Four Poems by Roshelle Weprinsky

Roshelle Weprinsky was a Yiddish poet, journalist, and prose writer, born in Ukraine in 1895. In 1907, she immigrated with her family to the United States, where she lived in New York. From the age of 13, she worked in a sweatshop, but continued her education by taking evening courses. She made her writing debut in 1918 with a poem in Di naye velt and went on to publish five books of poetry and an autobiographical novel between 1926 and 1978. Her poetry has been translated into Polish and was included in Moja Dzika Koza, a 2019 anthology of Yiddish women poets edited by Karolina Szymaniak, Joanna Lisk, and Bella Szwarcman-Czarnota.

In translating Weprinsky’s poems, I prioritized translating sound and images. Internal rhyme and alliteration replace the end rhymes, which are sometimes regular but more often not. I also replicated her frequent use of the dash, which may have been influenced by Emily Dickinson, whom Weprinsky translated, including her innovative use of three dashes as a form of ellipsis.

From my first encounter with her work, I was particularly drawn to Weprinsky’s use of unexpected imagery to describe the speaker’s solitude and intimate relationship with the natural world. Whether walking through the snow or crunching fall leaves, sitting by the bank of a river or watching the day turn to night at dusk, out in nature or looking at it through a window, the speaker is almost always alone. For example, in the poem “Snow,” the speaker’s steps are so light walking on the snow that she imagines she is a bird flying through the air.

–Rebecca Weingart