Welcome. Here, in this substack, I hope to have a place for my thoughts and feelings about my work as a translator of Yiddish and Hebrew poetry and prose.

Some months ago, I was translating a poem, and I started to struggle exactly where I always do: right away, at the title. The title and first line were essentially identical, so I did have to come up with something quickly, or else the entire project would stall out. The title was “נישטאָ דאָ קיין האַרבעסטן” and the difficulty with it was almost entirely spiritual and a product of my own pride and biases. Allow me to explain. 

The most accurate translation of the words in Yiddish are obvious to even very early students of Yiddish. “There are no autumns here.” Besides being accurate and succinct, this translation is an adequate expression of the themes of the poem and the life of the poet, Jacobo Glantz, a Ukrainian-born Yiddish writer who moved to Mexico City. The literal translation captures the sense of Here and There that make up the essential immigrant lament at the heart of the poem.

But to me, though I have learned it only scholastically, and never really spoken it outside of some shmuesenkreyz, conversation circles put on by the organizations teaching me Yiddish, despite all this, deep in my heart, Yiddish is a chatty language, a casual language, and comes to me in the shades of conversation I grew up around in Jewish New York. So instantly this totally fine, accurate translation, “There are no autumns here,” was transformed into the much more casual “Hey, they don’t have autumns here.” As if Glantz was coming up to me at a party, and pointing out that the hosts had neglected to put out his favorite snack, and that snack was really the only reason he had come. 

Now the “Hey,” I really couldn’t defend, and I let it go with good grace. But “They Don’t Have Autumns Here” somehow got at something true for me. Wasn’t Glantz talking about not just the surreality of moving from a temperate or northern climate to a southern tropical one, but about loneliness? Didn’t that “They” as in “Them” as in “Me vs Them,” didn’t it somehow convey the loneliness, the isolation of immigration and displacement? 

I couldn’t stop thinking about it. In my head my Yiddish tutor clanged on, an old native speaker from Montreal, aided a bit by the stern religious tones of the rabbi who taught me Talmud, my first forays into translation. “What are you adding words for?” my tutor would say. “He knows how to say ‘They don’t have autumns here.’ Where do you see the verb ‘to have?’ Where do you see the preposition ‘they?’” The older voice of my rabbi said “Translate it like you know what it says.” 

But also in my head were the extraordinary words of Kate Briggs, a translator of Roland Barthes, who says in her essay “This Little Art.” 

“I know that writing a translation is very different from copying or acting out a line from a book, not least because the translator, in my sense of her work, is a maker of wholes. . . . And yet still I want to insist on the common ground of enthusiasm that these activities (can sometimes) share. A spur which might also be framed as a curiosity, something like a personal experiment: to see what it might be like, what would happen, whether or not it is even possible for me to write this line, this work, in my own language, again.”

If I am a maker of wholes, do I not have a whole poem to be loyal to? Can I not construct and even deepen the meaning of Glantz? Was I not simply . . . writing this line again in my own language?

If you’d like to read the piece I mention here, it was published by Asymptote Journal and is available at this link.

Thanks for reading.