Circular Landscapes
- Written by:
- Dvoyre Fogel
- Translated by:
- Anna Torres
- Published:
- 2015 / 5775
- Part of issue number:
- Translation 2015
An excerpt from Mannequins
Dvoyre Fogel (1902–42) was a Polish Yiddish writer of poetry, short stories, and literary and art criticism. Associated with the Yiddish avant-garde, she published two books of poetry and a book of short sketches. Fogel termed her style “white words” and aimed “to create a new lyric poetry of the urban condition . . . in which monotone becomes theme.” In poems such as “Circular Landscapes” she collapses the dualities between interior and exterior spaces and between domestic and urban landscapes.
In houses angular as refusal
pale and watery whitewashed kitchens
brass basin-oranges ripen
blue flames lengthen from pots.
And bottles like cold lemons, quiet glasses
open resigned bodies
beside hazy foreign-land tea
and coffee that is hard like refusal.
Outside, circular streets pass by,
wagons carry sweet white milk in canisters
and breasts with sweeter milk, unneeded
bend themselves over gray sweet canisters.
Suburban streets open window shutters
with kerosene tin cups, silvery round
and with herring barrels, greasy bands
and sacks of gray flour and brown kasha.
And by sidewalks and squares
circular hats rock and bob on dark gentlemen
men have somewhere squandered their fate
and go on walking.
What is longing . . . What is refusal . . .
Click here for the original poem in Yiddish.
Anna Torres is an alumna of the Yiddish Book Center’s Steiner Summer Yiddish Program and a 2014 Yiddish Book Center translation fellow. She holds an MA from Harvard Divinity School and is currently pursuing a PhD in Jewish studies from the University of California at Berkeley.