Chava Rosenfarb’s Translations into Yiddish of Two English-Language Jewish-Canadian Writers

Last spring, as I was going through the papers of my moth­er, the Yid­dish author, Cha­va Rosen­farb, I came across three typed pages in Yid­dish enti­tled ​“An alte froy shpilt zikh,” tak­en from the Eng­lish-lan­guage mem­oir Old Woman at Play by the Jew­ish-Cana­di­an nov­el­ist Adele Wise­man. I also found six poems by the well-known Jew­ish-Cana­di­an poet Miri­am Wadding­ton that had like­wise been trans­lat­ed from Eng­lish into Yid­dish. In this translator’s note, Ruth Panof­sky and I give brief biogra­phies of all three writ­ers and high­light for read­ers some of the trans­la­tion deci­sions that went into the Yid­dish ren­der­ing of the work of these two promi­nent Jew­ish-Cana­di­an writers. 

Cha­va Rosen­farb was born in 1923 in Lodz, Poland, the elder of two daugh­ters of a restau­rant wait­er. She sur­vived four years of incar­cer­a­tion in the Lodz ghet­to and then one year in the con­cen­tra­tion camps of Auschwitz, Sasel, and Bergen-Belsen. She was lib­er­at­ed by the British army in 1945. After set­tling in Mon­tréal in 1950, she trans­mut­ed her expe­ri­ences dur­ing the Holo­caust into fic­tion, author­ing three nov­els in Yid­dish: The Tree of Life: A Tril­o­gy of Life in the Lodz Ghet­to; Bociany; and Let­ters to Abrasha. The first two of these nov­els have been pub­lished in Eng­lish, Hebrew, and Pol­ish trans­la­tion. She was also the author of four books of poet­ry; a play, The Bird of the Ghet­to; and numer­ous short sto­ries and essays. Cha­va Rosen­farb was one of the most impor­tant Yid­dish writ­ers of the sec­ond half of the twen­ti­eth century. 

Rosenfarb’s friend Miri­am Wadding­ton (1917−2004) was born and raised in the North End of Win­nipeg, Man­i­to­ba. She pub­lished four­teen vol­umes of verse dur­ing her life­time and par­tic­i­pat­ed in the rise and flow­er­ing of mod­ernist Cana­di­an poet­ry dur­ing the 1940s in Mon­tréal. Waddington’s verse, inflect­ed by the inti­ma­cy of the Yid­dish lan­guage, bore the influ­ence of her sec­u­lar upbring­ing and a mod­ernist, intel­lec­tu­al approach to writ­ing. She was also affect­ed by her expe­ri­ence as a social work­er, rec­og­niz­ing aspects of her­self in her most vul­ner­a­ble clients. In her poems she probed the under­ex­am­ined lives of the dis­en­fran­chised and the dis­pos­sessed, with a focus on women. Wadding­ton wrote lay­ered verse that was deeply root­ed in her every­day life as a woman and as a Jew. 

Waddington’s younger con­tem­po­rary, Adele Wise­man (1928−1992), was also born and raised in Winnipeg’s North End. Wise­man was one of Canada’s most high­ly regard­ed nov­el­ists of the sec­ond half of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry. She is best known for her two ground­break­ing nov­els, The Sac­ri­fice and Crack­pot, which explore Jew­ish life in Cana­da. In 1978, Wise­man turned away from fic­tion: Old Woman at Play is a mem­oir and a med­i­ta­tion on cre­ativ­i­ty, focus­ing on her mother’s folk art of doll-mak­ing. The text inte­grates col­or pho­tographs of Chai­ka Wiseman’s dolls and was adapt­ed for the stage as Doll Show. Shaped by the char­ac­ter of her moth­er, the work resem­bles a nov­el, a nar­ra­tive form that Wise­man under­stood well. As a work of life writ­ing that explores the cre­ative process, it also incor­po­rates ele­ments of biog­ra­phy and autobiography.

As a lit­er­ary genre, poet­ry is noto­ri­ous­ly dif­fi­cult to trans­late because it depends so much on the sounds of words that may be par­tic­u­lar to one lan­guage and not to anoth­er. In the case of Waddington’s poems, Rosen­farb man­ages to main­tain the met­ric rhythm and often the rhymes as well, aid­ed, no doubt, by the fact that both Yid­dish and Eng­lish are Ger­man­ic lan­guages. Rosenfarb’s lines are longer than Waddington’s because the words she must use to con­vey the mean­ing are longer: Yid­dish is not as com­pact a lan­guage as Eng­lish. Yet the meter remains the same in both ver­sions of the poems. But while Wadding­ton fre­quent­ly omits punc­tu­a­tion from her poems, as in ​“Don’t Say Any­thing,” Rosen­farb adds peri­ods and com­mas. Some­times, the added punc­tu­a­tion changes the mean­ing of the line. For instance, the first line of the sec­ond verse of Waddington’s poem ​“The Bow­er” reads in Eng­lish: ​“For you my breast / will be no bow­er.” In oth­er words, for the lover, the speaker’s breast will be no haven. But the punc­tu­a­tion and gram­mar of the Yid­dish make this a direct address to the breast, since the line is punc­tu­at­ed as fol­lows: ​“Vayl du, mayn buzem, / vest nisht zayn keyn bahel­tenish,” which trans­lates as, ​“While you, my breast, / will not be a hid­ing place,” thus chang­ing the mean­ing of the Eng­lish text.

Some­times the cul­tur­al bag­gage that adheres to a word in one lan­guage makes it dif­fi­cult to trans­late into the oth­er. For instance,“The Bow­er” draws on the medieval imagery that accrues to the word ​“bow­er.” ​“Bow­er” in mod­ern Eng­lish gen­er­al­ly refers to a shady spot in the woods or in a gar­den, but it also car­ries con­no­ta­tions of a lady’s boudoir or apart­ment in a medieval cas­tle. There is no direct equiv­a­lent in Yid­dish, so Rosen­farb set­tles for the word ​“bahel­tenish,” mean­ing a hid­ing place, thus los­ing the sec­ondary fem­i­nine mean­ing of bower.

Rosen­farb feels free to trun­cate some of the poems, so where Waddington’s ​“Beau-Belle” is sev­en stan­zas long in the Eng­lish orig­i­nal, Rosen­farb only trans­lates the first four stan­zas. This may be because the last three stan­zas require not only trans­la­tion from Eng­lish, but also from French – and from poor French at that. In the orig­i­nal poem, the Eng­lish speak­er asks her French-Cana­di­an lover to call her his ​‘doll’ by say­ing ​“tu es poupée” (“you are doll”), as ungram­mat­i­cal a con­struc­tion in French as it is in Eng­lish, pre­sum­ably intend­ed to demon­strate the bad French of the ​“mau­vaise anglaise” speaker.

But changes like these are few and minor. On the whole, Rosenfarb’s trans­la­tions remain faith­ful to both Waddington’s poet­ic line and to her mean­ing, although Rosen­farb does take full advan­tage of the pecu­liar­i­ties of Yid­dish where she can. For instance, in the sec­ond stan­za of the poem ​“Women,” the Eng­lish term ​“jam-mak­ers” allows for the rep­e­ti­tion of the root word ​“makhn” in Yid­dish: ​“di ayn­ge­makhts-makherins.” In the same stan­za, where Wadding­ton has the verb ​“post­ed,” Rosen­farb has turned the verb into a noun and slight­ly altered the mean­ing. Waddington’s ​“post­ed only on air” becomes in Rosenfarb’s trans­la­tion ​“a let­ter sent only to the air.” In the Yid­dish ver­sion of the poem ​“By the Sea: For A.M. Klein,” Rosen­farb trans­lates the Eng­lish line, ​“Apollo’s gold­en ear / was sealed against his cries” as ​“Apo­los gold­ene oyer / farziglt kegn kol fun zayn kel,” thus get­ting mileage out of the sim­i­lar sounds in Yid­dish of ​“kol” (voice) and ​“kel” (throat) with­out los­ing the mean­ing of the line.

This last poem is Miri­am Waddington’s trib­ute to one of the great Jew­ish-Cana­di­an poets, A. M. Klein, who, like both Miri­am Wadding­ton her­self and Adele Wise­man, belonged to the gen­er­a­tion of Cana­di­an writ­ers who knew Yid­dish well, yet chose to write in Eng­lish. Gen­er­al­ly con­sid­ered the first great Jew­ish-Cana­di­an poet, Klein suf­fered a ner­vous break­down at the end of his career in the ear­ly 1950s and was forced to stop writ­ing. Miri­am Waddington’s poem, ​“By the Sea: For A.M. Klein,” mov­ing­ly recounts this break­down. Unlike with some of the oth­er poems, Wadding­ton punc­tu­ates the lines here. What is more, they rhyme. Rosen­farb man­ages to main­tain a rhyme scheme in Yid­dish, but she length­ens the lines to make them con­form more read­i­ly to the needs of Yid­dish syntax.

Of the six poems that Rosen­farb trans­lat­ed, ​“This Year in Jerusalem” touch­es most close­ly on her usu­al theme of the Holo­caust. In the orig­i­nal poem, Waddington’s por­tray­al of the hor­rif­ic Jew­ish past in East­ern Europe is linked to the vio­lent Jew­ish present in Israel. Han­nah, the poem’s pro­tag­o­nist, has escaped the cool, green cli­mate of Poland to go and clean offices in Jerusalem, where, at first, she curs­es the heat of the sun. But this year, instead of the Nazis, she curs­es the Egyp­tians and the Syr­i­ans for killing the son she brought with her from Poland to Jerusalem. The mur­der pre­sum­ably occurs dur­ing one of the Arab-Israeli con­flicts. In both Eng­lish and Yid­dish, the homonyms ​“sun” and ​“son” are the same, thus illus­trat­ing an advan­tage of trans­lat­ing between two Ger­man­ic lan­guages. And, of course, Waddington’s title ​“This Year in Jerusalem” sug­gests the Passover seder’s hope­ful admo­ni­tion, ​“next year in Jerusalem.” But in Waddington’s poem, this year in Jerusalem sug­gests the lack of hope and the end­less cycles of Jew­ish catastrophes.

We turn now to Rosenfarb’s trans­la­tion of the first few pages of Adele Wiseman’s mem­oir, Old Woman At Play. Wiseman’s mem­oir is a the­mat­ic cousin to Waddington’s poet­ic trib­ute to A.M. Klein in that both works deal with cre­ativ­i­ty. But in Old Woman at Play, the cre­ativ­i­ty is not in decline — quite the oppo­site. Wise­man has writ­ten a trib­ute to the artis­tic inven­tive­ness of her eighty-year-old moth­er, who stays up until the ear­ly hours of the morn­ing mak­ing dolls. ​“Why do you make dolls, Mama?” Wiseman’s first-per­son nar­ra­tor asks. The ques­tion is repeat­ed sev­er­al times through­out the course of the nar­ra­tive as Wise­man tries to under­stand the ori­gins of her mother’s cre­ativ­i­ty and, by exten­sion, her own. Wise­man calls her mother’s doll-mak­ing ​“inno­cent,” because she is unself­con­scious about what she is doing, almost child­ish­ly so.

Noth­ing is as redo­lent of girl­ish­ness as a doll, even more so when the doll is con­struct­ed by an eighty-year old woman. In fact, the Yid­dish title that Rosen­farb gives Wiseman’’s mem­oir, ​“An alte froy shpilt zikh,” is more sug­ges­tive of chil­dren play­ing than Wiseman’s Eng­lish title, Old Woman At Play. Because the moth­er does not ques­tion her own impulse to cre­ate dolls, Wise­man is forced to acknowl­edge the wis­dom in her mother’s inno­cence and scolds her­self for assum­ing that all cre­ativ­i­ty is nec­es­sar­i­ly relat­ed to words and to writ­ing, which, of course, is Wiseman’s own form of cre­ativ­i­ty. Wise­man pays her moth­er the high­est pos­si­ble com­pli­ment by call­ing her doll-mak­ing an ​“art,” a word that she cap­i­tal­izes in oth­er con­texts in order to punc­tu­ate its pretentiousness. 

Rosenfarb’s trans­la­tion of these first few pages of Wiseman’s mem­oir is straight­for­ward, although the Yid­dish script does not allow her to cap­i­tal­ize words the way Wise­man does, so that Wiseman’s sar­cas­tic ART and ARTIST are sim­ply ren­dered as ​“kun­st” and ​“kin­stler­lin,” with­out any styl­is­tic indi­ca­tion that the terms are intend­ed iron­i­cal­ly. Also, unlike the poems, the Yid­dish text here looks more like a draft with words crossed out and over-writ­ten, so that the text is not always eas­i­ly leg­i­ble. It is puz­zling that Rosenfarb’s trans­la­tion ends where it does, giv­en that Wiseman’s text does not indi­cate the end of a sec­tion. Yet Rosenfarb’s end­ing is clear­ly delib­er­ate, since the note at the bot­tom says: “(Begin­ning of the book An Old Woman at Play.) Yid­dish: Cha­va Rosenfarb.” 

Since Wiseman’s book is a dia­logue between moth­er and daugh­ter — both artists in dif­fer­ent ways — their cre­ativ­i­ty also hints at bio­log­i­cal cre­ativ­i­ty, not just at giv­ing birth to the next gen­er­a­tion, but also at pass­ing on skills from one gen­er­a­tion to the next. At the same time, it sug­gests a kind of per­ma­nence in both bio­log­i­cal and artis­tic cre­ativ­i­ty in that the child remains a child even when she is an adult, while the elder­ly moth­er con­tin­ues to make dolls, as if she were still a child. Here is an exam­ple of what I mean, one that Rosen­farb includes in her translation:

Why do you make dolls, mama?
>To please the chil­dren.
>Only the chil­dren?
>Who else?
>I like your dolls.
>So?
>I’m a mid­dle-aged woman.
>You’re still my child.

This pas­sage illus­trates the flu­id­i­ty of time, its con­stant change, despite the artis­tic impulse to make things per­ma­nent. The same dynam­ic might be said of trans­la­tion, which cel­e­brates the flu­id­i­ty and mal­leabil­i­ty of lan­guage while attempt­ing to trans­pose and make per­ma­nent a text in a lan­guage oth­er than the one in which it was written.

At the same time, the act of trans­la­tion assumes a future in the tar­get lan­guage. By trans­lat­ing Miri­am Waddington’s poems and the begin­ning of Adele Wiseman’s mem­oir into Yid­dish, Rosen­farb is imply­ing the con­ti­nu­ity of Yid­dish, that it has a future where trans­la­tions like these can find a pub­lish­er and an audi­ence of inter­est­ed read­ers who would expe­ri­ence these texts in Yid­dish. In this sense, trans­lat­ing two Eng­lish-lan­guage writ­ers into Yid­dish is an opti­mistic endeav­or, a hope­ful ges­ture towards the future of Yid­dish lit­er­ary cre­ativ­i­ty. But the fact that I found these trans­la­tions buried in a box, that although I worked close­ly with my moth­er for many years, I nev­er heard her men­tion the trans­la­tions, not even when she rem­i­nisced about Wadding­ton or Wise­man, leads me to sus­pect that she went no fur­ther with them because the real­ist in her did not, tru­ly, fore­see a future for Yid­dish. My moth­er very sel­dom aban­doned work that she had start­ed, not even when she was dis­sat­is­fied with what she had writ­ten. That she let these trans­la­tions go sug­gests to me not that she was unhap­py with the trans­la­tions them­selves, but that she despaired of ever get­ting them pub­lished. It was an acknowl­edge­ment, how­ev­er painful, that the wider Yid­dish lit­er­ary world that she had known as a child and as a young woman no longer existed.

This piece was writ­ten by Goldie Mor­gen­taler with the assis­tance of Ruth Panof­sky. Wadding­ton’s poems in Eng­lish are tak­en from The Col­lect­ed Poems of Miri­am Wadding­ton (Uni­ver­si­ty of Ottawa Press, 2014) edit­ed by Ruth Panof­sky.

Click here to down­load a PDF of the Eng­lish texts and their Yid­dish trans­la­tion. The Yid­dish text below, based on Rosenfarb’s type­scripts (with orig­i­nals avail­able here), has been mod­i­fied to fit YIVO ortho­graph­ic stan­dards and con­tains lim­it­ed word reconstructions.