Tikvah
Editors’ Pick

January 22, 2019

Two New Translations Attempt to Bring Avrom Sutzkever’s Poetry into English

“Lava its seeds. Atoms/ Fermented forth primevally.”

While the moving life story of the Yiddish poet Avrom Sutzkever—who grew up in Siberia, spent part of World War II saving books and manuscripts from destruction at the hands of the Third Reich, fought the Nazis as a partisan, testified at Nuremberg, and spent the second half of the 20th century sustaining Yiddish literature in Israel—resonates in any language, translating his poetry has proved a more daunting task. In greeting two new English versions of his poems with enthusiasm, Mark Glanville reflects on the challenges they confront:

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