 Hello and welcome. I'm Allison Mark and Powell, Japanese Literary Translator and former co-chair of the Penn Translation Committee. My co-host today is Tess Lewis, who many of you will recognize from our Week 12 program on Ghost Languages of Europe. Tess is an award-winning translator from French and German, also a former co-chair of the Penn Translation Committee, as well as a co-organizer of Translating the Future, the conference you are now attending. Thank you, Allison. And thanks to all of you for joining us for the 16th installment of our weekly program, Language as Polis. Language, as all of you know in your bones, is at the core of our identities, personal as well as political. One symptom of the recent fraying of the American polis is the increasing hostility directed at people speaking languages other than English and public and in the sustained resistance to bilingual education. Today's panelists will discuss three languages that have been threatened by this urge to containment and simplification, but have also developed strength and resilience in encountering this threat. Yiddish, Kerala and Frisian are languages without passports. Each one has a complex history of accommodating, absorbing and influencing the dominant official languages of their particular regions, and all three are object lessons in the richness and value of linguistic inclusiveness and diversity. Today's conversation will feature Madeleine Cohen, also known as Mindel, who is academic director of the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts, which is sponsoring today's program. Latasha Diggs, a writer, vocalist and sound artist is based in Harlem, and Marianne Newman, translator from Kerala in Spanish, and the force behind the Sant Jordi New York Festival. You can find out more about these three wonderful people and their illustrious achievements on the Center for Humanities website. Today's conversation is also sponsored by the Institut de la Monure. A Q&A session will follow today's talk as usual. Please email your questions for Mindel, Latasha and Marianne to translatingthefuture2020atgmail.com. Questions anonymous, unless you note in your email that you would like us to read your name. Translating the future will continue in its current form through September. During the conference's originally planned dates in late September, several marvelous larger-scale events will happen. Until then, we'll be here every Tuesday with the week's hour-long conversation. Please join us next Tuesday, September 1st for so-called classics with Laurie Patton, Gopal Sukhu, and Vivek Narayanan, and keep checking the Center for the Humanities site for future events. Translating the future is convened by Pan America's Translation Committee, which advocates on behalf of literary translators working to foster a wider understanding of their art and offering professional resources for translators, publishers, critics, bloggers, and others with an interest in international literature. The committee is currently co-chaired by Lynn Miller-Lachlan and Larisa Kaiser. For more information, look for translationresourcesatpen.org. And if you know anyone who was unable to join us for the live stream today, a recording will be available afterward on the HowlRound and Center for the Humanities sites. Before we turn it over to Mindal, Latasha, and Marianne, we'd like to offer our utmost gratitude to today's sponsors, the Institut Ramanur and the Yiddish Book Center, and to our partners at the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center CUNY, the Marni Siegel Theater Center, the Coleman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, Pan America, and to the Masters of Dark Zoom Magic at HowlRound, who make this live stream possible. And now to our speakers. Hello. Hi. Hi, Marianne. Hi, Latasha. Hi, Mindal. Hi, Latasha. Hello. So we had the idea to start by, you know, each of us introducing ourselves and saying a bit about our relationship to these language and I think some first thoughts kind of in response to the theme. I'm willing to be the guinea pig and go first, if that sounds good to folks. That sounds great, Mindal, thanks. Okay, I'm really excited to get to be here and have this conversation with both of you and grateful to the organizers as well for putting together this amazing session that's brought a lot of enrichment to my summer, certainly. So it's exciting, you know, not just for us to get to talk, I think, but to be part of the conversation that's been evolving over the weeks. So a word about me. I'm the academic director at the Yiddish Book Center, which is a nonprofit organization in Massachusetts. We're celebrating our 40th anniversary this year and the mission of the organization has been originally to physically save Yiddish books and then in the decades since, you know, to interpret that mission in a lot of different ways of what does it mean to help make Yiddish accessible to different people. So first by making the books accessible, but then through different educational work to make Yiddish culture and Yiddish literature accessible. And I'll say a bit more about that probably later, we talk about some of the practical work that is happening to support Yiddish in translation. I didn't grow up speaking Yiddish, I learned it as an adult. I had one grandparents with whom I was very close who was a Yiddish speaker, but I started studying it in college after learning German and getting really interested just in the Jewish experience and the Jewish role in modern European and modern world history and trying to understand, you know, how this diasporic and stateless people continue to play such an influential role in world events especially European and Western history. And my experience once I started learning Yiddish I think is the same for many people who learn it. It's like opening a door into a secret room of treasure that one didn't even know that the room existed and suddenly one discovers these great riches that speak to so many aspects of modern historical experience and to being in the world today in a lot of different ways. So I went to graduate school studying Yiddish literature and I've taught Yiddish language especially to beginners. And I would say I've done just a lot of teaching that's about trying to introduce Yiddish to people. It's a language that has a lot of symbolic weight. It means a lot of things to different people and people have strong ideas about Yiddish and I find it really rewarding to open up the different complexities of language for people who have never encountered it before or have strong associations with it but there's so much more to learn about any culture and this culture for sure. And the last thing I'll say is a lot of my work recently has been in support of Yiddish in translation and more than even my own translation I've done a lot of work as a translation editor which I really love. I was a translation editor for an online journal called IngaVeb and at the Yiddish Books Center I get to do a lot of editing of Yiddish translations as well. So I'll make my pitch for why translation is so important to languages like Yiddish, languages without state support, languages that are threatened in different ways or just depend I guess on communities of individuals to maintain them. So I'll say a few things about Yiddish in response to the theme of languages polis or the idea of languages polis. We had started talking about stateless languages when we started speaking about this session and I'm really interested that we shifted to this idea of thinking about how languages organize community, how languages give shape to community especially outside of the structures of nation or state because I think probably that actually does describe the condition for many more languages and speakers than does the state of speaking a national language. The fact that I grew up speaking English in the United States is really probably an exception for most human experience rather than the norm though it's presented that way to be a monolingual speaker of a national language is thought of as some kind of normal condition and it's probably not whereas Yiddish speakers who were by definition multilingual and interacting using different languages for different parts of their lives without any kind of representation by their government is true for a lot of people in the world today and throughout history. So I like that if we take that framework, how do we understand a relationship between language and communal identity differently than the idea of English in England and France, French and France and German and Germany. I thought there is a centuries long history of Jews turning to Yiddish to help organize their sense of community. So probably we would say in the 19th century in response to or in communication with the rise of romantic nationalism in Europe which meant for many different peoples and languages turning to their vernacular language to build up a national culture that happened for Jews in that time period as well. Some people turned to Hebrew and that's very much how we get the revival of the modern Hebrew language and Zionism. And at the same time, different people were turning to Yiddish to redefine a sense of what it meant to be Jewish people or the Jewish nation. And in many ways this kind of movement to build a Yiddish national culture was really very successful. There are tens of thousands of volumes of Yiddish literature in the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst and they are largely a product of this conscious ideological movement to build a Yiddish national culture, to create everything in Yiddish that Jews saw as defining national culture around them, literature and poetry and theater and scholarship and educational systems. Probably the biggest difference for this Yiddish national movement compared to the other movements in Europe at the time, maybe two differences, right? Was the kind of persistent otherness of Jews as non-Christians in Europe and their lack of a territory, their lack of a national territory in Europe. So, while there is a lot in common say between how what Polish literature was doing in the 19th century as part of the movement to put Poland back on the map, to reestablish a Polish nation and a Polish culture, Yiddish hadn't been on the map before the way that Poland had. So the idea of creating a Yiddish state was something that some people were interested in but I think much more widespread was just a desire for national cultural recognition, national cultural autonomy and that there be some recognition by the states where Jews lived in their collective identity and their collective rights beyond just their individual rights to exist in those states. Obviously all of that changes for Yiddish, in the second half of the 20th century that all of these efforts to kind of build Yiddish national culture are really dramatically interrupted by the Holocaust and the death of so many of its speakers and then the failure to reestablish centers of Yiddish in Europe and then different forms of suppression both by Yiddish speakers out of fear of continued anti-Semitism, by suppression in the Soviet Union which earlier had supported Yiddish as a minor national language and later did not. In Israel, Yiddish really didn't receive their support because the project was to build Hebrew as the national language and in places like the United States the pressure to assimilate or Americanize disrupted Yiddish's continuity which is not to say that it hasn't continued, it does survive, it's very much a living language especially in Hasidic communities around the world today. But yeah, the question of how a community can support its language has continued for Yiddish and has become more challenging whereas there are new challenges given that it's no longer the majority daily spoken language of Ashkenazi Jews as it was in the first half of the 20th century. And yet nevertheless, I'm part of this community of people that continues to turn to Yiddish and continues to think it's important in our lives today and has things to say to us today. And I certainly think that translating Yiddish literature from that period is one important way to kind of maintain this community and maintain continuity but I'll say more about that later and let Latasha and Marianne introduce themselves. I think we were going in alphabetical order, Latasha. Would you like to continue? Oh. Well, first, I would like to thank the organizers for inviting me to this conversation regarding stateless languages and languages as Polish. I'll first say that I am a poet and a performer who plays with language. I have fun with language. I get frustrated with language, multiple languages. And for anyone who is familiar with my work, I work with several different languages often all at the same time, kind of making a bit of a collage with them based on sounds and meaning and as part of this conversation, it arises at a curious invitation in 2018. The organization, The Flemish House de Bruyren invited me to come to Leavaden. Leavaden is in the north of Netherlands. Also consider the capital of Friesland. For two weeks, just to write about Leavaden, I had no idea how these folks knew of me and why they wanted me to come and visit Leavaden. And I just said, yeah, okay, sure. And so for two weeks, I was in Leavaden and wondering about, wondering, what am I supposed to write about? And this also came at the time that Leavaden, as well as Valenta, which is a city in Malta, were deemed, given the title, the European Capital of Culture for the year 2018, which is something that all of the European countries participate in, something that was established back in 1985. And so Leavaden being the cultural capital of Europe was a big deal. So there were all of these activities, one had to do with creating this whole of languages, where they created an installation with some 6,000 plus languages that are still spoken throughout the world. There were a couple of languages that I was looking for that were not in that whole, that I do know are spoken, but that's a conversation for later as to whether or not there are languages versus pigeons versus dialects. But that's for something else. And as I'm wondering about, I come to this center called Afouk, and Afouk is the official center for the Frisian language. And I'm going, what's Frisian? And so I learned rather in pieces that Frisian is the language that was spoken by the Frisians in Friesland, which was once its own kingdom before it became part of the Netherlands. And that it has a mythical route to India, but that's not so much the case. It has a Germanic root, it has a Latin root. It's related to English. But that, for one moment, it is a language that is considered a minority language as well as an indigenous language. Aside from it being the same language aside from it being the second official language spoken in the Netherlands. So I went on a walk about attempting to learn a language which presented challenges because in Leeuwarden, I came across very few people that spoke Frisian. Despite the fact that there is a center dedicated to the preservation of the language, that the language is supported by the government yet at the same time, it appeared to me in my observations not so much of a widespread interest in learning the language aside from maybe another minority language in another remote town somewhere in the world with linguists they're interested in doing some type of collaboration. But again, these were very, very remote places. And so I decided to write about my attempts to learn Frisian and my attempts to learn what Frisian identity is in a place where you weren't, you were not hearing Frisian, but you were seeing it either displayed on the streets, the literal streets displayed as window displays, displayed on top of buildings, and yet nothing was audible. You couldn't hear it. And for me, as someone who works with sound, and this is how I play with language, it became a task of trying to find someone who spoke it and would take me seriously enough as a foreigner as a brown foreigner who was curious about the language. And I'll wait to read some of the work a little bit later, but how it relates to kind of connects to this question of translation, I myself am not a translator. But the task of then translating my work to Frisian, exposed to me just how much or how little there are those of a younger generation and I may be completely wrong right now because I'm not a translator, and I may be completely wrong right now because that was two years ago. So maybe there is someone who has picked up the mantle of serving as a translator of a English-based work to Frisian. And I say English-based despite the fact that within the text that I've wrote, Frisian does emerge, Dutch does emerge, Suriname-tongue, which is a language that is more based in Suriname, but it has a connection to the Dutch because Suriname was once a colony of the Netherlands to critique and rather to critique this work as a notion of Frisian being a multilingual location, that within the landscape that I was navigating, coming across brown bodies, whether they be Egyptian, whether they be from another country in Africa, whether they be from some area in Asia, the inability to hear their language in a place that doesn't appear to encourage languages from other places outside of Europe to be heard. And that's multilingual for them, which was surprising to me because when I think of multilingual, I think of brown. I think of variations of brown. I think of variations of brown. I think of variations of brown. I think of variations of brown. I think of variations of black. I think of variations of beige. I don't think particularly as someone visiting a place with my body, multilingual being just Frisian in Dutch, especially when I'm encountering a Somalian body who wants to engage me in Dutch, but I don't know Dutch. And yet it doesn't appear that it doesn't appear that that body wants to then switch to maybe the language of their origin, right, that they're gonna continue to try to speak in a European language until I can understand them. And it was like, this is very interesting. And then to encounter Dutch people and to encounter folks whose origins are based in the North, in areas where they are Frisian, not interested in Frisian as a language and in going, so what is that about? So, yeah, and I'll stop there because I think I can serve the conversation a little bit more later as we kind of flush this out. That's really interesting, the thing about a kind of erasure though, and for me, language is a very, it's both emotional and political, it's both of those things from the start. And my introduction to Spanish, the first time I ever got on a plane at four years old was to go to Cuba with my parents if my aunt was working there with the CIA. And so my introduction to Spanish was, they taught me 25 words, probably things to eat, leche con chocolate and arroz con pollo and the address my aunt lived at I suppose in case I got lost, which was funerically 22, 23, si, vedado. So that was my start in Spanish. And then I went, I grew up in Chelsea, I grew up in this house and Chelsea was a very Hispanic inflected neighborhood. 14th Street was called Little Spain and it was where all of the emigres and immigrants and migrants came, well, from the 19th century on from Spain and after the Civil War the Republicans came and then in the 1950s there was more of an economic exile and a lot of people who were not leftist but more right-wing came. In any case, I was going to a Catholic school on 17th Street, St. Francis' Day here and that was a mixture of the children of these immigrants and the children of Puerto Rican natives. It was probably my class was at least a third Hispanic as we said in those days. So, but there was a certain, it was my first introduction to diglossia. So my introduction to Spanish is in this incredibly vibrant culture, very exciting, all of these new experiences. And then I come back home and there is a whole Hispanic pool but where people are, where the Spanish language is not as strong as the English language. So there's an inequality between the two of them which is the diglossia that I'm going to refer to which is the presence of two languages in an unequal situation. So, but from as, you know, as I grew, Spanish became an observatory from which I could look at English. When I went to college and started studying Spanish and I studied it in high school but when I got serious about it, it was in the seventies and I was very anti-Yankee, anti-American and Spanish was the place from which I could look at the United States. And then I went to Spain on my junior year abroad, junior semester. And of course Spain, it was 1972, Franco hadn't died, Franco was still alive. And Spanish was in the position of power and in fact in the position of erasure, of trying to erase the Catalan language. So in Spain, the natural place for me to migrate to was to Catalan. Aside from the fact that the first time I landed in Barcelona from on the train was not landing the first time I slid into Barcelona. I just fell in love with it immediately. I mean, the architecture, the landscape. Madrid was a very, the presence of the government and of Franco was very overwhelming. And even though he was no less present in Catalonia and in Barcelona or even more present in other ways, it was, there was more pushback, there was much more resistance and that was a place where I felt comfortable. So I began to informally to study Catalan and in fact, I've always studied it informally. All my Catalan is street Catalan with a whole lot of reading behind it. I never actually took the class. I took two classes at the Catalan circle in Madrid and they were so terrible that I didn't continue. So I have this emotional relationship to language that is also political. The whole question of language as Polish, I think is really interesting. One of the first full-length book I translated into Catalan, into English rather, was by Xavier Ruber de Ventos, who was one of the great Catalan philosophers of the 20th century. And he wrote this book as well. Not, I hope you can see it, which is a study of nationalisms from a philosophical perspective. And he is responding to a kind of cosmopolitan dislike of people who are vindicating their cultures. Why are you so, why is this so important to you? You know what, oh, and there's a rejection on the part of the language of power, of the less powerful language. And then understanding that things would just be so much easier if you would stop doing that, you know? So, but one of the things that Xavier says in this book is that Polish in fact, which is the city, comes to substitute, comes to replace the clan and it replaces the old customs and the practices of vengeance and having to kill the people who have offended your family, et cetera. And you have this more civilized relationship to one another. But this requires a certain kind of forgetting. It requires you to forget the old rules. And in some cases, it would require you to forget the language. So I think the whole question of Polish is it has a positive and a negative aspect, you know? And I actually, I like the notion of stateless as well. Because Catalonia has everything to have be a state, accept a state. It has the language, it has an economy, it has institutions, it has a constitution of its own from many centuries old from before the Maccarta. So, you know, it's a country. It's a country. And with many, with a lot of, it's very interesting because Catalonia of course is not spoken only in Catalonia, it's spoken in the South of France, it's spoken in Valencia, in the Balearque Islands, even a little bit of Italy. So it's a stateless language in that sense because it has feet in many, in many different places. I'm interested in the emergence of Yiddish or the re-emergence of Yiddish because it follows a similar, Catalan follows a similar path in the 19th century. There's a re-emergence of Catalan culture after having been, after the War of Succession in 1714, Catalonia is absorbed into a Spanish state by Philip V of Bourbon. And the Catalan universities are closed, they're established a Spanish language university and a Jesuit institution. And, you know, it takes a century for the Catalans to kind of regroup and begin again to, one of the interesting things, I read another book by Enrique Comar called Cat Castilian, The Language Next Door. And he was talking about the fact that in fact, you know, Catalonia was mostly monolingual for much of its history. I know there are other linguists who say differently but it's a very convincing thesis. And in fact, you know, what happens then is that the Diaglosia becomes class-based whereas all Catalans speak Catalan, but the Catalans who want to become noble adopt Spanish and Spanish institutions are established, the Spanish language is imposed in fact by Philip V and his successors. And, but they're not very successful because one of the things that saves Catalan in fact is the fact that so many people were illiterate. So they weren't reading, they weren't going to school and they were continuing to speak Catalan. And in fact, when bishops and generals and other people would come to Catalonia, they would have to speak Catalan in order to be understood. So preachers would have to learn to preach in Catalan because otherwise they wouldn't be able to spread the word, spread the gospel. That's the only way of like asserting power from a position of what would be seen as powerlessness, right? That like the language being spoken and illiterate forces these people in positions of power to use it. That's right, that's right. And it's the power of the people. In that case, it's more the demos, right? The people who haven't forgotten their culture and their language, who haven't chosen to enter the palace or haven't chosen or don't have the opportunity, but in any case, they maintain that historic memory. Anyway, I think, yeah, I think I could stop there and we can speak to each other. Well, and I think you are just thinking about the time. I know we each brought some poetry to read. I wonder if we should do that now to make sure that they all get heard and then more time to discuss, does that make sense? Sure. Leta, I'd love to hear your part because I think you have some of your own work that you'll share with us. Yeah, and before I do that, I need to find the link again. It's funny because I wanted to bring up the fact that shortly after I left, Lea Vaudean wanted to prevent the arrival of more Antillians, which is an interesting conversation later on. I'm trying to find, okay, will I be able to share this? I think so. Share screen. So let me do this very quickly. I just want to make sure that, okay. So can you see the poem? Yes. Okay. So... Oompa Loompa? Oompa Loompa. Okay. Soya Ki Lutang. Can you welcome this gaze towards words and spoken by a cynical generation? Dump some luster of rulers. Your labor deserves plaudits. Oompa Bled never explained just expected. Yours of root I may retain just to slurs. General blah blah is null, so simply we are bipedal, but we be natural idiots. Full of ourselves driven to control the oceans, the winds, adjectives. Your cheese is mean friend, like pungent crunch, but we knew this. Skin fished and fried up. I thought it was the French to blame on mayo. A deaf waitress serves, teaches me espresso. A cashier denies me stamps. Cope the roofs with hot, illia, ital, emem. No volume raised though. So who hears if unable to read? Does this hand need be this heavy? Elaborate for me this thing about freezing women. Evidence of heavy and feathered traits all leading to Femke Janssen. Bad example. So ferholen ferhalen. The Dutch G est al naal me al compadre. Relatives not. Coat of honey on Spain or Iraq or insert African Asian root here. Well, then we did do it. A transfer of particles across ponds where escaped we collage. My skin coats switch. Longing tropics, it pales beside van dese. Your oak thrives in sand as I digress to YouTube tutorials to catch the rhythm. Full of joy alas the shop for clumpies is open from 12 to five, the tallest in Europe A. So what about the Danes? Hung like group there. Get yours vertical accents. Damn your staircases. Scaling obtuse triangles of hail, misdirected retribution for fiending bliscoe. Dump more tea in a big cup, please. I think my is Moana. My lessons are this. And I'll read just this one. I gave her zombie after Stanley Brown. Oh, numeral total bits. Minias passos in the Bronx. What does she know step on the social Harlem? El numeral total the miss passos in Helmond. What does she know step on the social Nishi or the Kubo? Oh, numeral total the minias passos in North Carolina. What does she know step on the social Okinawa? El numeral total the miss passos in South Salvador, Jebaia. What does she know step on the social? Tasko. Oh, numeral total the minias passos in Jalagi. What does she know step on the social? Vanda say. El numeral total the miss trampos in Ilea, Yoruba. And I'll stop there. Beautiful. Thank you, Natasha. Lovely. Can I ask a question about the second poem that you read? Sure. The kind of smaller English text. How does that relate to the rest of the text that you read aloud? Cause there are some changes, right? But not the same changes as in. Same changes. It's the total number of my steps in is actually a straight reference from Stanley Brown. Stanley Brown was a Dutch conceptual artist and the funny thing about his work, he dealt with measurements and counting how many steps he would take from A to B are asking strangers to make maps. Like how do you get to this store? And then ask them to draw a map. Sometimes they wouldn't know anything. And then he would stamp it. Stanley Brown was here. What interested me about Stanley's work was that for most of his career, no one knew his identity because he refused to take photographs of himself. There would be gallery exhibitions of his work and he wouldn't attend. And so really nobody knew his identity. His identity was merely these measurements. And then it was much later when he passed away, his wife wanted to make sure that everybody knew that he was black and that he was originally from Suriname. When Suriname was a colony of the Netherlands and that he went to the Netherlands later in his life to study art. So it's really interesting how then in this one conceptual piece that he created which was about the number of his steps, you get clues as to who he may be and who he's identifying as but you're never quite sure. So I wanted it to be a mistranslation of sorts because I don't think they're 100% correct at all. But it's me playing with the language, me trying to play with the Dutch and the Spanish and the Japanese to kind of record my identity in this very Northern low country space. Thank you. Thank you. Beautiful. Marianne, do you wanna read something? Okay, I think I have, where is it? You know, I don't have the text I want, I don't have access to the text I want to share so I'm gonna have to stop that but I will read it, I have access to it myself. This is a poem by Josep Karnay. I am currently working on a book by Karnay called Trees and it is indeed that it is just a book about every poem is about trees and it's rhymed and I have, in general, I don't rhyme, I don't, but in this particular case, I don't know why I can't bring them. All right, I'm gonna read a little bit in Katalon just so that you feel it. Oh, I can't, okay, I'm sorry. I don't know why I can't get that. But anyway, it's called The Donkey and the Olive Tree. This is a poem about trees, as I said, and the ones where you get the real Mediterranean feeling are when he writes about olive trees and fig trees and there's always this tremendous kind of Old Testament feeling to it and also very Christian but it's an interesting example of how all of these religious images are actually part of Katalon culture, I'm sure. And people celebrate holidays even if they're atheists. People celebrate the landscape and they have, it's part of the language in other words, it's part of the memory. So here, The Donkey and the Olive Tree. Donkey fixed to the pious olive tree, lenient tree, sentient being, the great tree and its dotage of glee lasts at the house and the darkening stream. The tired donkey neither yearns nor awaits the ancient God crowned in thorns. His braze ring out on the crooked trail like the scraps of orient mourned. You are the two gifts of the sacred land where the aurora appears in rosy span. Oh, testaments to that lovely bluff. Prophetic beast, whom a fool would query, wholesome tree ready to parley, your silver is the dust of immortal stuff. And I'm sorry, you can't see the original. I can read a tiny bit of the original. Lulivera y lasa, asa fermata la pio olivera, abraso al anima lantanen, larbra en sagrana vallata giuganera, rio a la casa y al negra turren. Okay. Beautiful. It's beautiful. I like it. It's the first time I've read it out loud, so. It's in progress. Any comments will be welcome. We'd love to hear something with you, Ruth. Linda? So, we can see now I'm sharing the English translation of a poem by Avram Sotskiver, one of the most famous Yiddish poets of the second half of the 20th century. And I think what I'll do, I'll read the English and then I'm gonna read the end in Yiddish after, so that we can end with the Yiddish. And you'll see the themes of translation and why this is a hard poem to read in translation. Yiddish, and it's translated by Barbara and Benjamin Harshov. Yiddish, shall I start from the beginning? Shall I, a brother like Abraham, smash all the idols? Shall I let myself be translated alive? Shall I plant my tongue and wait till it transforms into our forefathers, raisins and almonds? What kind of joke preaches my poetry brother with whiskers that soon my mother tongue will set forever? 100 years from now, we may still sit here on the Jordan and carry on this argument. For a question, gnaws and pause at me. If he knows exactly in what regions, Levi Yitzuk's prayer, Yahyaish's poem, Kulbaks Song, are straying to their sunset. Could he please show me where the language will go down? Maybe at the whaling wall. If so, I shall come there, come, open my mouth and like a lion garbed in fiery scarlet, I shall swallow the language as it sets and wake all the generations with my roar. That's fantastic. Okay, a bit, a bit of Yiddish. Tozol er mir a steiger, an weisen, wo hin die Sprach gebunter? If so, by dem Kosal Marovi, by bazoi, wel ich dort kummen, kummen, eröffnen das Meil und via Leib, ungetun in feiertigem Sunter, einschlingen den Laschen, wo es geht, unther, einschlingen und alle Deures decken mit mein Brummen. Love it. Roar. Love the sounds of the Yiddish. It's so much a piece of fabric of the New York. You hear it, I mean, I hear New York. Yeah. I love that, I love that. It's a part of different territories in as much as it is a stateless language or a language of exile that it is still, it's so strongly tied to different locations. Yeah. I have a question for you about that, Mindal, and it's a perfect segue from the poem who talks about, the poet talks about his, he'll speak his language as it's setting. And York, in combination with your comments earlier about the importance of translating the works, important works into Yiddish to create the Yiddish culture, you know, by the Jews in the diaspora in 18 and early 1900s. How much today is being translated into Yiddish and does the Yiddish Book Center have a focus on that at all? That's really interesting, yeah. The center's focus is certainly translating from Yiddish into English. There is some translation happening into Yiddish. One of the interesting things that happens is we get contacted by like various state boards in New York that need to translate official documents into Yiddish, you know, for the Hasidic community. So there's a very important kind of state function, interestingly, of translating into Yiddish still for communities. And there are some projects that a colleague of mine translated Dr. Seuss into Yiddish and like the cat in the hat in Yiddish is available and quite popular and they're continued to be projects like that for children's literature, probably as a way to, you know, to bring Yiddish into people's homes. And otherwise, I'm sure it exists not quite in the same way, right? Cause it did translating into Yiddish was a really important part of building Yiddish as a cultural language, right? And that's true for many languages. If you can translate Shakespeare into Yiddish, it means that Yiddish is as eloquent a language as English. And I think that that drive probably remains though I don't know of any very recent. Actually, I do know, I know somebody who just translated Shakespeare into Yiddish this summer. So I think that drive continues. Yeah. We had one question that came in from a viewer that it has a rather long preamble which because of we're short on time, I'm going to abbreviate this person, teaches both English and French in Louisiana. And they're describing the sort of wrench speakers of the state trying to reclaim the territory politically. So sort of on our own turf here. The question is, I'm wondering how, and this is really to any of you, I'm wondering how you might consider whether we will ever be able to convince America, particularly in this, you know, phobic era in the larger American society to engage in the learning of languages other than English, stateless languages or not by expressing the pleasure and delight of learning languages that open other parts of the world to them. If so, how best do we engage as American culture to show them the delights in tearing down walls, not building them at borders? I mean, I think this, you've all sort of spoken to this in terms of your own engagement with these languages, but I just wonder if you have any, what your, if you have a response to this viewer. Well, translation is one of the ways. I mean, I began to study Spanish language literature because I found a hundred years of solitude in a bookstore. And, you know, I think that's one of the things that translation does, if the Catalan texts and the Yiddish texts aren't in English and God knows if the Phrygian texts were in English, at least people could conceivably take an interest in it. But I think, you know, in the U.S., the U.S. has a problem just learning Spanish, never, not the lesser known languages are a next step for sure. But the interesting thing about Catalan is that its relationship to Spanish in the United States is very close. And most people, I would say 95% of people who begin to study Catalan come to it through a Spanish department, through having studied Spanish. So, you know, there's an interesting relationship there. I wonder sort of Latasha, the way that you, the way that Phrygian came to you actually. So, I mean, I just wonder, since you already had so many, you know, your work was already multilingual, is there? I don't know. You know, the one thing, you know, I'm thinking about the two weeks that I was there, you know, once I learned that there was this language and wanted to hear it, the question of who will speak it to me, right? And, you know, one thing to, you know, to make sure that is understood, that there was a Phrygian movement in the 1950s, which allowed the Phrygian language to be government funded to be officially recognized as the second language, to be taught in primary schools and certain courses in secondary education. And then beyond that, I think there are those who are invested in preserving the language, but then how they're preserving the language and how they're furthering the interest in curiosity is what I felt that I was hit with a wall. And the reason why I say that, and I guess I'm gonna try to connect it to this, how do we make Americans? Multilingual are to be just as giddy about different languages as we are. Very simply, there needs to be some fun. There needs to be some fun. You know, to encounter folks and understand that Phrygian is, though it's not necessarily spoken in Leovodin, but it's spoken in the towns outside of Leovodin, which were part of Phrysland. And that it's now, while it's spoken in the courts and while you can have someone and you have a Bible that's been translated into Phrygian, how do we make, how do we invite younger, the younger generation to be engaged with it, to have an interest in it? Dr. Seuss, Dr. Seuss is- I mean, yeah, I totally agree, Dr. Seuss is the one. But then after Dr. Seuss, you know, I mean, like we can continue to read Dr. Seuss because we like Dr. Seuss, but most folks will grow out of Dr. Seuss. So then are there graphic novels written in other languages? Are there augmented reality projects that involve other languages? That will spark a curiosity? I know we had a earlier conversation about how few people are interested in learning a language and are only interested in learning the swear words. And I said, I'm probably one of those people who love learning the swear words and because they become a secret language, right? When I taught, when I was teaching language, I always taught the swear words. They become a secret language. I'm crazy, I'm the curmudgeon. And that's growing up in New York, growing up with Dominicans and Puerto Ricans as my classmates. It was wonderful to learn the word, Uta. And Ben Bejo. And you could say it, but then it became universally known in New York, right? Because New York is unique in that where you did know, and you didn't have to know Spanish to know what Ben Bejo meant, right? You knew it was something bad. Yiddish is like, Yiddish too? I think Yiddish too, yeah. We have to introduce those cut-a-line words, Betsy. Yeah, we have to introduce them. We have to introduce them. I'm sorry we're out of time because we're getting, the conversation, as we start talking about swear words, it's getting more and more scary. But thank you all, Mindal, Atasha and Marianne for contributing to the conversation today. And once again, we would like to thank our partners, HowlRound, Penn America, the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center, CUNY, the Coleman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, the Martin E. Siegel Theater Center, and Deep Gratitude to the Yiddish Book Center and the Institute on Manual for their support of today's event. Thank you again and we hope to see you next week. Thank all of you, bye.