Rilke and Mandelstam in Yiddish

The Jewish Community Center of St. Petersburg held a literary event led by Yoel Matveyev, our website’s editor-in-chief, who presented a selection of Rainer Maria Rilke’s and Osip Mandelstam’s poems translated into Yiddish. Soon after the event, Matveyev’s translations were published in the newspaper Birobidzhaner Shtern.

Mandelstam’s poetry had been translated into Yiddish by several poets, including Aron Vergelis, the editor-in-chief of the Soviet literature and art magazine Sovetish Heymland. To the best of our knowledge, Matveyev was the first to translate Rilke into Yiddish. Despite the apparent similarity, Yiddish is quite different from German on every level. As the translator explains in his Birobidzhaner Shtern essay, he had to rewrite every one of Rilke’s lines from scratch, and not just to “touch up” the German language, as some people would mistakenly think.

Regarding Sovetish Heymland and its legacy, we are happy to inform our readers that we already have digitized most of its issues from 1961 to 1991 and published all of the them on our website. Soon we hope to present all issues of this highly influential historical magazine, which often contained poetry translations from Russian and other languages into Yiddish.