nice poetry | new poetry | sad poetry | love poetry

From A Day In The Hands of the Stormtroopers Execution  By Abraham Sutzkever Translated by A.Z. Foreman Click to hear me recite the original Yiddish As I must, as they order, I'm digging a hole. I search in the dirt for what might console.  A dig and a cut. A small worm is shaking Away below me. My heart is breaking.  My spade cuts him through. Then miraculously One severed worm is two. Then three. Another cut: they are four. Can it be That all these lives were created by me?  The sun comes through the dark of my mood A conviction sets my arm firm:  If a worm does not succumb to the spade,  Are you any less than a worm?  - May 22, 1942 The Original: ????????? ??????? ????????? ????? ??? ?? ???? ??? ??? ?????, ??? ??? ?????! ??? ??? ????-????? ??? ??'??? ???? ?? ??????. ?? ????? ??? ?? ????, ??? ?? ??????? ????? ???? ???????? ???? ????? � ???? ????? ??? ??????. ???????? ??? ???? ????, ??? ???????? ??????: ???????????? ????? ?????, ????? ????: ??? ??????...

Charred Pearls By Abraham Sutzkever Translated by A.Z. Foreman It's not because my words quaver in pangs Like hands that grasp out, broken, for salvation � And not because they hone themselves like fangs Prowling the dark for flesh and satiation, That you fan air upon my coals of rage. No, written word, Replacement for my world afire.  It is because your sounds glint off the page Like charred pearls Discovered in a now-extinguished pyre. And no one - not even I -  ground up by time Can recognize the woman drenched in flame. All that is left of her now, of her prime Are pearls charred grey in ashes of no name.  Vilna Ghetto, July 28th, 1943 The Original: ??????????? ????? ?????? ?????????              ??? ???????? ???? ????? ?????? ??????? ??? ????? ?? ???? ?????????? ???? ??????, ??? ????????, ???? ???????? ?? ??????? ??? ?? ?? ???? ??? ???????????, � ???? ??????, � ???????? ??? ?? ???? ???? ???? ?????????, ?? ??????? ?????, � ???? ?????...

For Berakha A poem for Jews who had escaped the Vilna ghetto and fled to the forests, in order to participate in bushwhacking guerrilla warfare against the Nazis. Sutzkever dated all his wartime poems. This one, importantly, is dated two days before Sutzkever and his wife would follow the men here hymned, escaping to the woods themselves, eventually joining a Jewish resistance unit commanded by Moshe Rudnitski. Song For the Men Taking to the Woods By Abraham Sutzkever Translated by A.Z. Foreman Click to hear me recite the original Yiddish Sprout up! Staunch heroes, stubborn strong young men � and take your ground. Sprout up! Sons of the future, make the world know what you are, For all the will of all a people, swallowed underground, Condenses � swelling lava in your breast beneath a scar.  If the old blade has gone to rust in vagabond confusion, Then file off all the yesterdays, and sharpen its today.  Never is it too late to show the people's retribution. Redeem the age-old...

How Christian Jacob Glatstein Translated by A.Z. Foreman How Christian, so to speak, can I become? How much Christian could I be?  How much mercy 1  was ever up to me? And what can I forgive?  Sure I can maybe toss out a soft crumb  Or two, on the account of one small life.  But then what in regard to that divine extermination?  Can I forgive on their behalf? 2  Did they  Grant such dispensation?  And is it my place to betray The burning bush of death?  All the face-slappers slapped both cheeks of mine. No Cossack ever gave a Mishnah-Jew 3 a  chance  To even turn the other cheek. How much Jew in me can be Christianed 4  out, so to speak?  A smidgen. That much pity You can beg out of me For children of my blood-bathed crime-leprous 5 enemy. So here you go: a smidgen of sympathy.  Take it. Dole it out. No loss.  But do not shadow  down 6  my heart With an oh-so-merciful cross.  1 - The word...

This poem, written just before the Vilnius ghetto was established, is a call to resistance in the face of Nazi persecution. The theme of Jewish revolt is one that would for obvious reasons permeate a good deal of Sutzkever's work from the 40s. There is much about this piece, as a Yiddish poem, as a Jewish poem, that could be said in explication. It takes a quasi-biblical and prophetic tone throughout. Its multi-textured allusions subvert pious tradition and supplant it with ideals of secular Jewish resistance in this world. Even the word ????? "way, course, manner of walking" seems loaded in context. I could probably fill several pages with detailed commentary. Maybe sometime I will actually do just that. (Poems like this are why  The Modern Yiddish Poem Itself  is a book that desperately needs to be written. Presumably by somebody whose knowledge of the language and literature is not so uneven, gap-strewn and idiosyncratic as my own.) Liberties in translation? Yes, I too...

To Say A Prayer By Abraham Sutzkever Translated by A.Z. Foreman Click to hear me recite the original Yiddish I have the urge to say a prayer. I do not know to whom.     He who once gave me comfort will not hear it, should it come.   To whom, then, would I pray?   I am its choked-up prey.    Maybe I should entreat a star up there: "old distant friend,   Come substitute for my lost speech. For I am at words' end."   That good star deep in ether   Won't hear my prayer either.    But I have got to say a prayer. Someone very near,   Somebody in my soul is tortured, and demands a prayer.   So I jabber on and on   Senselessly until dawn. - Vilna Ghetto, January 1942 The Original: ????? ??? ??? ?? ???? ?? ??????? ?????? ????????? ????? ??? ??? ?? ???? ?? ??????? � ????? ??? ??? ?? ??????, ???, ????? ???? ?? ???? ???????? ??? ???? ?? ??? ??????????,  ????? ??? ??? ?? ?????? �  ????? ?? ??...

And another from Spinelli... Roundup By Santino Spinelli Translated by A.Z. Foreman A bang on the door in the long dead of night, disciplined hounds with long fierce teeth, assault rifles raised in a face half-asleep sleep smashed dream gashed night-terrors awake; black uniforms cool cruel eyes hatred revulsion and heinous slander punishing windstorm innocent eyes... the door banged shut a dream pulled apart tears on the ground...gutted hearts. The Original: R�dm Ni d�b ki vudd�r andr� i bar� r�t d�nd bar� di giuk�l mard�, ni putin� a kat�r pru muj sovadd� sun� dukkadd� sun� tra�ian�; kal� jurvibb� ki� giungal� naf�l bi mi�tip� do� bar�, bar brav�l ki� lacc�... a vudd�r pandind� ni sun� ningadd� rovibb� pri p�... jil� cind�. Notes on the Romani: baro : the adjective occurs three times, in different senses � the first in bar� r�t (one of a handful of multi-word idioms in Romani which actually can be traced to India) meaning idiomatically " the dead of night, the middle of the night...

The Romani dialects of the Southern Italian group are interesting to me for two reasons. The first and long-standing reason is that, like all Romani dialects, they bear witness to the migratory history of their speaker communities. They appear to be early arrivals from the Balkans. There is a conspicuous lack of Slavic and Germanic loanwords (except, of course, for Germanic etyma borrowed by way of Italian Romance) which sets these dialects apart from the Sinte varieties spoken by Italian Roma farther north. The Roma that speak these dialects seem to have come to Italy by sea from the Balkans across the Adriatic, rather than a circuitous land route through central Europe and across the Alps as did the Roma of north Italy. The classification of these dialects within Romani as a whole is unclear. They have at least as much in common with northern dialects as they do with Balkan Romani. They show interesting patterns of influence. There are some striking archaisms attesting to early s...

There are two different Romani texts of this poem in print, and I give both for the sake of completeness. The first given here is in the poet's own dialect, with its heavy adstratum of Slavic loans, and uses the orthography one would expect. The other is in the metaphonological supradialectal orthography promoted by the IRU (the so-called "Warsaw Alphabet" created seemingly with the paradoxical aim of promoting Romani literacy by making the language harder for most speakers to spell, the delusion of the Mentally Coutiarded.) Unsurprisingly for a version in so ostentatiously standardized an orthography, every single Slavic loan is in this version replaced by a pre-European equivalent, along with other differences in morphology. I gave priority to the more dialectal version, which I not only thought was a better poem all round but also seemed to me much more in keeping with Sejdic's attitude toward orality in poetic language, as well as the reality of Romani literature ...