Speaker 1:	It's my great pleasure ... Well first of all I'd like to thank Department of Linguistics, Departments of Religion, History, Modern Languages and Literatures, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Interpretation Theory, The Trico Faculty Translation Group and Hilal for supporting. Anna's time here is also included two workshops and just really thrilled to welcome one of my most dearest former treasured students here and favorite colleagues in the comparative study of religion and in comp lit, Anna Torres. 
	Anna's from the Bronx and is currently a doctoral candidate in Jewish Studies Department at UC Berkeley. She earned a B.A. at Swarthmore College and a Master's of Theological Studies at Harvard Divinity School. Her research interest include modernist poetry in Hebrew, Yiddish literature, transnational Yiddish journalism, disability studies, the history of the press, North American labor movements, translation theory and feminist and gender studies. 
	Ann has organized community murals in Rocksberry, in Boston, and Chester PA where she co-founded the Chester Mural Collective while an undergrad here at Swarthmore. Some of you might have remembered the postings on her website for a while. Ann has also designed sets for Yiddish theater productions at Harvard University, including a full production in the fall of 2009 at the Opera Shulamith, an 1880 Yiddish Operetta.  
	Anna was also, and this is very interesting for me as someone who works in India also, was organizer of and one of the speakers at the inaugural Romany Studies Conferences in UC Berkeley in November 2011. Anna's proficient in Yiddish, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Latin, Biblical Hebrew languages. She is currently studying Ladino, Turkish dialects and Aramaic. Her fellowship awards include most recently a translation fellow, National Yiddish Book Center at Amhurst for a year-long grant supporting the translation of Fogel's poetry books. The Goor Prize in Jewish Studies, Rosenberg Poetry Award, Mentor Fellowship and a Chancellor's Fellowship at UC Berkeley. 
	Anna's poetry has been published in Zeke Magazine and elsewhere. She is currently working at her dissertation tentatively titled, "[foreign language 00:02:09]". Anyway, wonderful. The Torn Shirt, anarchist modernism and Yiddish literature. Her talk this afternoon is entitled the Circular Landscapes Dvoyre Fogel: A Reading and Discussion of Modern Yiddish Translation. Welcome, Anna Torres. 
Anna:	Thank you so much. I think this microphone setup works, yes. Okay, great. Thank you so much to Siblin, with whom I studied Dostoevsky while I was at Swathmore, and Steve for the introduction, and we studied together while I was here, and it was in a class that was co-taught by both Steve and Siblin that I first became interested in translation theory as a senior. 
	All right, so I'm going to give a short biography or Dvoyre Fogel. Then I'll read some of her work in the original Yiddish and then I'll read my English translations alternating between them except for the one poem that's eight pages long, which I'll only read in English. After that, I've written a translator's statement reflecting both on some of the particularities of translating from a diasporic language. 
	As well as how Fogel treats the themes of diaspora and domesticity in her own work. So thank you. The translations that I'll read today draw from Dvoyre Fogel's books of poetry, "Tog-Figurn" (Day Figures) published in Warsaw, 1930, and "Mannekinen" (Mannequins) published in Warsaw 1934. Fogel was born in 1902 in Burshtyn, Glicia, which is now Ukraine, in a Polish speaking home. Her father was a Hebraist and her mother directed a Jewish vocational school. 
	Fogel associated with the Yiddish avant garde in Poland, publishing two books of Yiddish poetry and a book of short sketches, "Akatsyes Bliyen", 1935 in both Polish and Yiddish. She studied philosophy in Vienna and Polish literature in Cracow, completing her PhD in 1926. Fogel's dissertation studied the influence of Hegel’s aesthetics on Jozef Kremer, the philosopher and scholar of aesthetics and art history. Fogel then taught psychology at a Hebrew teacher's college in Lviv.
	Her beloved friend Bruno Schultz author of "The Street of Crocodiles" and he was also a muralist actually. Schultz reviewed her work in Polish although the fame of his work soon eclipsed hers, although she had encouraged him to write in some of the letters that he wrote to her wound up becoming the foundation for some of Schultz's writing. Fogel was killed with her husband and son in the Lviv ghetto in 1942. When I first read Fogel I was struck by the iconoclastic minimalism of her writing, especially in the context of other poets published in the modernist journal [foreign language 00:05:11] or Introspectivist. 
	Her poetry with its repetitions and intricate variations was quite unlike the kaleidoscopic images of her fellow poets. And she cultivated a cool rather disembodied style in radical contrast to the more hotly embodied and therefore widely anthologized Yiddish female poets of her time. 
	Her first book of poetry "Tog-Figurn", 1930 opened with the manifesto stating "the law of boredom is merciless". Fogel combined modern art and poetry in a new style influenced by unism, an artistic school that emphasizes the right of art to have ... Art has the right to be pursued in laboratory conditions rather than subject to political utility. She terms this style "White Words" as Yael Chaver describes it "creating a new lyric poetry of urban condition in which monotone becomes theme." Fogel was criticized for being too high brow stylized and obscure. In other words, perhaps too unfeminine. 
	In poems such as "Herring Barrels", "Water" and "Circular Landscapes" Fogel collapses the dualities between interior and exterior landscapes and between domesticated and urban landscapes. As in unism, Fogel's work demonstrates a belief in the unity between art and the place in which it was created. I was taken by the melancholy landscapes, calm interiors and elliptical spaces of her poetic world, and for part of my dissertation I hope to combine this idea of the non-dualistic landscape in Fogel with narratives of travel written by some of her contemporaries, as a new way of thinking about spaces in Yiddish diaspora. 
	The first poem which I'll read as Yiddish and then in English is called "Circular Landscapes" from her book Mannekinen. The title is [foreign language 00:07:12]. 
	[foreign language 00:07:16] 
	That was the first poem titled "Circular Landscapes" in English. Hi, welcome. In houses, angular is refusal. Pale and watery whitewashed kitchens become ripe potted oranges. Blue lengths flame from bass pots, and flashes like cold lemons quiet glasses resigned bodies unfold beside hazy foreign land's tea and coffee that is hard like refusal. Outside circular streets pass by, wagons carry sweet white milk in bottles, and and breasts with sweeter milk, unnecessary, bends themselves over gray sweet bottles. Suburbs, streets open window shutters with kerosene tin cans, silvery round and with herring barrels, greasy bends, and with sacks of gray flour and brown kasha. 
	And by sidewalk some squares, circular hats rock and bob on dark gentlemen. Men have somewhere lost their fate and walk on. What is longing, what is refusal? 
	The next poem is called "Herring [foreign language 00:10:02]" or "Herring Barrels" and I'll again read it first in Yiddish, and then in English. 
	[foreign language 00:10:08]
	If you're wondering what that means, round is the world as the city are the five hooped herring barrels in the grocery store Broad Street Number 20. In five round wood barrels, gray salted fat herring, 50 groschen a piece. 50 groschen, fat herring at [Yoshe Shimels 00:11:57]. On distant glassy seas, narrow ships pass, fish laden, fish gray and velvety as an autumn day. Ships pass in a blue, cold distance of steely resigned landscapes. 
	And on hot seas of blue cobalt and ultramarine ships pass, laden with oranges, with fleshy bananas and sultry dates. Ships come from brass landscapes where the sun is a great metal canon ball. Where in streets elastic as gold leaf, everything occurs as for the first time, and urgently, fantastic and as if from nothing, like world's weary bananas, like oranges, like men with gambled off feat. 
	The next poem that I will read is called "[foreign language 00:13:02]" which means water. 
	[foreign language 00:13:10]
	In English, over stones of thousand years old, water flows. In wells 100 meters deep, water stands, and in large cooking pots banal. The mountain water is like a surrey drama, like a cold joy from everything that is, like the long years of life still waiting. Oh white stones, oh flow, the sky is blue and the walls gray, sweet as an almond is the sky. And in round tin kitchen pots lives wage water, greasy as boredom, mournful as flower, as men who cannot live from nothing. 
	But evening, when all is beyond hope, lively water stands in glasses, brown coffee, copper tea, orange lemonade, from longing the bitterness, from strange lands the colorful distance, and from days surrendered the fragrant cold. 
	I'm now going to read from a series of poems called "Figure Poems", and there are I think five of these short poems in the series. Yes. I'll just read them in English. Figure Poems, from her book "Mannequins". When days cannot be otherwise than precisely this, the right angle is the figure of our life. The right angle is the soul of sweet monotony, when one street exists for all days, beginning in the house where one lives and locked in the same house when the sun hangs on the other side. The right angle is the soul of renunciation. 
	A great train with railroad cars passes stations with one kerosene lantern. Pots, gray and blue hang on walls, whitewashed green. A gray pot, a blue one, a gray one. Over streets where fog blooms, wagons with milk cans go and in prayer rooms walls and tables stand and by walls and tables, figures with a glass eye.
	Two. But the rectangle does not wonder in the melancholy distance of one street. The rectangle suits all of life in laden heaps of days lost already from the beginning, already from always. One can remain in the house where one lives, because nothing can occur in the next house. Why walk down another street? A rectangular surface of sweet monotony is life, is the world. 
	Three. Around and around the city, there goes a pale street. On the pale circular street, circles of blue ladies, black gentlemen, all houses are straight in the street, in the circular street. Why walk in the melancholy distance of a street, of a circular one? When in each house everything takes place that can be. It can happen. The first encounter and a second. The city is the soul of a circle. The circle is a weary body that has refused to wait for the thousand colored things that should have occurred. The gray house and the first street and the next is the most colorful thing of all the unknown fates of distant streets. 
	Four. Sometimes a circular tin pot is so glum like a bored man. In many houses, servants scrub great stone tiles and blue soldiers march down streets and on soldiers stiff uniforms, and on blue soldier uniforms shine four round polished buttons. Tragic paper dolls in the he trains display corn flower blue dresses and grinning porcelain dolls push out undulant hair each wave three centimeters wide like black tin and yellow tin. And red and blue trams convey weary people to the flat house where each lives. Each beneath his number. 
	First station, second station, third, broad street, long street, garden street, garden street, long street, broad street. First station, second station, third. A great sphere of utter sameness is life is the world. 
	Five. Between pathetic bodies of gray led metal that male want nothing more, the ellipse is the only body that still waits for an encounter in city streets. The ellipses understand lost planets and all the forlorn people who have renounced waiting. The ellipse is the longing of space and the colorful distance of constellations and when everything is already lost, then must one perhaps return to the tragic longing of ellipses that still always want something. 
	Many days exist in fast space. Many people, many unknown things. A great path goes from one day to the next, to the fantastic path or renunciation. 
	So ah, let's see, okay, I'll read two more poems. Two more poems I think. Okay. This poem is called "Two Metals". A metal as in aluminum, brass, not like a metal on a ... For a hero or something. That would not ... The heroic is outside of Dvoyre Fogel's interests completely. Okay, "Two Metals". 
	Red copper's a fantastic Earth tear, marvelous in a minute of great joy when one has everything that one can have. Elastic is autumn streets from colored cloths of reds and yellows that still speak to many and make magic with clever parchment, like good omens unrecognized. Copper is the soul of days when all is possible in banal houses, in streets with nothing, with blue air and yellow lanterns. But gray tin is anguished and abandoned. 
	Forlorn is dull men, gray men that cannot live from nothing. Not from blue air, not from warm street lanterns. Hi, welcome. 
	Okay, and so I read this last poem first in Yiddish and then English translation. It's called "[foreign language 00:21:27]" or "Paris Trash Ballad". 
	[foreign language 00:21:34]
	In English. Paris Trash Ballad. And one can forget the color, the fashion, and even the material of your beads, your dresses, your bridges, Paris, you city of gaudy tinted trash. And one can forget the velvet of sidewalks and asphalts, Paris, Berlin, Stockholm, and cities that I have not seen, when one lives in a land that is sealed with fields, where cities are like fields of yellow boredom and violet potato. Oh, potato flowers smell sweet and gentle when no horizon dazzles with prospects of citified fortunes. 
	But somewhere, hastening cities exist where connecting metros can be like sweet dates and cool, white linen. And one longs for the city where people become so tired and unconcerned from connecting metros and asphalts and the thousand colored forms, materials and people and bridges spanning the green sand. 
	Now I'm going to talk a bit about the particularities of translating from Yiddish as a diasporic language. Also the question of domesticity, diaspora and language choice inside Fogel's poetry. Focusing on the poems that I just read. As a diasporic language, there are certain formal characteristics of Yiddish that happily lend themselves to poetic innovation. The poet and literary historian Benjamin Harshav has written that quote, Yiddish always was an open language moving in and out of its component languages and absorbing more or less of their vocabularies depending on the group of speaker, genre of discourse and circumstances. 
	Here Harshav is referring to the linguist Max Weinreich Stern [foreign language 00:24:47] or "component consciousness", which is an awareness among Yiddish speakers and writers of the linguistic origins of the words that they choose. Origins which include romance, Germanic, Hebaraic, Aramic, Slavic, in international derivations. As the expression goes, I speak 10 languages, all of them Yiddish. 
	Through Yiddish speaker's awareness of the provenance of their vocabulary, then a poet can signal a tremendous amount of information with very few words, or by juxtaposing words of differing etymologies. While modern Hebrew has intertextuality with the Hebrew bible, that is contemporary Hebrew poets are aware of how their words always already carried biblical resonances. Yiddish has the potential to activate multiple intertextualities. As Harshav wrote, Yiddish literature developed a profound grasp of this interaction and play of components, and used it as a major source of semantic and stylistic variation and impact. 
	What the poet Yankev Glatshteyn called "the multi-tangled languaging of Yiddish" uniquely inspires the poetics of diaspora. Some examples of this play between components. Many everyday Yiddish words concerning logic, for example, derive from the Aramaic of the the Talmud, so the Aramaic component. For example, [foreign language 00:26:18], definitely, [foreign language 00:26:20], to the contrary, and [foreign language 00:26:22], necessarily. 
	There are often multiple words within Yiddish with the same meaning that derive from different source languages, and so while they could all be translated with a single word in English, they're not synonyms with each other in terms of the register or the component from which they come. Just for an example, the English word "guests" could translate any of the following Yiddish words. Guests from German, suggests any kind of guests, but [foreign language 00:26:51] from Hebrew are poor visitors who needs to be welcomed on the Sabbath. People to whom you need to show hospitality. 
	And [foreign language 00:26:59] from Aramaic are the biblical figures, the seven biblical figures who come visit the sukkot the kind of open hut during the holiday of sukkots. So a somewhat more mystical idea of the guest, all of which in English we just have guests. Thus one word could be deployed ironically in Yiddish, such as turning a welcomed guest or an obnoxious guest by using the high register word for sacred guests. Playing off [foreign language 00:27:36] of the readers, so using the internal knowledge of components to create irony or humor by the contrast between them.
	Thus the perennial challenge for English translators of Yiddish is to accurately map the internal Yiddish linguistic difference. Component poetics is also a political question. For example, there was a turnaway from the Germanic component of Yiddish after World War II amongst some New York modernists. Jordan [Thinkin 00:28:08] has written about that if that subject interests you. Soviet writers also participated in a couple different waves of language reform campaigns to respell words of Hebraic and Aramic origins, so the component that we would call Loshen Kodesh, a sacred language. 
	By respelling these words phonetically, they sought to sever a connection to religion within Yiddish in order to make it a purer worker's language. There are many, many other examples of how language reform movements sought to standardize or otherwise regulate the interplay of component within diasporic languages, emphasizing one region or one ideology over another. 
	Thus a modern Yiddish poet such as Fogel is extremely attentive to linguistic component. Fogel's vocabulary choice leans away from the marketly Jewish terminology. In my earlier example, she would always say guest. She would never say [foreign language 00:29:08] or [foreign language 00:29:09]. She largely vacates her Yiddish of its Aramaic and Hebrew component, although as the daughter of a Hebraist and Hebrew educator and herself a professor in a Hebrew school, I assume that she knows that body of vocabulary. 
	Against this backdrop of more international words, when she does choose to use a Lashon Kodesh word, it creates a more striking texture, and you can imagine it almost as the poet holds a sieve and she shakes through the words from Lashon Kodesh and she catches fast international component and the Germanic component to fashion a particular modern aesthetic without religious inter-textuality. 
	Fogel's images of the domestic spaces and markets that women move through don't exalt labor in the manner of say Diego Rivera's muscled murals. Heraldically depopulated landscapes are filled instead with spare repetitive architectural forms, and even when she talks about metal, the kind of materiality of every day, it's somewhat anti-mystical and also anti-industry. It's really the material of the everyday I think. Mobility in Fogel's poetry is limited to the patterns of commuter trains circling between home and work. 
	And ships passing at a distance. There's no divergence from the path of the tracks. A trademark of her writing is the gathering in of exotic and distant places. In circular landscapes, the first poem that I read, the domestication of distance and industry is represented by [foreign language 00:30:51], hazy foreign-land tea. The poem continues as I read earlier. 
	[foreign language 00:30:57]
	Outside, circular streets pass by, wagons carry sweet white milk in bottles and breasts with sweeter milk, unnecessary. Bend themselves over gray sweet canisters. 
	The nursing mother's breast is theoreticized as it is replaced by industry, by the great sweet bottles that circle the house on elliptical streets. The rest of her body is undescribed and there is no baby. These verses give a tender but eerily disembodied feeling like the kind of uncanny still life. 
	The second poem with I read, "Herring [foreign language 00:31:47]", Herring Barrels follows this pattern. The barrels of fish become a microcosm of the worlds containing salt water. Folding within themselves the origins of its product "round as the world is the city are the five hooped herring barrels in the grocery shop Broad Street Number 20." It's kind of like nesting dolls. The grand spaciousness of trans oceanic industry is domesticated into the scene of a particularized market, [Yoshe Shimels 00:32:16], or perhaps it's neither domesticated or diminished but expands the realm of the everyday out into the vastness of the world. 
	For Fogel gazing at a herring leads to the contemplation of hot seas, of blue cobalt and ultramarine, more vivid than any view within actual eyesight. It recalls for me Rebecca Solnit's description in her essay "The Blue of Distance". The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. The color of there seen from here. Blue is the color of where you are not. Fogel's oceans maybe the color of where you are not, but she seems to have no urge to go out towards them. 
	When she asks why go elsewhere? I don't think it's rhetorical. "Why walk in the melancholy distance of a street, a circular one, when within each house everything takes places that can be." Although Fogel published in a journal Inzikh, whose Introspectivist's credo turned towards psychological study and expressionism, Fogel departs from the confessional mode as a marker of modernist authenticity. In the poem [foreign language 00:33:26] or Water, Fogel collapses deep space and time, removing all sentimentality from the familiar Jewish theme of women and water. 
	"Over stones of thousand years old, water flows. In wells 100 meters deep, water stands, and in large cooking pots banal." Elisheva Carlebach, a scholar of the early modern period describes the Ashkenazi or Eastern European Jewish association of uncovered water and women with magic, particularly the taboo against uncovered water, which becomes unstable or dangerous. So you can't leave pots of water uncovered at night. It's a bad omen. Fogel uses the international word "banal", thus inoculating water from mysticism. 
	The inscrutability of nature, "Over stones of thousand years old, water flows" contrasts with austere domestic ritual and vocabulary totally devoid of Lashon Kodesh further secularizing her theme. Is when she says in ground lives wage water, greasy as boredom, mournful as flower. 
	Fogel's instant water resolves into the greasy wage water of a kitchen, deflating diaspora as a heroic space. The Jewish home has traditionally been oriented within diasporic space through the use of symbols. As Jews and Eastern Europe for example would often leave a corner of their houses unpainted to remember the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem and remind themselves that they're always in diaspora, not at home, even within the home. 
	Between the Mizrach, which is a wall hanging to mark which wall faces east towards Jerusalem, and to the unpainted corner. The interior domestic space is visually inscribed with memory of the origin point, and I think we can see some echoes of this idea of non-dualism and dualism of space in Fogel. Contemporary theories of diaspora increasingly focus on gender and space. Deconstructing the association of travel, movement and mobility with masculinity, or a kind of spatial freedom or heroism. 
	Indeed if there is an archetypal male modernist speaker, it's the fragment itself who speaks from the political row end of the 20th century, a kind of valorized dynamism. I'm thinking of Yankev Glatshteyn's [foreign language 00:35:53], "rolling for eternity wrapped in red veils". Or Peretz Markish. He was a Russian. In his early period he was very much a futurist writer. His speaker announces in one poem, [foreign language 00:36:07], which means my body is sea foam and it reeks of wind, my name is now. 
	And even the ecstatic and arctic movement of Moyshe-Leyb Halpern in "Street Players" has this kind of masculine dynamism that's very archetypal of Yiddish modernism. I'll quote a translation by the Harhavs, a poem by Moyshe-Leyb Halpern. "Joyous free the bird will sing, trembles on his throne the king. Trembling is not good for me. Like a bird, I sing so free. As winds prance in a trance, wild and blind I roam and dance. One street in and one street out. Sick and gray and old I go, but who gives a damn, ho, ho. 
	For a penny they're about drumming till the drum will burst. Clanging on the symbols first. I spin all around and drum, gin, gin, boom, boom, boom, gin, gin, boom. Comes a girl, a witch for hire and ignites in me a fire. Spinning faster wild and bright, and I clench my jaw so tight, and I drum girly come, give your hands, and hug your bum. Two together hotter dance. In these examples, we can see a shared ecstatic dynamism that really defines the archetypal male Yiddishist modernist speaker. I bring these examples as context so that you can see the contrast between the poetry that I just read, which is really a poetry of stasis. 
	What about an archetypal female modernist speaker? I think we could find that within the highly erotic voices of for example Celia Dropkin's "Circus Lady" who's literally suspended in lust above an audience. The speaker of this poem is walking on a tight rope above an audience. Or we could find this archetypal female voice within Anna Margolin "Lamenting Dramatic Ladies". Win and Annie Margolin has been widely translated as well, unlike Dvoyra Fogel. When and of her fellow modernist's achievements, Anna Margolin vowed herself to literary silence in the middle age. 
	She wrote "I swear by [foreign language 00:38:25], I will be silent." Margolin's stillness is one of self abnegation, as in her poems "Slender Ships" where she writes, and I quote, all the winds are still. Clouds drift like ghosts in the mute, speechless night. Calm, pale earth awaits thunder and lightning. I will be still. 
	Fogel's poetic voice, however, rejects both these modes. The dynamic and the desiring. Fogel's stillness does not seem to me like the violent self-imposed silence found in Margolin's "Slender Ships" but rather a cultivated monotone that allows theme to break forth from repetition. Although Fogel herself traveled widely, Paris and Sweden appeared in images in the poems that I read today, Fogel does not exalt travel and movement as do many of her contemporaries. 
	This modernist themes of diaspora wild movement and domesticity in contrast are also theorized by the black feminist poet and scholar Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Gumbs calls on us "to listen closely to the paralysis that we are perpetuating when we use diaspora in a way that reproduces a gendered valorization of mobility." Thinking about the gendering of motion, when we talk about diaspora as something heroic and traveling, how is that image masculinized often in discourse. Gumbs in another essay she talks about how male poets are often referred to as exiles, whereas female poets are often referred to as immigrants. 
	Just the difference between exile and immigrant, we can see this kind of heroic language that is gendered in terms of how bodies move in space and travel. Gumbs sites Brent Edwards, "unfortunately, even in scholarship whose specific goal is to sketch a Black Atlantic imaginary, there's little attempt to consider not just the way that black women travel, but more important the ways that ideological uses and abuses of gender always undergird any articulation of diaspora. 
	I think that Gumbs' insight, although she's speaking on the Caribbean context in the Black Atlantic really speak to parallel issues in Yiddish modernist writing and also the way that Yiddish writing has been theorized, especially in writing about how movement and stillness is gendered. Domesticity and landscape are also gendered. In her analysis of poetry by Caribbean female poets, Gumbs describes the subject of Dionne Brand's poem, and this is a poem about an enslaved woman in a photograph. This is the subject of the poem. 
	Gumbs describes that the subject of the poem "projects herself into the future. Not through an active migration, but rather through a radical inhabitation and representation of her own stillness." Gumbs insight speaks to the questions of diaspora and translation that I also think about. How does Dvoyra Fogel's work "radically inhabit and represent her own stillness?" How does this break the archetype of movement as modernism? Or the symbol of the body transversing the world as the symbol of freedom? 
	Thus, in reading and translating Fogel's work, I see fascinating possibilities for rethinking the interplay between diasporic language, gender, and domestic space. Thank you.