Jack Ozro Milstein
השיר
כְּמוֹ צֶדֶף
שֶׁנּוֹתָר עַל הַחוֹף,
אֵין בּוֹ אֶלָּא רֶמֶז לַמִּתְרַחֵשׁ
בַּמְּצוּלוֹת.
אֲבָל מִפַּעַם לְפַעַם
מִישֶׁהוּ יִרְכֹּן וְיִטֹּל אוֹתוֹ מִבֵּין גַּרְגְּרֵי
הַחוֹל, וּבְשָׁעָה שֶׁיְּגַלְגֵּל אוֹתוֹ בְּאֶצְבְּעוֹתָיו
יַעֲמִיקוּ עֵינָיו, וּמַחְשָׁבָה אִלֶּמֶת
תְּפַרְפֵּר בּוֹ רֶגַע
וְתַחְמֹק
מִכָּל רִשְׁתוֹת הַדַּיָּגִים.
—Eli Eliyahu
The poem
Like a seashell
Abandoned on the shore,
Begins to hint at what is happening
Lost in the depths
But every now and then
Someone will bend down and pluck it up from the grains
of sand, and as he rolls it in his fingers
his eyes will deepen, and the silent thought
flutters within in him for a minute
before vanishing from the fisherman’s nets
—Translated from Hebrew by Jack Milstein
A poem?
A seashell
left on the shore,
Alone,
only a hint of
what is happening
in the depths
But every
now and then
Maybe someone will bend down
and maybe
he will decide to pick it up from the grains of sand,
and if he rolls it in his fingers
his eyes will deepen
the silent thought flutters
only a minute
But will vanish from all the fisherman’s nets
—Translated from Hebrew by Jack Milstein
After 30 I lost the ability to speak Yiddish
(an erasure of an interview with my grandmother)
spoke Hebrew fluently from 15-25
I lost the ability to speak fluently in my thirties
Grandparents immigrated from Eastern Europe
Not a consistent country because of the politics at the time
This was Ukraine/Russia
Yiddish culture in New York(Where they settled)
Lower East Side New York
When we spoke yiddish in Ukraine-ish, was made fun of being Jewish
Western Mass yiddish book center
saving Yiddish books from being thrown out
Teaches Yiddish classes
People that couldn’t get to the US went to Mexico
—Jack Milstein
Translator’s Statement
Born 1969 in Tel Aviv, Eli Eliyahu is an Israeli poet whose poetic works have been translated into several languages across the world. Today he is a copy-editor at the newspaper Haaretz. In his free time he writes poetry which has won many awards including the Education and Culture Ministry prize for debut books for his collection of poems I and not an angel, and won the “Matanel” prize and the Prime Minister Prize for Literature. Eliyahu is secular.
Published in 2oo8, Eli Eliyahu’s poem השיר(“The Poem”) discusses important religious themes that come up a lot in his poetry. As noted by Marcela Sulak in her article “Slipping Through the Net: On Translating Eli Eliahu’s ‘The Poem’”, the idea of a single male walking through nature conforms with the ideas of a prophet, a common theme in religion. Specifically in Judaism, the state religion of Israel, where Eliyahu lives they have the prophet of Moses. The reason that Sulak notes this about the poem and something that my grandmother also noted when I interviewed her, was the use of the male pronoun in the Eliyahu poem. However, in English verbs are not marked by gender like they are in Hebrew, which marks an impactful decision to make when translating this poem. Sulak also notes similarities to the nets of fishermen mentioned in the last line of the poem and in the trope of Jesus and his disciples as fishers of men, another possible religious connection. Another part of the poem lost when translated from Hebrew is the musicality of it, something that was specifically noted in Eliyahu’s win of the Brenner Prize for Poetry by the judges. Because of the difference between English and Hebrew rules, making the English poem sound similar is a hard task the Sulak struggled with (Sulak).
During the translation process it was an interesting journey to go through the poem line by line with my grandmother. For the most part I allowed her to make the choices about the literal translation because I do not speak Hebrew fluently. However, together we decided what to write to reflect the feeling and meaning of the original poem in Hebrew. We spent a lot of time on it but in the end I believe that we were both proud of the translation that we had made. For my own interpretive translations I focused on the English translation of the poem that I made with my grandmother and the one that I had found online(translated by Marcela Sulak). For my two translations I chose to try on two separate ideas. The first, a sense of unknown or lost to history feeling, and the second, a tone of uncertainty.
In my first translation, where I focused on a feeling of unknown or lost to history, I chose to extend lines like the second one from, “left on the shore, to, left on the shore for time and time”. I believed that this added to the feeling that the seashell had been on the shore for a length of time but also that the person in the poem has no way of knowing how long the seashell has been there. For them, the life of the seashell is when they pick it up and put it down. There is a whole story that they have to ignore because there is now way of knowing what came before.
In my second translation, where I focused on the idea that every line was like a question, I struggled more with how I could convey this idea without using question marks and rather use the tone of the poem to convey the idea of the questions posed by the poem. Still, making the poem sound like a question was still a struggle for me. However, one way I chose to combat this challenge was to use the word “maybe” to make the line more questioning. For example, in the original there was a line, “Someone will bend down and pick it up from the grains, which I cut up into two separate parts. The first was before the and: “Someone will bend down,” which I changed to“Maybe someone will bend down.” For me, the use of the word maybe makes the line more questioning by asking the reader the question if someone will ever pick up the seashell instead of the original poem stating that someone will eventually pick up the seashell. The second part of the line, “and pick it up from the grains”, was altered into 2 lines. The first, “and maybe”, and the second, “he will decide to pick it up from the grains of sand”. “And maybe”, continue the question of the line before, making sure that the reader is still questioning if anyone will ever pick up the seashell. The next line continues the line before.
Throughout the project, my belief of what a good translation was changed a lot as I had originally thought that the best translations were the most literal ones, as they stayed as close as possible to the original poem. However, after this process I have decided that, while a translator should still stay close to the original translation, they also must change parts of it because no two languages perfectly translate into each other.
During the translation process of these two different approaches to the same poem, I was struck by many of the same ideas that I came across when researching for this translation project. In Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o’s Decolonizing Education, he says “Linguistic suppression was not undertaken for the aesthetic joy of doing so”(wa Thiong'o 5). and while this is discussing the actual act of linguistic suppression in Africa, for me, this applies in a way to the act of translation that I did during this project and for all acts of translation done even with good intentions. Whenever we translate something we lose a bit of the original, enough to not make it truly the original. When Thiong’o talks about the aesthetic joy of linguistic oppression, I’m sure he is not referencing people who translate for the fun of it and with good intention, who are just trying to help a part of the word that does not speak the same language of the original piece of poetry. But in a way, they are partaking in a bit of linguistic oppression themselves, even if they don’t mean it when doing translation.
Another quote that stuck with me after the research process was one by Lorna Gibb in Why linguistic diversity matters. “These languages didn’t fade away naturally; they were actively suppressed, marginalized, or deemed impractical by invading cultures.” This quote connects to how my grandmother's family, over time, lost the ability to speak yiddish fluently. Similar to the quote I don’t believe it faded away naturally but opposite to the quote I believe that it was an internalized suppression. I believe that my mother's family chose to not continue speaking Yiddish once they got to New York so they could fit in better. I do believe that they deemed it “impractical”, shown by how my great grandfather stopped following Judaism when he got to America and only started following later in his life.
Interviewing my grandmother was an interesting experience that taught me a lot about my heritage that was previously unknown to me. I learned more about where my family immigrated from, eastern Europe, and the kinds of anti-semtism that they faced in a country that did not have one consistent ruler. I learned how they came to New York and lived on the Lower East Side, finding jobs and opening stores. I learned how Yiddish was ignored as a language to teach their children along the way, as a language to communicate, replaced by only English and a little bit of hebrew. I learned how today there are people trying to preserve Yiddish in the books that were going to be thrown away by Jewish-Americans who could no longer understand the language but were instead stored in a library in western mass. Everything I learned from this interview made me care so much more about a heritage that I formerly did not care enough to do a deep dive into. After this interview I wish to learn more about my heritage in Yiddish and Hebrew and how these languages brought me to the place that I am today.
I made a few important choices for my erasure poem that I believe had a significant impact on the outcome. The first choice I made was to include minimal punctuation to allow the poem to flow freely a little bit more than it did if I added punctuation. I tried at first to use punctuation, but it felt like the flow was off. A second choice I made was to move some lines over the right to contrast with lines on the left. These lines were lines that I thought were clarifying lines and important enough to the poem that they deserved their own side of the page. I also thought that this reflected my interview well with the way that my grandmother talked and answered the questions that we discussed. It showed how we were able to talk about topics in depth with detail to further add to the story.
Works Cited
Gibb, Lorna. “Why linguistic diversity matters.” Princeton University Press, 29 April 2025, https://press.princeton.edu/ideas/why-linguistic-diversity-matters.
Sulak, Marcela. “Slipping Through the Net: On Translating Eli Eliahu’s “The Poem.”” Mentor & Muse, https://mentorandmuse.net/marcela-sulak/.
wa Thiong'o, Ngũgĩ. Decolonizing Language and Other Revolutionary Ideas. New Press, 2025.