In this installment of the “Stranger Still” series, we invite the poets and translators Sabine Huynh (French, English, Hebrew) and Karen Alkalay-Gut (English, Hebrew, Yiddish) to join us in a conversation about their experiences as multilingual poets in Israel and the role of translation in their work. They will read selections of their poems and translations, including their recent collaboration: Huynh’s French translation Alkalay-Gut’s collection of Holocaust poetry, Surviving Her Story/Survivre à son histoire.

Karen Alkalay-Gut was born in London on the last night of the V-1 flying bomb attacks and grew up in Rochester, New York, completing a PhD in 1975 at the University of Rochester. Since 1972 she has lived in Israel, raising a family, and is retired from teaching poetry at Tel Aviv University. She was the founding chair of the Israel Association of Writers in English, a position she held until 2014 and resumed in 2018. She was Vice Chair of the former Federation of Writers Unions in Israel and is currently a board member of the Yiddish Writers Association. She has written poetry for the cabaret ensemble Panic Ensemble, as well as wide-ranging essays and scholarly articles. Her poetry publications include the recent collections A Word in Edgewise (English), Derakhim le-ehov (Ways to Love, Hebrew), and Yerusha (Inheritance, Yiddish/Hebrew).

Sabine Huynh is a poet, translator and editor based in Tel Aviv. She holds a PhD in Linguistics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and is the author of a dozen books (poetry, novel, short stories, essay, diary), and numerous translations (from the French, Hebrew and English). Her poetry collections include Kvar lo, which won France’s 2017 CoPo Poetry Prize, and Dans le tournant/Into the Turning, a bilingual English-French book co-authored with Amy Hollowell. Her first novel, La Mer et l’enfant, was shortlisted for the 2014 Emmanuel-Roblès Prize and for the 2013 Chambery’s First Novel Festival Prize. With Haggai Linik, she is the founding editor of the French-Hebrew literary translation magazine Peham. Her latest poetry collection Parler peau (« to speak skin ») was illustrated by Philippe Agostini and published last year by Æncrages & Co. Her French translation of the complete poetry of Anne Sexton is due out in 2021 with the feminist publishing house Editions des Femmes.
Huynh Photo Credit: Miriam Alster


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