Dear Colleagues and Friends,
Many of you are aware that The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, in addition to being a massive anthology covering many centuries from BCE to 2005, is an incredibly ambitious translation project. But what you may not know is the extraordinary breadth of languages of the original sources.
I like to say that The Posen Library includes works spanning from Afrikaans to Yiddish, available to view for free once you login or register.
In the five time periods of the collection released thus far, we have not one dozen, not two dozen, but 26 languages represented! And we’re not finished. Volume 5 on The Early Modern Period, edited by Yosef Kaplan, to be published in 2023, will add a 27th: Judeo-Italian.
The languages in the collection include many considered “Jewish” dialects, such as Hebrew, Yiddish, and Ladino, alongside Judeo-Persian, Judeo-Arabic, and Aramaic. Jews also wrote in most of the European languages, not just the major ones like French, German, Spanish, Italian, and Russian, but also the less universal ones: Czech, Danish, Dutch, Hungarian, Greek, Polish, Portuguese, and Romanian. And they wrote in major Middle Eastern tongues, including Arabic and Persian.
Jews usually spoke more than one language and the writer’s choice of language often reveals deeper meanings. Take Olga Kirsch (1924–1997), who grew up in South Africa. In college she specifically chose to write in Afrikaans, not English, a political decision on her part from which she never wavered. When she settled in Israel in 1948, she taught English but continued to write poetry in Afrikaans. Her poem, “Nostalgia” written in 1948, riffs on Psalm 137 “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget itself.” Its concluding line reverberates: “O land, my land, o rest yet unfulfilled.”1
What a contrast to Siegfried Kapper (1821–1879), who wrote in Czech (as well as German). His poem, “Ben-Oni (Son of Sorrow),” composed a century before Kirsch’s “Nostalgia,” defiantly rejects the promise of the land of Israel. “For the Rose of Sharon I no longer pine;” he writes, adding “Its milk and honey I gladly will decline, . . .” Instead, he yearns for acceptance from his countrymen. The poem’s concluding lines aver:
“If but for once in life I could forget
The bitter drops of my fellow-men’s disdain.”2
Kapper seeks respect. He is ready to give up the distinctive Jewish posture of longing for Zion in exchange.
Languages, of course, can travel. And the poet Ágnes Gergely (b. 1933) takes her Hungarian with her all the way to Iowa. In “Hualing’s Garden in Iowa,” written in 1993, she evokes the spirit of exile in the American Midwest.
“Wind bells over the river with an
Indian name: transplanted homelessness
disguised as a transplanted home.”3
It’s a powerful contemporary poem that picks apart the theme of home without ever specifically mentioning the Jewish homeland. Instead, she imagines “Great peoples. Small peoples. Diaspora peoples.”
The examples from poetry written in Afrikaans, Czech, and Hungarian remind us that Jews have created culture wherever they have lived. And Jews have always engaged in translation, from the Septuagint’s version of Torah to contemporary Hebrew and Yiddish novels.
We, at The Posen Library, hope that all these diverse translations become animate and influential in their new English identities.
I’ll be offering two lectures this fall: on October 27, The Posen Library will partner with the Yiddish Book Center for the free Zoom event “Women’s Roles across Literature, Culture, and the Rise of Feminism: 1973–2005.” Then on November 18, we are cosponsoring “Behind the Camera: The Photographers of This Light of Ours: Activist Photographers of the Civil Rights Movement,” an online event with Cleveland’s Maltz Museum. You can register to attend either event at the links. Do join us if you can.
Be well.
Deborah Dash Moore
Editor in Chief, The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization
What is The Posen Library? (video)
Credits
1 Olga Kirsch, "Nostalgia," trans. Andries Wessels, in “The Outsider as Insider: The Jewish Afrikaans Poetry of Olga Kirsch,” Prooftexts, vol. 29, no. 1 (Winter 2009), pp. 67–68. Copyright © 2009 Prooftexts, Ltd.
2 Siegfried Kapper, “Ben-Oni (Son of Sorrow),” trans. Roderick A. Ginsburg, from In Search of Freedom, ed. Guido Kisch (London: E. Goldston, 1949), p. 208. Used with permission of the translator’s estate.
3 Agnes Gergely, “Hualing’s Garden in Iowa,” from Contemporary Jewish Writing in Hungary, ed. Susan Rubin Suleiman and Éva Forgács, trans. István Tótfalusi (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), pp. 201–203. Originally published in Hungarian as “Hualing kertje Iowában.”
