Oct. 16, W.W.B. Polish and Yiddish poetry reading, NYC

[Sibelan E S Forrester]

A wonderful event for list members in the New York area:

As part of the World of Poetry Bilingual Series hosted by Caroline 
Crumpacker at The Bowery Poetry Club (308 Bowery, near Bleeker St., 
212.614.0505)

Words Without Borders
The Online Magazine for International Literature
www.wordswithoutborders.org

presents

Rebel Voices Now and Then:
Contemporary Polish and Modern Yiddish Poetry

a bilingual reading with actress Elzbieta Czyzewska and translator 
Amelia Glaser

Sunday, October 16th at 2:00pm, $7

If you're ready to travel beyond the safe confines of literary 
canons, Words Without Borders invites you to come hear voices from 
the avant-garde of contemporary Polish poetry (thought by some to 
represent the "other Poland"), and to encounter the radical poetry of 
American Yiddish proletarian writers from the 1920s to the 1950s, 
only recently rescued from oblivion. This WWB event includes the 
first reading of poetry in Yiddish at the Bowery Poetry Club.

Polish screen legend ELZBIETA CZYZEWSKA will read from the poetry of 
Ryszard Krynicki, Krystyna Milobedzka, Marcin Sendecki, Adam 
Wiedemann and other contemporary poets featured in the special 
"Poland Unplugged" section of Words Without Borders' September issue, 
dedicated to international poetry 
(http://www.wordswithoutborders.org/). These poets, though very 
different, all share one attribute-a robust skepticism toward 
poetry's traditional claims to prettiness, sincerity and 
righteousness. They question and complicate the traditional model of 
Polish poetry, the poetry of witness, of moral universalism, with a 
love of the concrete and the vernacular, often inspired by earlier 
poetry of the Polish avant-garde and the New York School.

AMELIA GLASER, scholar, translator and lecturer at Stanford 
University, will read and talk about poems from her recent book of 
translations, Proletpen: American Rebel Yiddish Poets (Wisconsin 
Univ. Press, in association with the Dora Teitelboim Foundation). The 
bilingual anthology, translated by Glaser, edited by Glaser and David 
Weintraub, and with an introduction by Dovid Katz, presents a 
little-known group of Leftist Yiddish writers, most of whom lived and 
wrote in New York from the 1920s to the early 1950s. The newly 
translated works of Sarah Barkan, Yosl Cutler, Malka Lee, Moyshe 
Nadir, Menke Katz and others comment upon the immigrant experience, 
the labor movement, racial injustice, love, and war. Glaser presents 
these poems within a critical context that acknowledges their value 
in historical terms; she also acknowledges that the Proletpen poems 
are interesting not only for their literary quality but for their 
very existence and variety. Proletpen reopens the pages of an 
important chapter in American, New York, and world history, revealing 
the depth and power of Yiddish literature against the backdrop of 
twentieth-century world politics. (Books will be available for 
purchase.)

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