Cute story about Lev, and Chicken Manure news for those who persist to the end

I mentioned that I am reading Harry Potter in Hebrew. It is going well and Harry is now at Hogwarts, now, but my feeling that I could be reading this in any language generally continues. It is as if the story were being sent directly into my head without the pesky medium of language. Occasionally though the fact of Hebrew intrudes on me. This is probably largely a personal matter that has to do with knowing the original pretty well and the idiosyncrasies of learning a language as an adult. When you learn a language as an adult you actually often can remember the first time you came across a word and this sets up a whole associative network which is hidden from view or buried when the language in question is one you have spoken since childhood. For example, I was curious about the origin of the word shakshuka which is a tasty egg-in-tomato-sauce breakfast which I first enjoyed at Tmol Shilshom here in Jerusalem. I assumed shakshuka was a loan word from Arabic but came across variations on the root shakshek in several places meaning something like "shake" or "mix-up". For example, when Harry and Hagrid visit Gringots and they first get out of the cart at Harry's vault, the narrator says "He [Hagrid] indeed looked a little green and when the cart finally stopped next to a little door in the wall of the tunnel, Hagrid got out and leaned against the wall until his knees stopped "leshakshek."
Still, I recently read a letter that Gershom Scholem, the renowned scholar of Jewish mysticism sent to his friend, the philosopher, Franz Rosenzweig and which is published in the collection On the Possibility of a Jewish Mysticism in Our Time, in which Scholem says (in an uncharacteriscally overheated sort of way) that "This Hebrew language is pregnant with catastrophe; it cannot remain in its present state -- nor will it remain there. Our children will no longer have any other language... One day this language will turn against its speakers -- and there are moments when it does so even now; moments which it is difficult to forget, leaving wounds in which all the presumtuousness of our goal is revealed. Will we then have a youth who will be able to hold fast against the rebellion of a holy tongue?" What Scholem was exactly worried about, he leaves tantalizingly unspecified, but it seems that it has to do with an inextricable bent towards messianism and eschatology somehow inherent in the Hebrew language itself. Given that you would think that Harry Potter would have a more pronounced messianic or apocalyptic flavour to it in Hebrew than in English but I have to say that in general that is not the case. The translation like the orginal is sort of eerily pelucid. However I found a few oddities. One is the translation of Halloween as "layal hakadoshim" or literaly "the night of the holies." Kadosh, of course has a strong redolence of the biblical and makes the non-religious, magical holiday of Hogworts seem very close to its Christian/Pagan roots. I'm not sure how Halloween general gets translated but I think a transliteration might have been more apposite. Another spot where the language's theology sort of jumped into the driver's seat unexpectedly was when Snape puts Harry on the spot on his first day of Potions class by asking him, among other things the difference between "choneq hazaev" and "bardas hanazir." Now, I have already packed up my dictionary so it is a little hard for me to confirm this but I think the translator -- Gili Bar-Hillel -- has come up with two Hebrew neologisms having translated wolfsbane and monkshood more or less literally. Neither variety of aconitum grows wild in Israel as far as I can tell from various plant websites (plant sellers just call them aconitum) so it is not so odd that the translator would simply use a direct translation from the very evocative English common names. But I would imagine that with a little work one could find a Hebrew name in a medieval Hebrew herbology. What is funny about the translation of monkshood to "bardas nazir" is that it relies on imagining the "nazir" as a Medieaval christian monk -- in which case the hood follows naturally and the flower really does look like its namesake. But if your referent for a nazir is the biblical nazir, such as Samson, the "bardas", the hood seems like a bit of a non sequitor.

The other day I told Lev that curiosity killed the cat. He said, "Really? How?"

Finally since I have touched on the agricultural and this is really mor or less just for my mom, there was an article in this morning's Haartez about flies, chicken manure and compost, topics all dear to her heart. It also highlights the benefits for people from all over the region to co-operation in this case on ecological issues. I can personally attest that 18 years ago when I was on kibbutz not far from the Jordanian border the flies were Biblical and plague like, though I never thought to blame chicken manure or the Jordanians and I remain skeptical on this point.

Jordan bans chicken manure as fertilizer over fly infestation

By Zafrir Rinat, Haaretz Correspondent

Tags: fertilizer, Jordan

Jordan has banned the use of chicken manure as fertlizer, as it has been responsible for widespread infestations by flies for many years on both the Jordanian and Israeli sides of the Dead Sea. In future, Jordanian farmers in the Jordan Valley and Dead Sea area will be required to use only compost. Chicken manure both attracts and nourishes flies, and the profusion of the insect has been a blight to life on both sides of the border for years. Recently, authorities in both countries teamed up, with the mediation of the environmental organization Friends of the Earth Middle East, to deal with the problem.