Born in the shtetl of Koydanov, in what is now Belarus, Sarah Reisen (1885–1975) was a member of one of the most outstanding families in modern Yiddish literature: her brother Avraham was a folklorist and prolific author of short stories, while her other brother, Zalman, was a cultural historian and theorist of Jewish nationalism. Sarah spent her life engaged in a number of literary endeavors, among them translating the Russian classics into Yiddish, but she is best known for her poetry. Herewith, one of three of her lyric poems, newly translated by Eli Jany:
I swallowed down every
last drop of the pain—
and proceeded boldly
on to life again.And the paths spread outward
hither and thither—
I walk without asking
and seek no “whither.”And if, God forbid it,
my time should draw near—
and from all of the paths
I must disappear,then in the air I’ll leave
notes of my refrain,
ever-resounding links
of the golden chain.
That last phrase, for Reisen and her readers, invokes both the centuries-old Jewish tradition and the modern Yiddish literary tradition of which she was a part.
Read more on In geveb: https://ingeveb.org/texts-and-translations/three-poems-reisen