A.Z. Foreman | "Lullaby" by Lera Yanysheva, read in Romani and in my English translation @a.z.foreman74 | Uploaded 1 year ago | Updated 6 minutes ago
Valeria Yanysheva is an actress, singer and dancer formerly affiliated with the Moscow Romen theater. She has released a small collection of verse in Romani — in various dialects thereof — accompanied by free translations into Russian. The collection, titled Adadîvés i Atasja "Today and Yesterday" is quite fascinating, and can be found here:
http://www.svenko.net/svenko/publ/lera.htm
In some ways she puts me in mind of the dialectal experimentations of Rudyard Kipling (in his Barrack room Ballads) or Paul Laurence Dunbar and Margaret Walker (who wrote their best poetry in Black English.) In other ways, though, the way she uses dialects, and dialect shifts, to actually tell part of the story, is harder to find analogues for in English.
In Stanza 2 the last line literally reads "what am I to do with you?" in Romani. For the English I borrowed from Yanysheva's Russian version, for no other reason than that I liked how it worked in English.
Now about Stanza 4. The poem is in North Russian Romani. But the mother-in-law in this stanza is speaking a quite different Vlax dialect. The implication, I think, is that the speaker is from the Ruska Roma, and has married into a family from a different group. She is now living her married life among a different Romani group than the one she grew up with. Cut off from the close-knit kinship network that would have served as a social safety net back home, she is all the more alone.
As for the line "Sasuj javéla te košel man" it isn't entirely clear to me how to read this, whether "javéla" takes its full semantic force and means "come" or is just an auxiliary verb. The poet's own Russian version doesn't settle this, though it does make me feel, at the very least, that I'm not gravely defacing the poem by translating it as a verb of motion.
"(V)laxîjka" is the general Russian Vlax term meaning "Rom woman from a different group." I have translated it as "Ruska girl." The word Gadže here really refers to Russian peasants or farmers. I feel like its more famous meaning probably isn't relevant here except inasmuch as such people would not be Roma. I just went with "farmers".
Valeria Yanysheva is an actress, singer and dancer formerly affiliated with the Moscow Romen theater. She has released a small collection of verse in Romani — in various dialects thereof — accompanied by free translations into Russian. The collection, titled Adadîvés i Atasja "Today and Yesterday" is quite fascinating, and can be found here:
http://www.svenko.net/svenko/publ/lera.htm
In some ways she puts me in mind of the dialectal experimentations of Rudyard Kipling (in his Barrack room Ballads) or Paul Laurence Dunbar and Margaret Walker (who wrote their best poetry in Black English.) In other ways, though, the way she uses dialects, and dialect shifts, to actually tell part of the story, is harder to find analogues for in English.
In Stanza 2 the last line literally reads "what am I to do with you?" in Romani. For the English I borrowed from Yanysheva's Russian version, for no other reason than that I liked how it worked in English.
Now about Stanza 4. The poem is in North Russian Romani. But the mother-in-law in this stanza is speaking a quite different Vlax dialect. The implication, I think, is that the speaker is from the Ruska Roma, and has married into a family from a different group. She is now living her married life among a different Romani group than the one she grew up with. Cut off from the close-knit kinship network that would have served as a social safety net back home, she is all the more alone.
As for the line "Sasuj javéla te košel man" it isn't entirely clear to me how to read this, whether "javéla" takes its full semantic force and means "come" or is just an auxiliary verb. The poet's own Russian version doesn't settle this, though it does make me feel, at the very least, that I'm not gravely defacing the poem by translating it as a verb of motion.
"(V)laxîjka" is the general Russian Vlax term meaning "Rom woman from a different group." I have translated it as "Ruska girl." The word Gadže here really refers to Russian peasants or farmers. I feel like its more famous meaning probably isn't relevant here except inasmuch as such people would not be Roma. I just went with "farmers".
