Review of So Many Warm Words by Rosa Nevadovska, trans. by Merle L. Bachman

The 1927 exchange between Yiddish poets Melekh Ravitch and Kadya Molodovsky (published in Literarishe Bleter ^{1 1} Only recently translated for the first time on In geveb’s special issue: Gendered Literary Debates in Yiddish. ) reveals much about the kind of reception a woman who published Yiddish poetry in America experienced. Perhaps fearing competition, Yiddish male poets wrote about their female counterparts in the most patronizing ways, sometimes in the form of ironic poems; in Ravitch’s case ^{2 2} Ravitch, Melekh. “Girls, Women, Ladies–Yiddish Poetesses.” In geveb, December 2023: Trans. Anita Norich, Faith Jones, and David Mazower. , as a collective review of anonymous (possibly imagined) women’s poetry. Happily, Molodovskys riposte ^{3 3} Molodovsky, Kadya. “Girls, Women, Ladies and... Prophecy.” In geveb, December 2023: Trans. Anita Norich, Faith Jones, and David Mazower. drips as ironic as Ravitch’s infuriating incitement. He probably got what he deserved.

Rosa Nevadovska ^{4 4} “Rosa Nevadovska 1890-1971: A Yiddish Poetess Finds Peace by the Sea,” Recovering Yiddish Culture in Los Angeles: https://scalar.usc.edu/hc/reco.... , who was born in Bialystok and moved to America in 1928, when she was 38, published early, in Russian-language newspapers, where Yiddish poetry written by women appears to have been more respected, or at least more welcome. Her first collection, Azoy vi Ikh bin (As I Am), was published in Los Angeles in 1936. Though she continued to write poetry, none of the poems from Lider mayne, her second collection (published posthumously in 1975) appeared in newspapers or journals. Did the long silence between books have anything to do with the reception of the first? We don’t know.

Remarkably, for a woman of her background and era, Nevadovska lived and studied in the most cosmopolitan cities. During WWI, she stayed in Moscow, where she married, divorced, and tragically lost her only child, her two-year-old daughter Leah, to meningitis. In America, Nevadovska traveled often to lecture and teach, but she lived alone for the rest of her life. It comes as no surprise that loneliness and homesickness are recurrent themes in her work.

Nevadovska’s poems are generally short, spare, compressed lyrics that rely for their effect on rhyme and rhythm. The poems tend toward 4-line stanzas—the “sturdy quatrain”-with an aabb or abab rhyme scheme. Her caesuras—intentional breaks in continuity—often pack an emotional punch. The endings of her poems depend on rhyme to bring them home, which makes a translator’s task difficult because without the closing rhyme the poem can fall flat. And yet, Nevadovska’s best work—in particular the poems about California, the desert and sea—culminate powerfully even in translation, even without their rhymes.

Merle L. Bachman’s new translation of a selection of Nevadovska’s poems, mostly from Lider Mayne, published by Ben Yehuda Press, is an event to celebrate. A bilingual edition, with the original and translated poems on facing pages, this work will be much appreciated by Yiddish readers and significantly useful to students of translation, allowing for a quick study of the difficult decisions a translator of poetry must make.

Reading them side-by-side, I found Nevadovska’s originals more spare, more modern than Bachman’s English translations. To illustrate why this happens, consider the opening tetrameter line of the title poem (also the title of this book)— three words, six syllables, in Yiddish— “fil vareme verter,” which, in English, becomes four words and five syllables: “So many warm words.” Bachman most likely wanted to get as close as possible to the stanza’s 3-foot line, and perhaps also to its accentuation. Still, the addition of the colloquial “so,” especially before “many” adds an extra adverb in a line that already features both adverb and adjective, and changes the quality of the lyric.

The Yiddish one-syllable “fil” is not easily captured in English. In The Eight Stages of Translation, the late poet Robert Bly details his many revisions in translating “viel, o viel,” which appears in one of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus — he first tries “many, oh many,” then “many, many.” Dissatisfied with the word “many,” he attempts “a lot, a lot,” returns to “many of them, “and finally resigns himself to “so many poems!” Settling on “So many warm words,” Bachman is in good company.

Among other notable additions and deletions in this poem, Bachman adds the present participle— “humming,” “filling,” “climbing”—and the past perfect— “had I gone.” She introduces the speaker in the first line of the second stanza, while Nevadovska holds off the drama of the direct “I” until the last two lines of the poem. In the third (final) stanza, Bachman also adds a line that isn’t in the original— “When I got to the top”— and deletes the question that sets up the ending. This makes a difference. In a poem that risks opening with “warm words,” Nevadovska’s reticence feels intentional, necessary even, withholding additional sentiment until the disappointed sigh of the final lines: “Did I find anyone there?/No one waiting for me.”

In his introduction to The Dream of The Poem, ^{5 5} Cole, Peter. “Introduction” in The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry From Muslim and Christian Spain 950-1492 (Princeton University Press, 2007), 14. the translator Peter Cole discusses the competition between the two great Andalusian translators who worked on Maimonedes’ Guide to the Perplexed and how it highlighted the familiar opposition between “surface fidelity” and “essential accuracy.” He quotes the stylist Alharizi: “I translate in most places word by word, but first and foremost, I strive for the meaning of what I’ve heard.” In fact, Cole reports, Alharizi “allows himself a considerable measure of freedom with the text.”

Trends in translation change, and every translator emphasizes different aspects of the original. In 1964, the literary critic Edmund Wilson and the writer Vladimir Nabokov famously had a friendship-ending feud over the question of how to translate. ^{6 6} Beam, Alex. The Feud: Vladimir Nabokov, Edmund Wilson, and the End of a Beautiful Friendship (Pantheon Books, 2016). Clearly our relationship to language, especially our mother tongue, is complex and emotional, so it is not surprising that different styles and methods of translation elicit passionate opinions. By the time Nabokov published his (by most accounts, unreadable) literal translation of Pushkin’s Onegin, Wilson had acquired enough fluency in Russian to criticize it as barbaric.

Here’s an example of my own literal translation—clumsy, perhaps barbaric, yet more true to the original—of the second line in “Letters,” another Nevadovska poem: “fun ehrgetzland, fun yugentland arois.”

Bachman offers the smooth and readable “From somewhere out of the land of youth;” my more literal translation would be something like “From somewhere-land, from youth-land emerged.” Yes, I’ve coined the awkwardly hyphenated somewhere-land and youth-land to translate Nevadovska’s “ehrgetzland” and “yugentland,” but it is accurate and allows me to retain her caesura, therefore the music of the original line.

Caesuras are frequent in Nevadoska’s poems, and their placement is often strategic, as in “Images,” a powerful poem that sees mother, father & grandfather in nature: spring, frost, dew, grass, & flowers. Each stanza in the original features two em-dashes, one in the first line, the other in the third, and they’re placed at emotional peaks, stopping the flow momentarily, like a hiccup. The pause both heightens the pathos while somehow also diminishing the sentimentality. In the English translation, which features only one em-dash per stanza and not in the same moments as Nevadovska’s, this powerful aspect of the poem gets lost.

“A Day to Come,” a poem from Nevadovska’s first collection As I Am, guts me, in large part because of the caesuras which here are happily retained in the English: “A day will come, I will fly past the sea—/I will come to you my father—you, my tate.” The translator is Etai Rogers-Fett, and his decision to stay with Nevadovska’s Yiddish “Tate” for the second time she addresses her father, is spot on. As with the English Dad, “Tate” gives us the intimacy of a daughter addressing her father.

Emily Wilson, the award-winning translator of Homer’s Odyssey, makes the point that every translation, “is an entirely different text from the original poem;” for her, the concept of a “faithful translation” is a “gendered metaphor,” when, as in her case, the “male-authored” original is valued over a translation by a woman. ^{7 7} Wilson, Emily. “Translator’s Note” in The Odyssey (W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2018), 86.
In So Many Warm Words, we have the gift—the mitzvah—of one woman bringing the work of another woman to our attention.

Bachman tells us in her introduction that for the most part she does not attempt Nevadovska’s rhyme, a smart decision as it would be impossible to do well. She reaches instead for “sound echoes” and attempts matching line length and rhythm. “Thankfully,” Bachman writes, “if you can read Yiddish, you will enjoy reading the originals.”

Bachman’s “So Many Warm Words” offers readers with even a modicum of Yiddish the pleasure of both the essential meaning and sonic joys of Nevadovska’s work.