Sid Gelber
שפּערלען
איר קליינע שפּערלען, גראָע פײגל פון דער אָרעמקייט,
אָן זינגענדיקע שטימען, אָן פעדערן קאָלירן,
מיין מוזע וועט פאַר אייך היינט טרילירן.
אַיעדע אָרעמקייט באַדאַרף אַביסל פרייד.
נאָר קודם וועט זי װאַרפן פאַר אייך קרישקעס ברויט.
פּיקט, פּיקט, חברה-לייט, און זייט זיך םחיה,
היפּט אַ ריקודל, ווייל ס´איז אַן אַלטע ראַיה,
אַ ריקודל מאַכט לופטיקער ליכטיקער די נויט.
מיין מוזע נעמט אַביסל װאַסער, טוט אַ הוסטל און הויבט אָן:
„אין די גאָרטנס אויף די פעלדער גיפטיקט רויט דער מאָן.
אָפענע ברענענדיקע וואונדן פון דער מאַמע-ערד.
דער אָדלער קושט די וואָלקנס, די נאַכטיגאַל דעם קוסט.
נאָר איר, איר קליינע שפּערלען, ווי ס´איז יעדערן באַװאוסט,
נעמט הכנעה´דיק פונעם לעבן װאָס ס´איז אייך באַשערט.“
–Itzik Manger
Little Sparrows
Oh you little sparrows, grey birds of need
Without beautiful voices or colorful feathers
For you my muse will make you feel better
By singing for you she will help you succeed
First finish your crumbs, no need to forebode
Peck peck, high society of respectable fellows
To dance is a medicine that many men know
It will aid in your poverty and lighten your load
My muse takes a sip, coughs and copies
“In the gardens on the fields tainted red by poppies
Like a gaping wound on our marble of blue
All birds have a place, from eagles to crows,
But you, little sparrows, as everyone knows,
You passionately take what was meant for you.”
–Translated from Hebrew by Sid Gelber
Sparrows
Oh you little sparrows, grey birds of poverty
Without beautiful voices or colorful feathers
Before you my muse will sing today
Your poverty needs some happiness
But before she will wait in front of your crumbs
Peck peck, society of gentlemen, such delights
Dance a dance as we all know you should
To dance will lighten your load
My takes takes a sip, coughs and begins,
“In the gardens of the fields poisoned by poppies,
The open fiery wounds of mother earth
The eagle kisses the cloud, the nightingale kisses the bush,
But you, little sparrows, as everyone knows
You passionately take what was meant for you.
–Translated from Hebrew by Sid Gelber
Meshuggeneh
No
No
Mine would have spoken Yiddish, some Russian, Polish and some Romanian.
Yiddish, Russian, Ukrainian, Welsh, German, Irish.
Yiddish is a Jewish language.
Very strong connection.
Our ancestors identified as jews first,
country second.
Weren’t fully accepted
The connection to our culture.
I mean,
Yiddish is drama and comedy.
Few people spoke it,
Fair amount of words in regular english.
Meshuggeneh, schmuck, putz, schmutz, schlep, tchotchke, schvitz, schl-, schmatta, chutzpah, kvell, kvetch.
I don't know those.
Not supposed to speak-
Don't know if they want to-
They were learning English
Didn’t necessarily object to that
—Sid Gelber
Translator’s statement
Itzik Manger was one of the most influential Yiddish poets of his time. Born in 1901, he lived in many countries over the course of his life. He was born in Czernovits in the Hapsburg Empire. He spent some of his 20s and 30s in Warsaw, Poland, then moved to France in 1938. He then left France before the Nazis made it there and lived in England until the end of the war, after which he moved to New York. He died in 1968 in Israel. He began writing in Yiddish during World War I. He is skilled at rhymes and meter in his poems, he wrote in traditional verse (Citron).
The poem I chose is שפּערלען, or “Sparrows” in english. It has four stanzas, half which are 4 lines long, the other half are 3 lines long, for a total of 14 lines. It contains enjambed lines. The register of the poem is neutral, although the tone is somewhat endearing. The narrator is talking to sparrows rhetorically. He uses onomatopoeia to describe the pecking of the birds and jokingly calls them something similar (in English) to “a society of gentlemen.” It has a rhyme scheme of:
ABBA/ABBA/AAB CCB
The narrator says that the birds are impoverished or in desperation; but that his muse will play a song for them and that they should be cheered up. He states in the second stanza that dancing will “make lighter their poverty.” Then he describes the muse’s speaking. Starting halfway through the 3rd stanza and going through all of the 4th stanza the muse is speaking for the rest of the poem. The muse describes a field of red poppies and compares it to an open firey wound on the earth. Finally the muse tells the sparrows to take what was meant for them at birth.
It was fun to talk to my translator. I especially liked making the trot since I got to learn about the specific possible meanings that words have in a different language. In my 1st interpretive translation I focused on the rhyme scheme. This wasn’t too difficult and the challenge wasn’t making it rhyme, it was trying to preserve the meaning as much as I could. There were some instances where I had to swap the meaning of lines that were follwing each other. The only sacrifice I made in the rhyme scheme itself was in terms of stressed syllables. There was a point where I rhymed “fellows” with “men know,” which is a slant rhyme, and also in the context of the stanza the stresses are wrong. In the word “fellows,” “fel” is stressed and “lows” is unstressed, while in “men know,” boat syllables are stressed; this results in there being more more spaces between the syllables of “men know” than there is in “fellows,” leading to a consistent meter. For the second translation I tried to focus on both literal meaning of the lines of the poem and the emotions that I felt while looking at the poem. The poem feels peaceful and I wanted to capture the way that the narrator speaks to the sparrows. I completely ignored the rhyme scheme. I chose words subjectively based on what I felt fit best and I tried to communicate what I felt that I got out of the poem. I knew that I just couldn’t translate the poem perfectly, so I didn’t try to and aimed to capture purely what felt right for me. Translator Schorske asserts that “It’s impossible to account for every possible meaning in a poem, so the labor it takes to translate one does not come as a surprise” (Schorske). I agree with Schorske about how it’s possible to translate something and account for everything, however the approach I took used less labor on purpose. I think that trying too hard to translate perfectly is fruitless and may result in a messy product if the translator is trying to do too many things at once. The statement made by Schorske: “Translation makes my struggle with Spanish seem natural, even tender.” I feel I capture my translation process better, since I was translating based off of what felt natural for me.
I now believe that a good translation depends on the goal of the translator. It isn’t possible to perfectly translate something and preserve every aspect, so the translator must have a goal about which aspect they are preserving. The quality of the translation depends on how successful the translator is in preserving what they choose to focus on.
My relationship with my heritage languages isn’t very deep. As I discuss more below, I don’t make attempts to understand it better very often, although this project was still interesting and enjoyable.
Interviewing my parents was pretty fun to do. It was interesting to hear what my parents knew about our history. One question resulted in talking about the story of my great-great-great grandmother who either got arrested or fined for disorderly conduct, because her speaking Romanian was mistaken for curses. The process of making the erasure poem was enjoyable, and it led me down a short rabbit hole of Yiddish words in English. I chose to begin the poem with the word “no” twice. In the interview, my parents answered “no” to the first 2 questions I asked my parents. The first question reads, “Do you speak any languages or forms of English other than Standard English?” The second question relies on giving an answer to the first one. I wanted to write about how I’m actually not as connected to my Jewish heritage as I could be. It rarely plays a part in my life outside of celebrating the holidays. I simultaneously feel like I do and don’t need to know more and do more about my Jewishness; it’s not something that I feel like I should be doing, but in the back of my mind I feel like I should connect more to my culture. The next 2 lines are drawn from my parents listing the languages their ancestors speak respectively. I wanted to include this because of how many languages there are. While almost all of my ancestors are Jewish, aside from a bit on my mom’s side, they weren’t from mostly the same country or spoke the same language. They came from all throughout Europe. The middle portion includes lines I selected about the Yiddish language and its history, and then I included the Yiddish loan words in English that my parents and I started listing out. I also ended up researching more English words from Yiddish and learned some interesting things, such as several more well known loan words and English words derived from Yiddish that I didn’t realize were from Yiddish, like schnoz, spiel, schtick, clutz, golem and glitch. There were also several foods like lox, kugel, bagel, and knish. Yiddish words show up throughout American culture, for example since the aforementioned word “knish” comes from Yiddish, without Yiddish, “Rapp Snitch Knishes” by MF DOOM and Mr. Fantastik would never have been made.
Works Cited
Citron, Murray. “From Poems and Ballads and Ruth.” Asymptotejournal.com, 2025, www.asymptotejournal.com/special-feature/itzik-manger-poems-and-ballads-ruth/. Accessed 11 June 2025.
Schorske, Carina del Valle. “Letter of Recommendation: Translation.” The New York Times, 26 Oct. 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/10/26/magazine/letter-of-recommendation-translation.html?unlocked_article_code=1.KU8.NSGW.7os4ChwRv53w&smid=url-share.