The Stars and the Cookie Jar

Holy translit, Batman, I have to be awake again in four hours, and now I'm amped on academic perversity and different kinds of hunger and OMG such a love poem, this, who was she fooling?

Untitled, Raissa Gellerman, signed GRS, ca. 1943. Trans. me, 2004.
Bitokh ikh undser herts gebrokh,
in dieser tog broyklikh.
Shprayken Sie sikh fun di levoyne,
un - hob ikh nikht keyn shpeygel -
ikh gukhe mikh in di gleßene gaß.
Sie'st shoyn shpeygelbildglikh,
in dieser tog grayslikh,
eydetelikh un sharfe vi di glays.
Los'n Sie nisht arayn fun mayn
kleyne, shvayge hant....

[Raissa had a definite soft, Germanised turn to her Yiddish, the mark of a very snobby education; in her own translit, she uses s and scharfes-S, which pops up in the middle of her bloody Hebrew hand, as above. On the bright side, it makes it very easy to pick her work from a stack of moldy paper.]

Literally:
I take our broken hearts in stride
in these broken days,
You tell yourself to the moon
and -- I have no mirror --
I stare at myself in the glassy street.
You are an image of yourself from the mirror,
in these dire days;
clear and sharp as a shard of glass.
Don't cut when you slip from my small, silent hand.

All right, a real poet, have a go now. Andrea, Sonya, that's you.
I gave you the translit, I gave you the literal; you want lightly-poached eggs and delicately browned toast, too, while I'm at it? It's about two women going slowly crazy in a small room, one of you ought to be able to take a decent swing where I cannot. Tell Kallimachos and Beowulf to bang off; perhaps together; they might enjoy it. Who am I to say?
{ducks}

Yes. I gave up, I went crazy, I fled my store screaming.

Or I'm on my lunch and blowing actual money to type this at the Kinko's down the way.

Because I went crazy and fled my store screaming.

I am so tired, and soon I am going to stop talking to everyone on the planet except maybe Joel and Sonya, because everyone lately is saying I said the sky was green when goddammit, all I said was that the sky was blue.

(cusses and rants more, possibly to excess, but all offscreen)

Stupidness! Gods-poxed stupidness of people and their big mouths! So I'm young! So I got promoted! Feck off, damn you all, leave me alone! Leave me alone! I didn't cheat or play dirty or stand on anyone's back and tread them in the mud! Leave me alone!

...all right, better now. I need to go home and do some nice, safe translation. Less risk that way of anyone, you know, getting dead.

The sky is green, by the effing way. Just go on and say I said that. At least this time, it will make sense.

I have no idea the kind of writer Raissa might have been, if she had lived; Violeta was very good, certainly, her style was very clean and oh, it was different; her style leant on Raissa's, but Raissa had more youth and unpolished edges.

I'm noticing we have a thing in common: she went for sound. Sound makes me roll over and loll if it's rich and wild enough; I occasionally will put up with simplistic or obvious language for the sake of it. Raissa -- hm, how can I say this -- her poems strike me as her rough work, the conceptual stuff. The way she worked out her issues.

She could bang out the cold, hard, quick rhymed satire and work in layers about peaches from Russia, things that will never exist; rolling around in a barrel, Diogenes in a barrel.

But when she wrote with that big, grand signature, Katriel, it had a certain coolness and sharp distance; it couldn't be anything but the satire of those who know they are sofuckingdoomed.

And when she wrote poems, they were the poems of someone who's grown up so fast, but still writes in colored inks in notebooks under the quilt at night.

Yes, yes, for a contrast study, all right, a poem of Raissa's and one of Violeta's; I could do that.

Might even do one of the English verses. They're not so striking as the Yiddish, but they're conceptually easier, and as far as Violeta, well, she's best known for a love song about a stolen overcoat, so everything else is the upgrade.

Comments? Thoughts? Chickens?

 

I fell asleep translating Violeta's poem. Yes, this happens a lot. Head on notebook, commence drool. But this time... this time...

Listen to me, this woman did nothing in her life but read, and write, and speak, and be brave. She kicked the quotas, and she made Yiddish rhymed verse roll over and be her bitch.

Okay, I'm being a little narrow in focus, but I'm telling you. It happened in my sleep.

Shprikhstu mir oyf Prinzen, da'n dayn troyme shprintzen;

far un Reyd mir bett'len, als kann ikh ayngeb.

'Speak to me of princes, of what runs through your dreams; beg a tale from me, all I have, but I can give it to you."

So, I obviously read too much Peter S. Beagle and heed too much of people's meter, because I dreamed, and it turned into this, and I was sort of humming along. Here, see, it goes.

Oranges and cherries, sweetest candleberries,

who will come and buy? Who will come and buy?

Songs, they're songs, Violeta was writing songs.

(collects Lexikon, notebook and pencil and clatters off like an insane person to get back to this)

Eeeeeeeeeee!