A bilingual edition of Yiddish poems
Step into the vivid, unsettled, and sometimes lonely life of the poet Rosa Nevadoska. With a strong foundation in Jewish and Russian education, Nevadoska’s seemingly endless intellectual hunger pulled her from her native Bialystok home to Ghent, Brussels, Berlin, Paris and, ultimately,the United States.
Nevadovska's first publications were in Russian. Then came her Yiddish works. Here, in So Many Warm Words, in English translation as well as the original Yiddish, you can see the world through her eyes, in poignant, at times heartbreaking, images. Walk with her through indelible scenes of quiet despair. Share her wonder at the mysteries of night and silence.
Nevadoska writes, "No thing is silent./ Everything possesses a voice." The immediacy of these poems will transport you as she shares the voices of city, mountain and sea; of joy, sorrow and yearning.
"Some thirty years ago, Found Treasures, the first anthology of Yiddish women writers in English translation, was published. So Many Warm Words: Selections from the Poetry of Rosa Nevadovska bears witness to the fact that new treasures are still being found. The poems have been thoughtfully chosen and carefully and beautifully translated by poet and scholar Merle Bachman.
"This bilingual edition makes Nevadovska's oeuvre-poems of loneliness and longing countered by others expressing joyous moments of transcendence-accessible, for the first time, to the English reader, and offers the Yiddish reader an opportunity to discover a poet whose verse offers moments of exquisite beauty."
Sheva Zucker, author, Yiddish: An Introduction to the Language, Literature & Culture, Vols. I & II. Editor Emerita of Afn Shvel.
"In this exquisite bilingual collection, Merle Bachman brings into English the Yiddish poems by an all-but-forgotten poet whose peripatetic life extended from Bialystok to Berlin and, after 1928, from New York to Los Angeles and back. Selected mostly from Rosa Nevadovska's posthumous 1971 Lider mayne (My Poetry), the poems in Bachman's book reveal a lyric voice that is at once grounded in the American landscape and yet rises to shared sensory and spiritual experience. 'The things around me absorb language, ' says the poet through Bachman's elegant translation, and indeed, it is by rendering the Yiddish into English that the translator brings these poems alive for a new audience. 'And when shadows rise from corners, / A whole other reality unfurls, ' revealing 'a secret world.' The world of Nevadovska's poems is one of emotional depth and subtlety, where, in the experience of yearning, the poet transforms into an eagle, drifting above the mountains to 'glimpse the world anew.' "
Kathryn Hellerstein, Professor of Germanic Studies (Yiddish), University of Pennsylvania; author, A Question of Tradition: Women Poets in Yiddish, 1586-1987