פיר לידער

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.