Listening to the Other: Versions of Yiddish, Vietnamese, and Aztec Poetry

By Martin Wasserman

In this work, the author makes it a point to try to connect meaningfully and purposefully with the otherwhether that other is a Yiddish jazz poet, a Vietnamese poet-educator, or an anonymous Aztec singer of songs. Since poetry is a genre with which the author feels quite comfortable, he deliberately uses translated verse as a means of connecting with each of the poets from the three different cultures mentioned above.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 8, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524523961

Martin Wasserman

Martin Wasserman, the creator of this book, is a Professor Emeritus at SUNY Adirondack, a college in the State University of New York system where he taught for thirty-six years. During his career he published over thirty journal articles and three books. One of those works, Kafka Kaleidoscope, was chosen as a “Best Book” by the Small Press Review in 1999. Professor Wasserman’s two most recent works are an original poetry piece entitled Kafka, Rilke, Nadel: Three German Writers Pulling Me Toward the East and a poetry translation called What There Is, As It Is: The Epigrammatic Poems of Ludwig Feuerbach.

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INTRODUCTION

At the start of the tenth century, Yiddish became a distinct language when Jewish communities were established in Germany, and the settlers blended their Hebrew with a medieval German dialect. Over the next thousand years, a substantial number of Jews migrated eastward to the eastern European countries and to Russia. They took their way of speaking with them, but when they settled in the Slavic territories, they incorporated many of the elements of Slavic languages into their Yiddish vernacular. By the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, Yiddish was at the peak of its usage, being spoken by millions of Jews all over Europe.

From the very earliest days of the Yiddish language, a literature existed in the form of folktales, legends, and religious homilies. However, it was not until the nineteenth century that Yiddish writers started to create novels, poetry, and short