Description
Poetry. Translated from the Yiddish by Faith Jones, Jennifer Kronovet, and Samuel Solomon. Foreword by Edward Hirsch. "These remarkably vivid poems could be titled something like 'Sensation And How To Think It.' They are carefully made, but the poet allows herself a certain carelessness to say the unsayable. She is interested in violence and tenderness together, as our nervous systems seem to be. There are lovely Reznikoffian glimpses of Manhattan; there are the pleasures of the short poem—the poem passing but lingering. The poems are of their time in the best possible way: you want to be there then, too. Early in the 20th century, in New York, having learned Yiddish or some other language new to you, watching a new age by born as if that were natural." —Alice Notley
Author Bio
Celia (Tsilye) Dropkin, née Tsipporah Levine (1887-1956), was born in Babruysk in what is now Belarus. After attending Russian-language schools and teaching briefly in Warsaw, she went to Kiev in 1907. There she met the Hebrew writer Uri Nissan Gnessin and began to write poems in Russian, one of which Gnessin adapted into Hebrew and published without acknowledging its source. In 1912 she joined her husband in New York, where she continued to write in Russian but also began to publish Yiddish translations of her Russian poetry. Known primarily as a Yiddish poet, she was also a painter and wrote short stories and the novel Di tsvey gefiln (Two Feelings, translated here as DESIRES) in the 1930s. Her poetry has been both lauded and criticized for its sexual imagery and eroticism.
Author City: BELARUS RUS