is two (Ben-Shahar 130). This objective constraint presents a difficulty in creating a Hebrew translation that closely maintains the poem’s original meter (Toury 230–231). Due to this reason and since I wanted to remain faithful to the poem’s content, I have decided to neglect any meter. To preserve some of the structural characteristics of the poem, I nevertheless opted to retain the rhyme pattern as much as possible.
7In the English original, all even lines consistently rhyme with each other, featuring a different rhyme in each couplet, whether it be a perfect rhyme (e.g. fan/man) or a near rhyme (e.g. sooth/youth). Since the Hebrew equivalents do not necessarily rhyme with each other, some changes in the rhyme pattern were made. Still, the majority of the rhymes follow a consistent pattern; thus, in the first, second and fourth stanzas, every even line is rhymed with a near rhyme: menīp̄ā (מְנִיפָה, “fan”)/ʾīššā (אִשָּׁה, “woman”); nišbaʿ (נִשְׁבָּע, “in sooth”, lit.: “I swear”)/ḥaḇīḇā (חֲבִיבָה, “Lovely”); še-ʾep̄šar (שֶׁאֶפְשָׁר, “that is possible”)/neyar (נְיָר, “paper”). The rhyme pattern of the third stanza was nevertheless altered due to the Hebrew content and phonetics. The first line of this stanza contains an internal rhyme: śeʿarah mesoraq yašar ve-ḥalaq (שְׂעָרָהּ מְסֹרָק יָשָׁר וְחָלָק, “Her hair is combed up straight and smooth”); The second and third lines are rhymed with a perfect rhyme: ha-yap̄īm (הַיָּפִים, “the pretty”)/yedīdūtiyīm (יְדִידוּתִיִּים, “friendly” [pl.]); and the sixth, seventh and eighth lines also rhyme with each other: ba-ʿaraḇīm (בַּעֲרָבִים, “in every evening,” lit. “in the evenings”)/han-naʿīm (הַנָּעִים, “the pleasant”)/mā ha-ʿinyanīm (מָה הָעִנְיָנִים, “How-d’ye-do” [colloquial]). Another rhyme pattern emerges towards the end of the translation, where in the last four lines, only the first and last lines rhyme: bīš (בִּישׁ, “bad” [in Aramaic])/ʾīš (אִישׁ, “man”).
8The primary linguistic strategy Richards employs in “Eletelephony” is blending—creating new lexemes (ad-hoc neologisms) by combining two words (Bat-El 283–285; Mattiello 111–140). This technique begins with the title and is employed in several instances to underscore the speaker’s mistakes and confusion:
telephant (telephone + elephant)
elephone (elephant + telephone)
telephee (telephone + free)
elephop (elephant + drop)
telephong (telephone + song).
9In these blends one of the poem’s “heroes”—either “telephone” or “elephant”—is always present: These nouns were chosen due to their phonetic resemblance, as both contain the phonetic string eleph, allowing them to be combined and serve as the base for different blends. Interestingly, these blends may convey an iconic layer, as similar and relatively complicated nouns might be a source of mistakes and production errors for children in the early stages of language acquisition. These mistakes of production correlate with the speaker’s meta-linguistic bracketed remarks at the end of each stanza, which refer to these alleged production errors.
10That said, the main challenge that arises while translating this poem into Hebrew is finding an appropriate equivalent for one noun: “Eletelephony.” While telep̄ōn (טֵלֵפוֹן, “telephone”) is a loanword in Hebrew, the equivalent for the English “elephant” is the short, one-syllable noun pīl (פִּיל). The problem with finding the Hebrew equivalent is twofold: (a) In the base of each blend lies an omission of phonetic material from either one of the components or both. Since the Hebrew pīl has only one syllable, the possibilities of such omission are limited; (b) Another issue which usually (but not necessarily) involves creating blends is a common phonological part in both components. Hebrew telep̄ōn and pīl have only one common consonant, which further limits possible alternations.
11To resolve these limitations, at least to some extent, I have replaced telep̄ōn with the Hebrew blend pelep̄ōn (פֶּלֶאפוֹן, lit. “wonder phone”), the name of the first cellular provider in Israel in the 1980s which became metonymic for cellular phones in Israel in general. The phonetic resemblance between pelep̄ōn and pīl made it easier to create different relevant blends more seamlessly:
pīlpelep̄ōn (פילפלאפון)
pīlep̄ōn (פילפון)
pelepīl (פלאפיל)
pīlepōš (פילפוש)
pelepīr (פֶּלֶאפִּיר)
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