Oct 26, 2021
INTRODUCTION
Debora Vogel was the apotheosis of a transdisciplinary Yiddish modernism which is no more. The contours of her work in poetry, aesthetics, and criticism crossed languages and domains of knowledge. Even after the disappearance of much of the literary, economic, and social infrastructure that made possible those intellectual pursuits, the contours remain. Vogel’s work has been rewarded with an increasing readership and scrutiny, mostly on the part of scholars, in the recent past. But we readers must find a solution to a problem of loss. How are we to understand Vogel in the context of the destroyed historical communities that made her work possible? How are we to provide her a genealogy, among other Yiddish modernists, in the wake of destruction?
Like Vogel, I write in a Yiddish that is not my birth language, that I came to as an adult attracted by the literary-critical heritage of the language, its literature, and its creators. I have chosen in particular two poems by Vogel to render anew via the poetic method of translation-erasure, revealing through distortion the contours that lead from language to language across the decades.
In erasure poetry, parts of a text are removed by some means (as with an eraser), or blacked out(as with the censor’s pen). The resultant altered text, with the words presented either in situ or otherwise shifted, is called an erasure poem. This method has been used by those identifying with a variety of literary traditions to concretize the reparative work of creation in the wake of loss. In particular, Dan Pagis, Tracy K. Smith, and Layli Long Soldier, among others, have made use of erasure in the wake of genocide.
If, as Jerome Rothenberg points out, erasure is a political act, each of these individual actions of erasure is itself political. The multi-component nature of erasure, and the ways we are political actors in our choices of what to read or not read, are reasons which motivate my use of this genre to honor the work of Vogel in our day.
As someone living later, writing in English, a language that has itself undergone transformations and erasures, whenever I translate a Yiddish poet or endeavor to create in Yiddish myself I am enacting erasure. To do so using the words of another poet is a chance to make explicit and deliberate, in the setting of another’s preoccupations and philosophical approach, what Vogel’s legacy might have been if not subject to violent erasure.
This is a counterfactual, of course, in two senses: the violent erasure did occur, and I am not bringing back into being Vogel’s poetry in anything but a refracted and distorted way. That is a kind of homage, like a memorial notice for the dead whose place of burial is unknown.
I have chosen two poems to modify: one entitled “Libe-ferzn 1920” [Love Verses 1920], a short poem in four parts on pages 38 and 39 of the book MANEKINEN: lider [Mannequins: poems], published by Tsushtayer in Warsaw in 1934; the other, “Balade fun der shlekhter libe [Ballad of bad love]”, from page 50 of that volume. I was intrigued by the interplay in these poems between the specific realia of daily life, especially urban daily life, and philosophical apothegms. The spare setting of the sayings, as well as the binary-centric view of love (or love’s failings) in a planetary existence, cry out for a speculative transfer of her images and observations into our own day.
I chose them also because love is what motivates me to write poetry, and all the more so Yiddish poetry: a love, in the terms of the Talmudic rabbis, “that is not dependent on anything”: not the permanence of the reader, the society, or even the language it is written in. The love in Vogel’s poems deliberately dismisses, or negates, the motifs of romantic love (“maybe memory isn’t enough/with words like ‘you’re my happiness’” [from Vogel’s “Ballad of bad love”]). Such overwriting of cliché with flat desperation is an invitation to the contemporary translator who doesn’t know, sometimes, which language they are writing in, for whom they write, or in what century.
An Explanation of the Erasures
An erasure poem comprises four parts: the original text, the act of erasure, those portions of text subject to erasure, and the resulting combination. I will add a fifth part: a translation of the original poem and of the created erasure-poem.
The sample comprises three poems.
1. The first is an erasure of a portion of Vogel’s poem “Libe-ferzn 1920” from Manekinen (pp. 38 – 39, Farlag “Tsushtayer,” Varshe-Lemberg, 1934). The erasure in Yiddish comes first (I have entitled my version Libe-ferzn 2020), accompanied by my English translation of that erasure; next there is an English translation of the original poem of Vogel’s. This method, fragmented as it is, represents an approach to erasure and translation as complementary techniques.
2. The second is in the same arrangement, but an erasure of another section of that same poem.
3. In the third, erasure is enacted graphically by striking out words with black marker. It is included as an image. The source poem is “Balade fun der shlekhter libe,” also from Manekinen (p. 50), accompanied as well by my translation.
ליבע-פערזן 2020, 1
שלום בערגער (אַן אָפּמעקעניש פֿון אַ ליד דבֿורה פֿאָגעלס)
א
אַ צײַט האָט געמוזט אַװעקגעבן
קײנער מיטן צװײטן האָבן זיך נישט געטראָפֿן
ב
װאָס צו װיסן קען אײן מענטש
געבן אַ צװײטן, אַלץ געװאָלט װיסן
ג.
לעבן בלײַבן און געבן
װיסן, װעגן ליב האָבן
Love Verses 2020, 1
an erasure poem by Zackary Sholem Berger based on a poem by Debora Vogel
Time had to give away
No one met each other
One person gives another
What he should know. Wanted to know everything
Staying alive and giving
Knowledge, about loving
Love Verses 1920
Debora Vogel, trans. Zackary Sholem Berger
1.
They had to meet at a time
When no one can live without the other
And they had to leave each other
2.
This is what it had to come to:
They met just when
A person didn’t yet know, didn’t experience
What another can give them
Wants everything not to know anything
Wants life itself from them
ליבע-פערזן 2020, 2
שלום בערגער (אַן אָפּמעקעניש פֿון אַ ליד דבֿורה פֿאָגעלס)
אַ סך ליבעס גייען איבער דער
פֿאַרטרויערטער וועלט.
אַ סך פֿאַרלוירענער מענער.
פֿרויען, גייט פֿאַרבײַ.
Love Verses 2020, 2
An erasure poem by Zackary Sholem Berger based on a poem by Debora Vogel
Many loves pass over the
Mourned world.
Many men, lost.
Women, pass by.
Love Verses, 1920
Debora Vogel, trans. Zackary Sholem Berger
Passerby, never mourn
A lost lover - him or
Her
A long road of lost
Passes over the world
Many days in life, many wo/men
The Ballad of He/She/Them (Nonbinarizing)
An erasure poem by Zackary Sholem Berger based on the original by Debora Vogel
Thousands of times already he not
she --
Not
Not
Since that time
It’s come as if
with happiness
to them, oh, happiness
They concealed their feelings
as one should - but as one
Memory remained
(compared before to yellow leaves)
and perhaps memory isn’t enough
Translation of “Ballad of bad love” (from Vogel’s original Yiddish), trans. Zackary Sholem Berger
It would have been a thousand times more preferable
if he didn’t come
when they wouldn’t have met, among thousands
him and her
no green leaves and sky
no blue tomorrow or evening
since that time
it came out as it usually does
with happiness
it came to nothing between them, oh
happiness
They hid their feelings
Maybe it’s not love for him. or love for her
that’s how it ought to be .… but just for him
Only memory remained
(compared once upon a time to yellow leaves)
maybe memory isn’t enough
with words like “oh, you, my happiness”
But why does it always end up with this sentence
“it would have been better
if they hadn’t met”