Document generated on 09/30/2021 11:21 p.m. TTR Traduction, terminologie, re?daction Stopping by the Woods: Classic American Poems in Yiddish « Stopping by the Woods » : poèmes américains classiques en yiddish Albert Waldinger Traduction et (im)migration Article abstract Translation and (im)migration This essay interprets and analyzes in detail the Yiddish versions of great Volume 16, Number 2, 2003 American poems: Poe's "The Raven," Longfellow's "Hiawatha," Whitman's "Song of Myself" and Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." An URI: https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/010719ar attempt has been made to relate all cross-linguistic data to cultural and social DOI: https://doi.org/10.7202/010719ar ideologies like Poetic Professionalism, Americanization, Socialism, Preservation of Ethnic Identity and Personal/Communal Expressiveness. In other words, the main intent of the essay has been to "explicate" a text by See table of contents reference to its cultural context, whether American or Jewish. Publisher(s) Association canadienne de traductologie ISSN 0835-8443 (print) 1708-2188 (digital) Explore this journal Cite this article Waldinger, A. (2003). Stopping by the Woods: Classic American Poems in Yiddish. TTR, 16(2), 155–174. https://doi.org/10.7202/010719ar Tous droits réservés © TTR: traduction, terminologie, rédaction — Les auteurs, This document is protected by copyright law. Use of the services of Érudit 2003 (including reproduction) is subject to its terms and conditions, which can be viewed online. https://apropos.erudit.org/en/users/policy-on-use/ This article is disseminated and preserved by Érudit. Érudit is a non-profit inter-university consortium of the Université de Montréal, Université Laval, and the Université du Québec à Montréal. Its mission is to promote and disseminate research. https://www.erudit.org/en/ Stopping by the Woods: Classic American Poems in Yiddish Albert Waldinger Mary Antin's The Promised Land (1912), the most famous Jewish immigrant autobiography of its time, recounts her futile attempts to restore the taste of Russia through eating American cherries: And if I should return to Polotzk, and buy me a measure of cherries at a market stall, and pay for it with a Russian groschen, would the market woman be generous enough to throw in (the) haunting flavor (of bygone fruit)? I fear that the old species of cherry is extinct in Polotzk (quoted in the introduction to Antin by Sollors 1997, xii). As a result, she found herself in limbo, despoiled of the bracing stay of an accustomed delight. However, her tasting to the full of American strawberries did reconstitute the fruit she had eaten twenty years earlier, restoring the freshness of childhood, a near Adamic experience with the power of strengthening her for the difficult but ideal-driven adulthood of the New World. The new strength was born of the unity of seemingly hostile identities and times and made up what Werner Sollors calls "invention" (in The Invention of Ethnicity 1987), and it was through such "inventiveness" that reputed American Yiddish poets (Aaron Glanz-Leyeles, Abraham Liessin, Solomon Bloomgarden [Yehoash], Louis Miller, Berl Lapin and Meyer Tkatch) managed to bring back the Old World savor while making it smack of the American future. In fact, Aaron Glanz-Leyeles (1889-1966) was the first to show the full motivation of such "nativization" in the early years of the 20th century. He began with Poe, whose "Raven" he translated (Harshav 1986, p. 8) and whose intricate meters and rimes he valued highly as a master of technique—in such "Annabelle Lee"-like poems as "Yuola," 155 where the mystical goddess has an attraction "whose wave I cannot refuse" (Harshav 1986, p. 87). But Leyeles was much more than an esthete; in 1919 he founded (with Jacob Glatshteyn) the poetic school of "Introspectivism" (Inzikhizm, literally "In-Self-Ness"), according to which "free meters" should "follow the bent" of alienated and expressionistic desire (the phrase is from Glatshteyn's 1972 essay on Leyeles, p. 44). Thus he invented the persona of Fabius Lind, the forgotten urbanite whose poetic diary registered everything from painfully fleeting time to disgust with the flesh (Harshav 1986, pp. 137- 138). The result was a Jewish version of Eliot's J. Alfred Prufrock (1910) mixed with Bellow's Augie March (1953), one persona spanning two World Wars in New York City. Of course, Leyeles continued to think of Poe as the poet of modern horror, to be paired with Baudelaire as the diver into the urban depths—"Late Hour" of 1948 spoke of "…a horror tale of Edgar Poe,/ A commentary on the spleen of Baudelaire" (to rime with "malheur" [Yid. malyer ], Harshav 1986, pp. 172-173). This is a long way from the Second Avenue Yiddish musical theater in which an actor sang— "Columbus, I've got no bone to pick with you at all/ And you, sweet America, no hair from your head should fall" (quoted in Hana Mlotek, "Louis Fridzel, an umbakanter Yidisher muziker" ["Louis Fridzell, an Unknown Yiddish Musician"], Forverts, Aug. 23, 2002, p. 14). Nor is it close to the sunny translation of the "Star-Spangled Banner" by Berl Lapin (1889-1952), also a translator of Frost (Hana Mlotek,"Berl Lapin, a poet fun 'Di Yunge'"—"Berl Lapin, Poet of 'The Young Ones'" [name of a poetic school devoted to Revigoration and Urban Regionalism], Forverts, Oct. 18, 2002, p. 14). But it does approach, while explaining, excusing and refining, the early curse of Ellis Island as an "Isle of Tears," as the first station into "Columbus' Damned Country" (Mayzel 1955, p. 12). Still, passing the statue on Columbus Circle, Leyeles saw the "conquistador" as harmlessly "believing and disappointed " (1968, p. 65) and then turned to accentuate the positive in an examination of Poe's value to Jewish liberation in the "Land of Columbus"—"Poe whispers, 'O man, know well thy cloudy underside, ignite thyself thy sole and single light'" (1963, p. 98 from Poe vispert, du mentsh, tsind on dayn eygen likht1). 1 All translations from the Yiddish are by the author of this article. Transcriptions follow the system used by the Yiddish Scientific Organization 156 In other words, the awareness of individual freedom and release from communal command and superstition meant embodied truth—and thus poetry; both together ("Truth and Poetry") combined to make up the "immortal instinct of the Beautiful" in Poe's Poetic Principle (1984, p. 76). For a Jewish writer, the emphasis had to be on Truth, an urgent matter, wrote Uri Zvi Greenberg in 1920's Warsaw—"gramen- shtramen" ("rimes-chimes" ) created only a trivial "tintinabulation" (see Feldman 1986, p. 27). Moreover, according to both Poe and Leyeles, the poet could only attain the heights of harmony by first "diving into the depths of the densely dark self" (1963, p. 99 from toykh arop in shvartsen zikh, gedikht riming with gerikht or "doomsday" in a complex seven-line stanza). It is significant of the optimistic American 19th century that William McGuffey, way back in 1879, attacked such a "Fortunate Fall" as no more than Gothic "morbidity"; at the same time, he felt the need to include Poe in his Sixth Eclectic Reader for his "care and skill in the construction" (1962, p. 409). For Leyeles, on the other hand, technique was secondary to the Jewish immigrant self as expressed in Yiddish, not English, with the result that the "Promised Land through its blessing straightened the back of my yearning" (1963, p. 105 from the majestic hot mit brokhe oysgeglaykht dem rukn fun mayn garn). Of course, on the material level, America enabled the "Jewish tribe" to "eat regularly and sleep in one's own bed" (1963, p. 90)—as Mary Antin had recited with twelve- year old pomp to the assembled pupils of Chelsea Grammar School near Boston: "We weary Hebrew children have at last found rest…" (1912, p. 242). But Leyeles emphasized the "spiritual level" in the chance to be oneself, Enlightenment (Haskole) in the Jewish-Yiddish and American sense, not the freedom to assimilate to America and reject the Jewish past. Moreover, it was a "fortunate" paradox that America encouraged him to strive after the "shine and sparkle of a non- American iota of self" through Yiddish—which best expressed the "Jewish point" [dos pintele yid] of redemptive personality. Such recovery in language (a yidish vort, superficially no more than "A Yiddish word", but deeply and substantively one resonant with the homelike past) became "his mission, his passion and the sense of his life" (1963, p. 104). In the words of Yiddishism, "No-one knew before (YIVO) and Sol Steinmetz's Yiddish and English (University of Alabama: 1986: 108-111). 157 Leyeles that the poor [and homeless] jargon of Yiddish was capable of singing with a broad-chested and full-throated baritone" (see Glatshteyn's 1968 introduction to a selection of Glanz-Leyeles' Poems and Plays: xviii). Unexpectedly, Poe the "morbid" idealist contributed to such Yiddishism in the poems of Abraham Liessin (1888-1938), former editor of the Zukunft ("The Future") which set the tone for fine Yiddish prose and poetry. "Nevermore" (keyn mol meyr, "No time more") adapts Poe's 19th century to the Jewish "I" of 1931: instead of the Poe narrator, the center of the poem is the struggling Yiddish poet in New York—whether in the person of Mani Leib, the self-styled cobbler- 'Young One' from the Bronx or the poverty-stricken Moyshe Leyb Halpern—who recreates the American voice despite the planes overhead (Mayzel 1955, p. 192). The scene is set: Hot amol azoy gegosen oykh in yener nakht fun osyen/ Ven es hot zikh Poe gematert in zayn Bronkser shtiybel shveyr (190, "So did it rain and pour throughout this Autumn night/ When Poe tortured himself hard in his Bronx room" (where shveyr ["hard"] rimes with the hypnotic and harmonious refrain announced by the title (see Poe's analysis of "The Raven" in The Philosophy of Composition 1984, p.