This past week provided a bit of a breather I think for my supervisor and the rest of the staff in the Art Department. Even though there are a few odds and ends that we need to work on, the first wave of the Big Move is over! The HRC’s objects and paintings are now safe as construction begins at the FAC.

Seeing as that project was mostly over (for me at least), my supervisor introduced me to a new project: translating information on a set of prints by Avraham Goldberg. The title, artist info, date, and introduction are all in Hebrew, which I can translate as I grew up speaking Hebrew, my father’s native language. Previously, at the HRC I volunteered by translating identifying information on Hebrew and Yiddish books, so this new project was sort of a deja vu experience as I sat leafing through my dictionary and slowly, but surely making headway!

During my first day with the prints, I felt fairly confident as the information presented  was straightforward and easy for me to translate. However I turned to the last page of the suite, and I saw a double sided introductory text. The two scholars who wrote the introduction did so in a sort of elevated academic Hebrew, which is much more advanced than my conversational skills. And so this part of the translation has taken me a few days, and will be an ongoing project. I have translated, with some gaps, most of the first section, and next week I will tackle the next. There are some words and phrases that are beyond both me and the dictionary, and I will definitely be calling up my father next week, bugging him for some answers (he doesn’t know this yet!).

I hope that in the future someone will find this translation helpful in their research. The artist, Avraham Goldberg, is not renown so much in the U.S., but in Israel he is more well known as an artist dealing with Jewish themes, something that many Jewish artists have tried to move beyond.

I enjoy projects that I know will take a few weeks to complete, so I don’t have to constantly be searching for small tasks to do. I come in in the morning, check in with my supervisor, and get to work! Feeling productive makes me feel like I am really contributing to the HRC.