Last Month Philologos Asked for Language Help, and Got It

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Norman Buder has identified the source of the Yiddish expression tapn a vant, “to grope a wall”—that is, to attempt the impossible—whose origins I wondered about a month ago. The source is the Bible. Specifically, Mr. Buder points out, it is the tenth verse of the 59th chapter of Isaiah, the beginning of which reads, in the King James translation, “We grope for the wall like the blind, and we grope as if we had no eyes.” In Isaiah’s Hebrew, this is N’gash’shah kha’ivrim kir, u-kh’eyn eynayim n’gasheshah. In the modern Yiddish Bible translation by Yehoash, the pen name of the Yiddish poet Solomon Bloomgarden (1872-1927), the verse reads Mir tapn vi blinde on der vant, un azoy vi on oygn tapn mir arum.

Of course, the expression tapn a vant is older than Yehoash’s translation, which first saw the light of day in 1922. (It did so in installments in the New York Yiddish daily Der Tog, the only Bible translation ever to be serialized in a newspaper.) At the time of Bloomgarden’s death, only his Pentateuch or Five Books of Moses had been printed; the rest was published from posthumous manuscripts. Although his Bible was justly hailed as a masterly work and quickly found its way into Yiddish-speaking homes, tapn a vant could not have come from it.