Eau du Dove

My work is going all to pieces: pieces of Sutzkever's "Ode to the Dove," that is. Part 1 appeared in InTranslation, and part 2 in Words Without Borders. Part 3 is now out in qarrtsiluni.

Herring and Coconuts

Two translations of mine are featured in the new issue of the journal Eleven Eleven from the California College of the Arts: one of Dvoyre Fogel's Herring Barrels, the other of Moyshe Nadir's My Pedigree. Let me know what you think!

What have I just started translating?

These sentences are the beginning of a famous Yiddish novel. If you guess what I'm translating, you will win a hearty congratulations and a drink the next time I see you in person.


The city of N is built in three rings. First ring: the very center, the trade market. Second: the great city itself, with the many houses, streets, byways, alleys around the market, where most of the dense habitation is located. Third: suburbs.

What should be translated?

The Yiddish Book Center (that Yiddish Book Center) has a blog post up by David Schlitt where he asks the question, "What Yiddish titles and/or authors would you most like to see translated?" An excellent question, that (and it's no surprise that I left a comment there). Follow the discussion, if you would.

Setting Out

Setting Out
Bei Dao 

To TT, on his 24^th birthday

In the watch store called The Stars
Twelve celestial hours chime
Along the clouds’ unending path
Twenty four mountains spin around

Migrating birds set out from you
The earth is covered with written signs
Waves turn the pages, wind reads aloud
Roots’ meaning is drawn out by trees

With song a music box protects
The juniormost of all the gods
Querulous teapot teaches how
To know the taste of wind and storm

Reality is another dream
The air is full of banknote kites
Fire’s ice and thunder’s shock
The chessboard kingdom sets its traps

The gravely ill disseminate
All the rumors of the age
But only those who guard the night
Will breach the lines of dawn’s defense

Shadows clear up, rainbows push
The swinging doors when seasons change
In the watch store called The Stars
Twelve celestial hours chime

Original here. Translation mine.

This Be The Translation

There's a not-bad Hebrew translation of the Larkin poem. And whoever wrote it (I don't see a name) links to some guy's Yiddish version.

What should a bilingual book of poetry look like?

Should every poem be "available" in both languages -- via translation? "equivalent" poems? how? Or does there not need to be an exact symmetry? You can read what promises to be an enlightening discussion by pledging even just one thin dollar at Kickstarter and becoming a prenumerant (pre-subscriber) of my poetry manuscript.

Ode to the Dove at Words Without Borders

Trapped on the lips are sounds, like pearls of forts oceanate
are mute for thousands of years, and over the muteness—a blade.
"Dove darling, childhood's child, let the lips speak, give them speech
Become now the cry of the sounds, or else the dream is extinct . . ."

Read more.

The "was" and the "still"

from Diary Poems
Avrom Sutzkever

Here and the there are together-together
and to swim reaching depths the ray bends itself downward.

Scythe is connected to stalk. This is how,
like violin player is one with the sound.

That's how the was is enbrothered with still,
that's how a woman and man are enlimbed.

--from Yiddish: Z.Sh.B.

Sutzkever on the Square

Some translations of mine of his Diary Poems (Lider fun togbukh) are included in the Summer/Fall 2010 issue of Washington Square. (If you would like to look at the process of translation in the raw & blogged, look over here.)

Anthologized

I can sing the praises of the Ecco Anthology of International Poetry.

I can also mention that my translation of Glatshteyn was included! I know this only because a friend was browsing at the Newark airport and picked up the book.

Buy the book!

Larkin in Yiddish

This Be The Verse.

Translating even one sentence is hard! A case study.

A story by Chaim Grade (yes, her husband) excerpted in this week's Yiddish Forward doesn't seem all that interesting from a narrative point of view, or innovative stylistically, but it's lovely writing all the same.

Here's the first sentence.

אונטער די קאַלטע שטיינערנע געוועלבן פֿון קלויז ישן זיצן זקנים בײַ דעמבענע שטענדערס.

Unter di kalte shteynerne gevelbn fun kloyz yoshn zitsn skeynim ba dembene shtenders.

Under the cold stone vaults of the * the old men sit at oaken *s.

Kloyz yoshn is a macaronic phrase, yoshn meaning - of course - old in loshn-koydesh, and kloyz being a smallish prayer- or study-house. "Old study house" doesn't get at it, because yoshn is part of the name here, not an adjective. Maybe Old Study House, but that seems like we're talking about a Society of Friends meeting place. Venerable? Ancient? Neither of those work.

Shtender - that's a common Jewish, or at least Yeshivish word. I think that when Grade is talking about the skeynim (old men, for lack of a better translation) sitting at the shtenders, he doesn't mean the podiums that people daven at, but rather the bookstands that rest on a table. "Bookstands" doesn't sound right, though.

Doves, time, and pianos - together again

Three new translations of mine of three Yiddish poets - Avrom Sutskever, Yonia Fain, and Boris Karloff - are up now at InTranslation. Have a look! (And thanks to Alex Cigale for making me aware of the journal. While you're there, check out his translations from the Russian.)

I wouldn't say no, either

I keep trying to think who besides Michael Wex they could get to do the Yiddish for Chabon's Policemen's Union, but I can't come up with anyone else.

Oh, except...

Возможно, поэма звучала бы лучше в русский?

A fellow Yiddish poet, Yisroel Nekrasov, translated one of my poems into Russian. Very nice of him, of course.

БЕЛОЕ НА БЕЛОМ

Хлеб с толстыми ломтями света.

Роженица расцарапывает кожу

От зуда.

Из чёрной раны

Вытанцовывает кость.

A new bilingual anthology of contemporary Yiddish poetry!

Very exciting, and not just because I am represented (and helped with the translating).

"It is precisely [the] remarkable and idiosyncratic character of Yiddish, which bridges languages, cultures, 'worlds of geography and universal human spaces', that shines through this anthology of contemporary Yiddish poetry. Inspired by Peter Yankl Conzen’s poetry and his deep knowledge of the Yiddish literary tradition, Step by Step. Contemporary Yiddish Poetry brings together the voices of contemporary Yiddish poets from throughout the world."

Buy it here.

Gained in Translation

Yermiyahu Ahron Taub is a multiple minority. He moved away from the ultra-Orthodox community in which he grew up; he is gay; he is a Jewish poet, and he writes in Yiddish, English and (occasionally) Hebrew. Nothing about him or his poetic persona can live in a single language — which is one reason, perhaps, that this poet (as a way station out of the ultra-Orthodox world) took a job as a painter’s model. Art can often work a transformation that can be difficult through language alone.

More in the Forward.

My talk in Philadelphia today

It's lacking something without the talk, but here's a silent Power Point.

"Intoxicado" Does Not Mean "Drunk"

Among Cubans, “intoxicado” is kind of an all encompassing word that means there’s something wrong with you because of something you ate or drank. I ate something and now I have hives or an allergic reaction to the food or I’m nauseous. On the day Willie’s intracerebellar bleed began, he had lunch at a fast food restaurant, the newly opened Wendy’s. His mother and his girlfriend’s mother assumed that the severe headache he experienced that night was related to eating a bad hamburger at Wendy’s - that Willie was “intoxicado.”

More at the Health Affairs Blog about a terrible linguistic misunderstanding. "Neither the ER doctor nor the family requested a professional medical interpreter because each side believed they were communicating adequately."