This Translation Tuesday, a poem in the Yiddish by Leyzer Wolf (recovered and translated by Roberta Newman) presents the febrile hours before a tryst. Time ticks down with an exquisite slowness, in volatile, pyrotechnic couplets that positively shudder with anticipation.
Almost all of Wolf’s work has been lost. Though he was a prolific writer, most of his poems remained unpublished during his lifetime, reportedly stored in a stuffed-to-bursting cupboard in his apartment in Vilna. It is likely that most of the manuscripts were left behind when he fled to the Soviet Union at the beginning of World War II; others were in the suitcases that went missing after his death in Uzbekistan in 1943.
The Clock
Evening-sun. Blaze.
Bushes by the bridge.
And the clock on the wall says:
Tick, tick, tick.
Rendezvous, night.
Fever on her cheek.
And the clock in her room says:
Tick, tick, tock.
Lips, park, trees, man.
Farewell by the bridge.
And the clock of her heart says:
Bliss, bliss, tick.
Room. Night. Darkness.
Fiery, passion-armed throes.
And the clock on the wall
Goes, goes, goes.
Evening-sun. Blaze.
Bushes by the bridge.
And a different hand gets kisses:
Bliss, bliss, tick.
Room. Night. Darkness.
And a bullet to the head.
And the clock in her room says:
Tick, tick, stop…
Translated from the Yiddish
Leyzer Wolf (1910-1943) was a celebrated poet in Vilna, Poland (today Vilnius, Lithuania) in the 1920s-30s, when it was the home of Young Vilna, a writers’ group dedicated to developing Yiddish as a modern literary language. Best known for his zany and satirical rhyming poems, he also wrote soulful and philosophical verse. There is compelling evidence from his poems and from memoirs by his contemporaries that he was queer, though he did not publicly define himself as a gay man. After fleeing to the USSR as a refugee at the start of World War II, he ended up in Uzbekistan, where he died of starvation and disease at the age of thirty-three. Wolf’s last, enigmatic letter to a friend included a poem entitled On the Trail of Leyzer Wolf that predicted he would be forgotten by future generations. Indeed, today, he has become a footnote in Yiddish literary history.
Roberta Newman is a freelance writer, editor, and translator living in Brooklyn. She is coauthor, with Alice Nakhimovsky, of Dear Mendl, Dear Reyzl: Yiddish Letter Manuals from Russia and America (Indiana University Press, 2014), winner of a National Jewish Book Award. She has published several pieces of short fiction, and two of her Yiddish poems appeared in the Soviet Yiddish journal Sovetish Heymland in 1988. Her article “Soul Struggle and Science Fiction: A rescued manuscript of Leyzer Wolf’s” was published in the journal Jüdische Geschichte & Kultur (Leipzig, 2021). With the help of a 2022-2023 Translation Fellowship from the Yiddish Book Center, Newman has translated fifty poems by Leyzer Wolf into English for her forthcoming book Why Does a Dog Bay at the Moon? Poems by Leyzer Wolf. Three of her translations of Leyzer Wolf’s poems appeared in 2023 in Vol.28 of Loch Raven Review Poetry Translations.