They Don’t Have Autumns Here
1
They don’t have autumns here in this strange country
Only blooming, it seems, spreads throughout the flowerbeds!
There . . . a blustery Tishrei went winding over countries,
Dead, rotting, sad.
Small children fell upon me
With hands clenched, as Autumn branches:
When childlike beings shudder, crying,
On sunny days I also cannot keep quiet.
Why should I hide my sadness now?
When the heart, like a cup, is filled to the brim
Just here in this country, in this radiant sunshine
An autumn loneliness roams the roads . . .
2
Tishrei days . . . the gardens grow greener and still greener.
A gardener—the sun goes all over the garden,
Truly golden, she splashes the flowers
There! My blustery, cold, Tishrei country
The winds roam—homeless roamers—in early dawns
And write on the pages that Autumn is coming . . .
There the bloody lindens in the forests wither and wither
The crows croak from the tips of the trees their funereal songs—
Corpse remnants lie in the fields—Summer died.
Here!—Now the day has sunk into the valleys;
Dromedary twilight silence strides and strides
Bringing night on its swollen humps . . .
(1930)
In A Mexican Park
No longer wandering through velvet grass
In Ukraine’s Spring valleys
Home, I lost you long ago already
So who am I complaining about?
In the grassiness of the Mexican park
My one-year-old child plays, horses around.
So much joy in them, it seems,
That joy drips from every tree.
Only I can’t sing to you, nor write
You strange country, Stormy downpour country!
I won’t survive in your wild tropicality.
I didn’t grow on your grass.
Your mountains with eternal snow are strange to me,
As strange as Ukrainian plains are to my child.
I will never be happy with your joy.
And I will never suffer your pains.
My song drank other dew.
Dew from golden waving rye.
And there, where I should not wander,
My song sings of that sun-drenched Spring year . . .
(1928)
So Much Gold
So much gold—and without an owner
On the Mexican mountains and valleys . . .
I drink this gold, as from a cup,
And it doesn’t cost a penny . . .
With hot breath I gulp down this gold
Which the sun, in its overflow, forgot.— —
And I wouldn’t want to ask a thing,
Although I have so many “whys.”
My heart is still chilled by that snow
Of that country, where I broke my youthful years— —
And that burning-frost pain,
I brought here, to this golden tropic . . .
Were I one who wants to ask here
One of these white-hot “whys”:
Why exactly is it my heart is in such pain, when gold
Sunnily melts on the mountain and valleys?
(1931)
from Steps in the Mountains
Jacobo Glantz
translated from the Yiddish by Mordecai Martin
Listen to "So Much Gold" read in the original Yiddish by Mikhl Yashinsky:
In translation, we run up against the distance between the translation and the original, which itself lives in the distance between reader and author. As a translator I collapse the reader and author into one figure, and so I often strive to collapse the space between my experience of the original and the readers’ experiences of the translation. I came to the work of Jacobo Glantz out of intense personal interest and sympathetic feeling, as we are both Ashkenazi writers working with Yiddish while making a life in and with Mexico. I hope that feeling of sympathy remains in the final translation.
In an earlier draft, I presented these poems and others related to them on one page, with lines connecting words and phrases that I felt called to each other between the poems, labeled with the motif or thematic keyword that I felt united them. This proved too messy for publication. I would still encourage readers to think of what the poems share and how they call to each other.
Glantz published these poems in his collection Trit in Di Berg (Steps in the Mountains; Farlag Churban, 1939) in a segment that he labeled “חרובע היימען,” which I would render as “Ruined Homes.” I spent a great deal of time in the reading and preparation of these translations looking for what was ruined about Glantz’s encounter with Mexico in his early years there as an immigrant and a refugee survivor of pogroms.
While I have mostly abandoned Glantz’s end rhymes, I have kept the semantics of his lines intact and tried to keep an ear for approximate rhyme within and across lines. I have tried my best to respect his punctuation, but I felt ultimately that Yiddish is more forgiving of an ellipsis than Anglophone readers currently are, so I curtailed some of his use of them.
In an earlier draft, I presented these poems and others related to them on one page, with lines connecting words and phrases that I felt called to each other between the poems, labeled with the motif or thematic keyword that I felt united them. This proved too messy for publication. I would still encourage readers to think of what the poems share and how they call to each other.
Glantz published these poems in his collection Trit in Di Berg (Steps in the Mountains; Farlag Churban, 1939) in a segment that he labeled “חרובע היימען,” which I would render as “Ruined Homes.” I spent a great deal of time in the reading and preparation of these translations looking for what was ruined about Glantz’s encounter with Mexico in his early years there as an immigrant and a refugee survivor of pogroms.
While I have mostly abandoned Glantz’s end rhymes, I have kept the semantics of his lines intact and tried to keep an ear for approximate rhyme within and across lines. I have tried my best to respect his punctuation, but I felt ultimately that Yiddish is more forgiving of an ellipsis than Anglophone readers currently are, so I curtailed some of his use of them.
Jacobo Glantz (1902–1982) was a Yiddish Mexican modernist poet. Born in Novovitebsk, Ukraine, he taught Yiddish literature in Odesa and ran in revolutionary circles before moving to Mexico City in 1925, where he wrote several collections of poems and an epic work about the journey of Christopher Columbus in the Americas. He also published in Spanish, and is largely still famous in Mexico as the father of noted scholar and woman of letters, Margo Glantz.
Mordecai Martin is a fifth-generation Ashkenazi Jewish New Yorker, an experimental translator of Yiddish poetry and prose, and a writer. He lives in Washington Heights with his wife, son, and cat, Pharaoh-Let-My-People-Go. His work has appeared in ANMLY, Peach Magazine, the tiny, TIMBER, Honey Literary, and Longleaf Review. He is pursuing an MFA at Randolph College.
