Wolfes World of Poetry

Sound of gravel crunching under tires. Logs grew up from that lakebed. All those black bones rising from black water. That, or smoking up in his garage.

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You know, you hear about the Body all the time: Someone once told me the place had been a valley, before the dam, before the town. But that was a long time ago.

Q: What did Thomas Wolfe write?

When the engine stopped, I heard the silver sound of keys in the lock and then I was up on his shoulders, tasting blood. I think he said my name. I think he walked toward the woods. Who is the speaker in this poem?

What has happened to her? In her poem, Bachinsky switches the point of view to the woman in the trunk. How does the poet use natural imagery throughout the poem? What does the comparison of the killer to a black bear suggest about human violence? Then you can re-create it.

Quotations

But Wolfe believes that book learning is not enough. He thinks that the translator of poetry must be a poet himself and a native speaker of the language. You have to know the sounds. You have to know the idioms. Still, translating Yiddish is no easy task.

Wolfe, a retired jeweler, must struggle to find the equivalents to Yiddish words that may have several or no direct translations into English. His translations, as well as some of his own poetry, have appeared in such prestigious literary journals as Poetry LA, the University of California's California Quarterly and Translation.

And I wish I were a poet for Nothing in Wolfe's background would suggest such a mission this late in his life. He quickly began a life of industry, selling shirts door-to-door after school. He then entered the jewelry business and, at about the same time, studied economics at Brooklyn College.

I worked every day of my life, except for two years of 'holiday' during the Korean War. This hectic pace was beshert for that period of his life, just as his literary and spiritual life is beshert now. For it was in recent years, during the last few years of a bad marriage, that Wolfe began writing poetry as therapy.

And after a while I realized this sounded like poetry. But I found out what poetry was about," he said. After three years of Levitt's workshops, Wolfe's poetry began to improve. During class one day, the subject of Yiddish poetry came up. Wolfe categorically stated that there weren't any good Yiddish poems.

Have you read Yiddish poetry? The instructor assigned Wolfe to write his own translation of a Yiddish poem. Because Yiddish was Wolfe's first language--followed by Czech and English--he set at the task. But he encouraged me," Wolfe said. Wolfe said that, because so many Jews were lost to the Holocaust and because Israel chose biblical Hebrew over Yiddish as its official language, there are few native Yiddish speakers left.