My Wait
I already know, my wait was for nought—
I read the flight of the tiny bird all morning,
knew from our cat,
who forgot to lick
her white-yellow freckles—
her habit,
a sign that someone is coming.
The fire too lay in the oven, ashamed,
sunk in ash & dismay,
refusing to spring up,
offer a sheaf of sparks for a visitor.
Everyone knows you will not come tonight.
I will turn off the lamp & draw the curtains
against all that’s near & far.
I will throw myself into the jungle
of my loneliness with all my limbs,
grope the night with memories like silent footsteps,
& not step on the slithering snakehead of remembrance.
Then I will extend my hand in greeting,
talk to my shadow, a homeless wanderer
blanketing the wall.
Even if it’s pitch dark—
take my hot breath in your narrow hand,
say one word—& all my grief will depart.
My Dreams
My dreams are so full of you, mornings
are fragrant of my life with you—
A sip, slow, on my bitten lips,
the drop of blood, the only sign of choked tears.
My hours overflow, like cups,
one into the next,
with hope, like fine wine—
that you are not far,
that soon, any minute now,
you will come,
you will come,
oh, come.
I Stand at Midday—
I stand at the midday of your life,
a cornstalk mid-field, bent by fullness,
having shrugged off its green spring sleeve,
& growing with golden certainty of coming days.
Lilac jingles play in the far meadow.
bitter scents of summer, of wild poppy,
of sultry soil, hot on my hair.
When the day entwines itself in my blonde braids,
& the evening gathers pearls of dew,
my brown body breaks like a cornstalk
to the blade & falls at your feet.
Like White Birch—
Your years, like white birch,
seed my way—
I carry in my trembling knees
the weight of your unspoken word.
My lips turn red & full
with spring & with you.
Gloomy, these premonition-laden days of waiting,
how like waves before a storm
your eyes lower to the ground.
The dark arches of my brows tense with madness.
On my lips, which can’t help you, spurious trouble.
Vulnerable & shamed in foolish pride
they mumble stubbornly, silently.
If only for them alone, this—
which my eyes have
already said a thousand times.
Four Poems
Rokhl Korn
translated from the Yiddish by Pearl Abraham
Listen to an excerpt of the original Yiddish read by the translator:
Two noteworthy facts about Rokhl Korn draw me toward her work. She wrote nature poetry—rare for Yiddish writers of her time, and she came to Yiddish late, after she had published in Polish to much acclaim. WWI pogroms turned her against the Polish language and she started studying Yiddish. This could not have been an easy decision for a poet: She didn’t grow up with the language as her mother tongue, as most Yiddish writers did. Her husband, though, was a native speaker, and somehow Rokhl Korn managed to learn and write in Yiddish exclusively for the rest of her life. She published her first Yiddish poems in 1918 and went on to win just about every prize in Yiddish literature.
Born and raised in a rural landscape, Korn’s imagery in Bashertkeyt, the first collection published after she emigrated in which these four featured poems appear, is grounded in nature. A ripe cornstalk in the field serves as a metaphor for the speaker’s body. Years seed like white birch. Rivers and ravines stand in for life journeys. These are poems of love and longing, filled with the ache of a distant and distanced partner, the basherter (intended one), their fate, and the separation, is the Bashertkeyt, title of this book.
These poems are highly personal, with the speaker of the poem, the I, almost always present. In Yiddish poetry of this time, this I, the three-letter ikh, often arrives as a contraction, attached to the verb: kh’hab, kh’vell, kh’zul, kh’trug, kh’shtay (I have, I will, I should, I carry, I stand), so that it doesn’t add an extra syllable—the change in meter would be due to the added syllable, so it’s not a separate point. I didn’t use contractions in my translation of these poems even when the English I’ve or I’ll might’ve worked. To my ear, it didn’t sound like spoken English.
Another contraction that appears in these poems—s’shpielt, s’flekht, s’bliet (it plays, it braids, it blooms)—would’ve made, in English, for vague, passive construction. I reorganized the lines, beginning with the subject—“Lilac jingles play in the far meadow.” Of course this comes at a loss: the word “play” no longer holds the prime place.
Perhaps my greatest trespass as a translator occurs in a poem titled Benkshaft, not the easiest word to translate without introducing a sentimental note. In the Yiddish, the word appears at the end of the first line. In my translation, the word doesn’t appear in the poem. I planned at first to keep it as the title, in Yiddish, which remains a good option. Indeed, an argument could be made for keeping titles untranslated. In the end, since so many of Korn’s titles are also the first two words of her poem, I went with My Dreams.
Born and raised in a rural landscape, Korn’s imagery in Bashertkeyt, the first collection published after she emigrated in which these four featured poems appear, is grounded in nature. A ripe cornstalk in the field serves as a metaphor for the speaker’s body. Years seed like white birch. Rivers and ravines stand in for life journeys. These are poems of love and longing, filled with the ache of a distant and distanced partner, the basherter (intended one), their fate, and the separation, is the Bashertkeyt, title of this book.
These poems are highly personal, with the speaker of the poem, the I, almost always present. In Yiddish poetry of this time, this I, the three-letter ikh, often arrives as a contraction, attached to the verb: kh’hab, kh’vell, kh’zul, kh’trug, kh’shtay (I have, I will, I should, I carry, I stand), so that it doesn’t add an extra syllable—the change in meter would be due to the added syllable, so it’s not a separate point. I didn’t use contractions in my translation of these poems even when the English I’ve or I’ll might’ve worked. To my ear, it didn’t sound like spoken English.
Another contraction that appears in these poems—s’shpielt, s’flekht, s’bliet (it plays, it braids, it blooms)—would’ve made, in English, for vague, passive construction. I reorganized the lines, beginning with the subject—“Lilac jingles play in the far meadow.” Of course this comes at a loss: the word “play” no longer holds the prime place.
Perhaps my greatest trespass as a translator occurs in a poem titled Benkshaft, not the easiest word to translate without introducing a sentimental note. In the Yiddish, the word appears at the end of the first line. In my translation, the word doesn’t appear in the poem. I planned at first to keep it as the title, in Yiddish, which remains a good option. Indeed, an argument could be made for keeping titles untranslated. In the end, since so many of Korn’s titles are also the first two words of her poem, I went with My Dreams.
Rokhl Korn was born in 1989 in Eastern Galicia (present-day Ukraine). Her first poems appeared in 1918 in Polish, and her first poem in Yiddish appeared in the Lemberger Tageblatt the following year. Her early collections of poetry are Dorf (1928) and Royter mon (1937), while her first collection of prose, Erd, was published in 1936. Korn emigrated to Montreal, Canada in 1948, where she wrote and published more than eight books of poetry and prose. She went on to receive significant awards in Yiddish literature, among them the Louis Lamed prize (1950, 1958), H. Leivick prize (1972) and Itzik Manger Prize (1974).
Pearl Abraham is the author of four novels, most recently American Taliban (Random House, 2010) and The Seventh Beggar (Riverhead Books, 2005), which was shortlisted for the Koret Int’l award. Her essays, stories, and reviews have appeared in various publications. Animal Voices/Mineral Hum, a collection of stories, was shortlisted for the 2018 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Oberon, Of the Book, Gashmius, Voices Israel, and Jewish Poet’s Collective. Her translation of a Yiddish Rokhl Korn poem, “Ikh volt gevolt amul deyn mamen zen” (“I Would Have Liked to See Your Mother Once”) along with her own Mother’s Day poem appeared in In geveb. Other poems in translation from Yiddish, Abraham’s first language, appear on https://pearlabraham.substack.com/. Abraham has been an emeritus professor since 2022, founded and directed an MFA in Fiction and edited the sentence craft website, S.
