On Paul Verlaine’s 172nd birthday…

…here — via the very useful Lyrikzeitung & Poetry News — is a translation of Verlaine’s most famous (& famously untranslatable) poem Chanson d’automne into Yiddish by Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger.
Born in Czernowitz in 1924, this young woman, a cousin of Paul Celan’s (they would on occasion meet and sing together & talk poetry at Celan’s grandfather’s brother house on Sabbat evenings), wrote poetry in German and died at 18 of typhus in Michailovka on the Bug river, in the same labor-camp, in which Paul’s parents were held and also died. As recounted here, “poignantly, in 1968, Paul Celan would permit a German press to include his masterpiece “‘Todesfugue” in an anthology only if Selma’s “Poem” was published next to his. Thus Celan paid tribute to his cousin and was responsible for Selma’s first published verse.”

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