Good enough translations to get you started.
Every poem here appears four ways at once—the Yiddish original, a YIVO transliteration, an English translation, and a German one—so you can read across the columns and start sounding out the original yourself.
The translations are scaffolding, not authority. Where English drops something the Yiddish was carrying, the reader marks the word and tells you what went missing.
It begins with two figures of Yiddish modernism—read them in their own words, letter by letter, with the English kept alongside rather than in front.
ציליע דראָפּקין
1887–1956
Born in Bobruisk, arrived in New York in 1912. Her verse — sensual, unsparing, decades ahead of its time — scandalized and electrified the Yiddish literary scene.
Enter In the Hot WindI am a circus dameand dance between daggers
ה. לייוויק
1888–1962
Escaped Siberian exile to become the conscience of Yiddish letters. Poet of suffering and redemption, author of the celebrated drama The Golem.
Enter the Complete WorksSomewhere far, somewhere farlies the land, the forbidden
Halb fol—half full. The glass, and the attempt. These translations are offered in that spirit: good enough to get you into the poem, not good enough to stand in for it. Nothing here claims to be the definitive English Dropkin or the definitive English Leivick. They are working drafts made in public, and they are useful precisely as a way in.
Which is why the original never leaves the page. Each text is laid out in four parallel versions—Yiddish, YIVO transliteration, English, German—so the translation functions as a handrail rather than a replacement. Read the transliteration aloud against the Hebrew script and the alphabet starts to come apart into sounds; German, Yiddish’s close relation, catches turns of phrase that English flattens.
And where English simply cannot carry a word—benkshaft, neshome, karahod—the reader marks it. Tap the underlined word and a note explains what the translation had to leave behind. An honest accounting of the loss seems better than pretending there wasn’t any.
The Leivick volume arrives here the long way around: scanned pages, run through OCR, corrected and translated one page at a time. The archive shows that work in progress, and the Yiddish Library opens a search onto the Yiddish Book Center’s scanned collection at the Internet Archive, where far more is waiting than any one project could translate.
Two volumes so far, each one readable in parallel columns—or, if you prefer the whole field at once, in the archive.
אין הייסן ווינט
A bilingual collection of Yiddish modernist poetry, translated to English with transliterations, German translations, and scholarly annotations.
Celia Dropkin1887–1956
Poetry & Dramaאַלע ווערק פון ה. לייוויק
The first volume of Leivick’s collected works (Jubilee Edition, 1940) — poems and long poems by one of the most important Yiddish poets and playwrights of the twentieth century.
H. Leivick1888–1962
מער קומט באַלד
We are actively translating additional works from the Yiddish literary canon.
Every work here exists in four versions. Follow a single line of Dropkin’s through each of them—and see what every step of the journey has to leave behind.
Original Yiddish · as Dropkin wrote it
איך בין אַ צירקוס דאַמע
The poem as it left the poet’s hand — in the alef-beys, read right to left. For her readers the script itself carried memory: the same letters that spell scripture here spell a circus act.
Nothing yet — the poem is still whole. Follow it across, and watch what each step must leave behind.
Some words never fully arrive in another language. We translate them anyway — and annotate what the translation can’t hold.
בענקשאַפֿט
benkshaft
More than “longing” — an ache for people and places that no longer exist to return to.
דווקא
davke
“Precisely so, in spite of everything” — contrariness, destiny, and a wink in a single word.
נחת
nakhes
Joy that arrives through someone else’s flourishing, usually a child’s. English needs a sentence.
Begin with Dropkin’s In the Hot Wind, the first collection here to be finished end to end—or let the archive choose for you, from either poet.
