Translatable but Debatable: דווקא (davka)
/by Mark L. Levinson
The word davka (דווקא) is post-Biblical, from the Aramaic. If it were a Biblical word, it would be on every page of the Bible and King James would have been forced to deal with it. “And God saw the light, that it was davka good.” “Hast thou davka eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?” “Take now thy son, davka thine only son Isaac, whom thou davka lovest…”
For want of an exact translation, English speakers often use a word like precisely when they want to say davka . “My wife polished the windows with precisely the newspaper section I hadn’t read.” But precisely isn’t really what they mean. They don’t mean that it wasn’t somehow imprecisely that section of the newspaper, they mean that it wasn’t any of the other sections that it easily could have been. There’s a lacuna in the English language where davka should be, and they’re filling it the best they can.
Sometimes there is a way to express davka in English by modifying a noun with very. “My wife polished the windows with the very newspaper section I hadn’t read.” Or if the sentence can bear it, you can add a whole phrase: “Of all the newspaper sections, the one she polished the windows with was the one I hadn’t read.”
The question then is, did she do it davka? Besides meaning that of all the possibilities, one special possibility in particular has eventuated (yes, in particular is also a way to express the meaning sometimes), the word davka is of course also used to mean someone brought it about deliberately. Sometimes spite is appropriate in English, and in fact Alcalay and Dov Ben Abba include it under davka in their Hebrew-to-English dictionaries. When Jerry Seinfeld returned a sports jacket out of spite, it’s what the subtitles on TV said.
JERRY: Excuse me. I’d like to return this jacket.
CLERK: Certainly. May I ask why?
JERRY: For spite.
CLERK: Spite?
JERRY: That’s right. I don’t care for the salesman that sold it to me.
CLERK: I don't think you can return an item for spite.
In that case, spite translated well as davka . But spite requires a grudge. If a child sees a harmless ladybug on the sidewalk and deliberately stamps on it, that’s a case of davka but the ill will involved isn’t spite.
The word davka is also used to modify adjectives. “I met the kid who crushed the ladybug, and he appeared davka well behaved.” In this case, it means that of all the things the kid might be, he was something you might well not expect. The Bantam-Megiddo dictionary lists for all that as one definition of davka . “For all that, he appeared well behaved.” The Morfix dictionary (www.morfix.com) includes in fact and actually as definitions, and they too can be useful to hint at the contrast, implied by davka , between what’s before us in reality and the many other possibilities we might have expected.
If you have comments that are davka about this word, please contribute them below. If there is davka another word on your mind, please write me at whystyle@elephant.org.il and if I use it here, you’ll be duly credited.
