On Transmitting the Work of Anna Margolin

Literature, and all lasting art, can take a surprising path while finding, losing, and rediscovering its audience again. This is the case particularly with literature by women, and literature in a language like Yiddish, which only began to be taken seriously as a literary language in the late nineteenth century, blossomed so quickly that it soon had literary centers on nearly every continent, and then was snuffed out by the Holocaust. 

The work of the Yiddish poet Anna Margolin is a testament to this surprising path. Born in 1887 in modern-day Belarus, Margolin eventually became a poet of 1920s New York City. Her poems, upon their initial publication, were lauded—so much so that critics infamously declared that she must have been a man, writing with a woman’s name and persona. “These poems are written with an experienced hand,” they said. “And a woman can’t write like that.” 

Yet Margolin’s one book, Lider (Yiddish for poems, or songs), didn’t find the success Margolin anticipated, at least not in New York. It did garner praise in Warsaw, but just over a decade after its publication, the booming Yiddish cultural center of Warsaw would be largely destroyed.

It’s often said that because of what she considered her book’s failure, Margolin fell into a determined silence, never publishing another. Yet, her poetry has haunted Yiddish literature. Fittingly, her poetry has been turned into music, following a cultural tradition that sees setting poetry to music as a natural progression. Furthermore, Margolin herself had a tendency to write about music. In one poem, a recollection follows Margolin “like a forgotten refrain,” in another, a feeling haunts her like a “song without words." 

When I first began studying Yiddish as a teenager, I was drawn to Margolin. While I had always been intrigued by Yiddish—the language of generations of my family, but which I did not grow up speaking—the goal of translating poetry was the catalyst that inspired me to buy a Yiddish textbook.

I began translating Margolin’s work almost as soon as I began studying the language. Her vocabulary became my Yiddish vocabulary. I still associate her poems with the summers I spent studying Yiddish in now-defunct summer programs at Vilnius University. The lushness of her poems mirrored the cool lushness of a  Vilnius (Vilna, in Yiddish) summer, their haunting quality echoing the haunted sense that one feels as a Yiddish learner there. Eventually, my translations of her work became the first works that I ever published in literary journals.

Still, there had already been a translation of Lider published in English in 2005. I assumed it would be difficult to publish another. After placing seventeen translations of her poems in journals—not an easy feat—I moved on to other projects.

And yet, as Margolin’s own work has persisted, so did my translations. I have come across them reprinted on various websites, professor friends tell me they include them in syllabi. And while previously, when Margolin’s work was set to music, it was only in Yiddish, over the past couple of years, my translations, too, have found their way into music.

The first to produce music from my translations was Ayelet Rose Gottlieb, a Jerusalem-born singer based in Montreal, whose group The Dream Keepers includes musicians from Tehran, Marseille, and Quebec.

She chose a translation published in Tupelo Quarterly in 2014. As much as I enjoy klezmer, what I appreciate about this composition is that it does not sound like what one expects a Yiddish poem set to music to sound like, its influences mirroring Margolin’s own eclecticism. The song is bilingual, featuring both Margolin’s original and my translation.

The next singer to contact me also does not specialize in klezmer, but rather jazz. While Anna Margolin was, in fact, born Rosa Lebensboym, and invented the name Anna Margolin as a pseudonym, this singer just so happens to truly be named Anna Margolina. She too, is from Belarus, though based in Berlin. She set several of my translations to music, titling her most recent album Song of a Girl, after a translation of mine that also appeared in Tupelo Quarterly. 

This past November, I was a poet-in-residence in a kulturhus (a community center) in Sweden, where Yiddish is an official minority language. There I was put in touch with a musical duo who call themselves Shtoltse Lider—meaning Proud Poems in Yiddish, inspired by a work by Margolin. Composed of pianist and singer Ida Gilner and violinist Livet Nord, their music is indeed rooted in klezmer, though neither of them is Jewish. 

Their latest album, devoted to Margolin, had been recorded but not yet released when we met this past November, but we collaborated on an event. While the initial idea was for me to recite my poetry and translations, and for Shtoltse Lider to perform, we ultimately improvised a trilingual performance. I recited my translation of Margolin’s poem “My Home” while Ida accompanied me on piano. She and Livet then transitioned into their Yiddish and Swedish version of the poem.