Cultural translation and the immigrant artist: Zoya Cherkassky-Nnadi’s works in context

ABSTRACT

Grounded in contemporary translation studies, this article offers insights into the way translation links with multimodality and art to display the experience of migration. Its main contribution to the discipline is exploring these issues from the perspective of cultural translation – a concept that applies to the transformation of individuals and entire groups when they encounter otherness. Our case study is a selection of works by the Israeli artist Zoya Cherkassky-Nnadi who emigrated from Ukraine to Israel during the mass immigration from the former Soviet Union in the 1990s. In her art, which reflects a navigation between conflicting identities, she articulates the experience of “translated” women and men (to use Salman Rushdie’s coinage). While examining her works through the prism of cultural translation, we explore several issues: the manipulation of stereotypes of the “other”; the transformation of people, especially in relation to immigration; the involuntary sharing of space; and hybridity.

KEYWORDS:

• Zoya Cherkassky-Nnadi
• immigration
• multimodality
• art
• cultural translation
• hybridity

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Zoya Cherkassky-Nnadi and to Rosenfeld Gallery, Tel Aviv for permission to include the artist’s works in this article. Alex Moshkin has kindly given his consent to quote his translation of Rita Kogan’s “Atsey ashu’akh lo” (Fir trees aren’t).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Bhabha refers to the earlier translation by Benjamin (1968).

2 The name Nnadi was added following her marriage to Hyacinth Obinna Nnadi.

3 See, for example, New Barbizon. Accessed August 27, 2023. https://newbarbizon.wixsite.com/new-barbizon/blank

4 See Lemish (2000) for the connection between the hair color and the stereotype.

5 From the point of view of the receiving country, all the immigrants from the FSU are regarded as “Russians”.

6 The similarities between the immigrants’ life before and after the immigration are highlighted in Cherkassky-Nnadi’s diptychs which were part of the “Pravda” exhibition (Kohn and Weissbrod 2021).

7 From Yana Pevzner Bashan’s blog. Accessed August 27, 2023. https://www.mako.co.il/video-blogs-weekend/Article-0cbc0be76522c71026.htm

8 Humor is created by incongruity between elements that coexist simultaneously (Veatch 1998), in this case – the two shops facing each other; while irony also involves criticism (Hirsch 2011).

9 Collectio Judaica, Rosenfeld Gallery. Accessed August 27, 2023. https://rg.co.il/exhibition/collectio-judaica/

10 For his artistic creation, see Perloff and Reed (2003). For his influence on Cherkassky-Nnadi’s Haggadah, see Dashevski (2021).

11 Dashevski (2021, 96) notes that the birds in the Aachen Haggadah resemble ravens, and traces the sources of this anti-Semitic image.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rachel Weissbrod

Rachel Weissbrod is Professor Emerita at the Department of Translation and Interpreting Studies, Bar-Ilan University. Her areas of research include translation theory, literary translation into Hebrew, audiovisual translation and adaptation. She has published in Target, The Translator, Meta, Babel, Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance, and other journals. Her book Not by Word Alone – Fundamental Issues in Translation (2007, in Hebrew) was published by the Open University of Israel. Her recent books, coauthored with Ayelet Kohn, include Translating the Visual: A Multimodal Perspective (2019), and Multimodal Experiences Across Cultures, Spaces and Identities (2023).

Ayelet Kohn

Ayelet Kohn is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Communication at David Yellin Academic College in Jerusalem. Her research focuses on multimodality in media texts and on communities in the internet. She has published in Visual Communication, Visual Studies, Computers in Human Behavior, Jewish Quarterly Review, Journal of Israeli History, Social Semiotics, Convergence, and other journals. Her recent books, coauthored with Rachel Weissbrod, include Translating the Visual: A Multimodal Perspective (2019), and Multimodal Experiences Across Cultures, Spaces and Identities (2023).