Just As My Glance Full of Tears
by Anna Margolin

Just as my glance full of tears,
the night is intimate and blue.
Say your cruel words,
but with a voice that is tender.

And, here and there, in your voice
there will suddenly bloom
in the moonlight a garden,
in the moonlight a face.

And the play of sorrow
on a sick conscience again:
I know so much, my tired one,
oh, I don’t want to know anymore.

But listen, oh, like so, until late
for the coming of the shadow of love,
sad as the reeds of the river,
tender as the names of the flowers.
— Translation © Maia Evrona (First appeared in Tupelo Quarterly)

Translations of Anna Margolin:

(Click titles for links to poems available online)

-"In the Streets," "Autumn"

Cosmonauts Avenue; 1.8, August 2015

-"Mother Earth," "Slowly and Brightly," "Sleep, Beloved, Sleep," "Autumn"

Asymptote Blog; Translation Tuesday

-"My Home," "The Sun," "Girls in Crotona Park," "Unhappy," and "From a Letter"

The Brooklyn Rail; InTranslation, February 2015

*Poems from this selection were reprinted in How Yiddish Changed America and How America Changed Yiddish, available from Restless Books

-"I Was Once a Handsome Boy," "Just As My Glance Full of Tears," "The Song of a Girl," "I Walk in the Shadow of Your Life"

Tupelo Quarterly 4

-"A City by the Sea"

The Journal; Fall 2013

-"The Golden Peacock has Flown"

Massachusetts Review; Summer 2012

-"The Years"

Ploughshares; Winter 2011-2012

Translations of Yosef Kerler:

(Click titles for links to poems available online)

--“Epitaph”

Forthcoming in Columbia Journal Online

--“I Sit Myself Down at the Blank Sheet” and “Parting”

In Geveb; A Journal of Yiddish Studies, Fall 2020

-“Northern Lights”

Paper Brigade; 2020

-”Gentleness,” “Profanity,” “From Silence,” “I Seek No Great Joys,” “There is, There is a Certain Kind of Smile”

The Offing, Summer 2020

-“Midnight,” “The Saucer in the Sky,” “When My Love Goes to Sleep,” “Come to My Dream,” “Polished in Blood and Flame,” “Spring,” “Emerging,” “From Afar” “August 12th 1952 [Night of the Murdered Poets]” “The Third Day a Bit of Bread,”

Lunch Ticket; Issue 17, June 2020

-“If I were in Alabama,”

Pakn Treger; Coming to America, 2020 Online Translation Issue

-"Old Fashioned," and "The Sea"

InGeveb, February 2016

*These translations were awarded a fellowship from the Yiddish Book Center

Translations of Abraham Sutzkever's In the Sinai Desert:

(Click titles for links to poems available online)

-"Toys"

Plume, June 2017

-"Hours"

Mantis, 2016

-"My Father," and "The Braids My Sister Wore"

The Grief Diaries

For my translations of Sutzkever's collection Poems from My Diary, visit my Abraham Sutzkever page.

Translations of Malka Lee:

(Click title for link to poem)

-"Wounded"

In Geveb, May 2018

Translations of Celia Dropkin:

(Click title for link to poem)

-“White as the Snow on the Alps” and “I Beam, You’re Beaming,”

Jewish Women’s Archive website, winter 2019

*Reprinted in How Yiddish Changed America and How America Changed Yiddish, available from Restless Books

In addition to these translations, I have also completed numerous translations, of poetry and prose, by various writers, for The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, for the Lodz Art Books, published by the Yiddish Book Center, and for the Association des Amis de Marc Chagall.

If you appreciate my work, and would like to support it, you can do so through various avenues. The simplest is my Paypal Tipjar. You can also support my work through tax-deductible donations to the Congress for Jewish Culture. To do so, email kongress@earthlink.net and specify that you would like to support my work.