Adriana X. Jacobs

Position:

Associate Professor and Cowley Lecturer in Modern Hebrew Literature; Fellow, Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies 

Faculty / College Address:

Asian and Middle Eastern Studies / St Cross College

Email:

adriana.jacobs@ames.ox.ac.uk 

Research and Teaching Interests:

Modern Hebrew and Israeli literature; contemporary poetry; translation history and theory; literary translation; comparative poetics; diaspora and transnationalism; multilingualism and translingualism; comparative poetics; political poetry and digital cultures.

Current Projects:

I am the author of Strange Cocktail: Translation and the Making of Modern Hebrew Poetry (2018, University of Michigan Press), which offers a translation-centered reading of the development of modern Hebrew poetry (2019 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award Finalist). I have published widely on contemporary Hebrew and Israeli poetry and translation, including articles in Shofar, PMLA, Studies in American Jewish Literature, and Prooftexts.  My translations of Hebrew poetry have appeared in Gulf Coast, Anomaly, World Literature Today, North American Review, The Ilanot Review, among others, as well as in the collection Women’s Hebrew Poetry on American Shores: Poems by Anne Kleiman and Annabelle Farmelant (Wayne State UP, 2016). In 2022, I was the recipient of the 2022 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets for my translation of Vaan Nguyen’s The Truffle Eye (Zephyr Press, 2021). With Claire Williams, I am the co-editor of After Clarice: Reading Lispector’s Legacy in the Twenty-First Century, eds. Adriana X. Jacobs and Claire Williams (Oxford: Legenda, 2022).

My current projects include a study on contemporary poetry of crisis within a comparative and multilingual framework, as well as a translation of Tahel Frosh's poetry collection Avarice (for which I received a translation grant from the National Endowment for the Arts). I am affiliated with the research programme Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation and co-convenor of the MSt in Comparative Literature and Critical Translation.

 

Select Publications:

 

  • “Clarice Hebraica,” After Clarice: Reading Lispector’s Legacy in the Twenty-First Century, eds. Adriana X. Jacobs and Claire Williams (Oxford: Legenda, 2022)
  • “The ‘Forgers’ of World Literature: Translation, Nachdichtung, and Hebrew World Poetry,” The Cambridge History of World Literature, ed. Debjani Ganguly (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2021): 544-565.
  • “Sappho in Hebrew Literature,” Cambridge Companion to Sappho, eds. Patrick Finglass and Adrian Kelly (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2021): 441-456.
  • “Extreme Translation,” Prismatic Translation, ed. Matthew Reynolds (Oxford: Legenda, 2020): 154-170.
  • “‘Not My Mother Tongue’: Hebrew Literature in Translation,” What We Talk About When We Talk About Hebrew (And What It Means to Americans), eds. Naomi B. Sokoloff and Nancy E. Berg. (Seattle: University of Washington): 160-178 (2018).
  • “Ha-im ata dome le-yom aviv?: Anna Herman Translates the Sonnets,” European Judaism 50 (Spring/Autumn 2018): 97-105.
  • Money, so much money: Reading Tahel Frosh’s Avarice," Dibur 5 (Spring 2018): 87-99.
  • HO! and the Transnational Turn in Israeli Poetry,” Prooftexts 36.1-2. Special Issue on Jewish/World Literature: 136-166.
  • “Anna Herman and the Goldberg Variations,” PMLA 132.2 (March): 421-426.
  • “Where You Are From: The Poetry of Vaan Nguyen.” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 33, 4, Contemporary Israeli Literature (Summer 2015): 83-110.
  • “Hebrew on a Desert Island: The Case of Annabelle Farmelant.” Studies in American Jewish Literature, Special Issue, eds. Kathryn Hellerstein and Maeera Shreiber (Spring 2015): 154-174.
  • “The Go-Betweens: Leah Goldberg, Yehuda Amichai and the Figure of the Poet Translator,” The Blackwell Companion to Translation Studies, eds. Sandra Bermann and Catherine Porter  (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2014): 479-491.
  • “Hebrew Remembers Yiddish: The Poetry of Avot Yeshurun.” Choosing Yiddish: Studies in Yiddish Literature, Culture and History, eds. Lara Rabinovitch, Shiri Goren and Hannah Pressman (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2013): 296-313.
  • “From IDF to .pdf: War Poetry in the Israeli Digital Age.” Narratives of Dissent: War in Contemporary Israeli Arts and Culture, eds. Rachel S. Harris and Ranen Omer-Sherman (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2012): 153-166.
Photograph of Adriana Jacobs