by Larry Rosenwald
I'm a member of a translation collective called di khalyastre ("the gang"), run by the distinguished Israeli Yiddishist Efrat Gal-Ed, who writes in German. We meet nearly once a week, on Zoom, and work together on translating Yiddish stories and poems into German. The experience of doing collective translation is itself fascinating, a challenge to my usual ways of thinking about translation as a solo activity, and I've written an article about that; what's at issue here, though, is something I learned about in our conversations that was new to me.
That something is a name for God, a Yiddish name: kavyokhl, "as if it could be." Sometimes it's added to the word got ("God"), got kavyokhl, "God - as if it could be -" and sometimes it stands alone, as in the poem by Yisroel Shtern in which I came across the term: - "As-If-It-Could-Be walks through hospital rooms."
I gather that this name, though new to me, was familiar to many in the Yiddishist community; so also for its Hebrew equivalent k'viyakhol; Havurah alum Michael Fishbane has written some seventy-five pages about that Hebrew equivalent, in an appendix to his 2003 Biblical Myth and Rabbinic Mythmaking.
As noted, though, it was new to me. Here are the lines from Shtern's poem:
iz a vunder, az di kranke zenen greyt zu vern heylik |
un vartn op di mes-lesn mit simkhe vi men scheydt op mayser … – |
iz a vunder – ven kavyokhl shpatsirt in roym fun di shpiteler, |
vi s’hot zayn gayst a mol geshvebt afn flakh fun ershhtn vaser!
Is it a wonder, if the sick are ready to become holy
and wait day and night with joy as one pays the tithe -
is it a wonder - if As-If walks through hospital rooms,
the way his [sic] spirit once hovered over the surface of the first water!
(My translation, though based on the German translation the khalyastre was making that day.)
I love this name. Many of our God-names, the ones collected on pages 69-70 of our siddur Birkat Shalom, name particular aspects of attributes of God - the creator, the Creator, the Source of Life, the shechinah. Some challenge the idea of naming at all: "I will be-there as the one I shall be-there as," Hashem, the ein sof ("there is no end"). But none, at least for me, is quite as playful and as challenging as kavyokhl, challenging in grammar as in reference, playful as if in a conversation full of shared jokes - "God - so to speak . . . " Or even: "So-to-Speak created the heavens and the earth." Kavyokhl is for me an extension of experience and an unpretentious challenge to belief.
In our first discussion of how to translate Shtern's poem, the one in which I first encountered the name, we ended up rendering it only with the German word Gott, "God." I was too timid to object, and my German, though good, isn't always good enough to dissent from a majority. But I thought about the word the whole week following, and in our second discussion I proposed that we render the meaning of the name as best we could. We ended up with Als ob, "as if," which is the way I've rendered the name in the English translation above.
As-If.
That something is a name for God, a Yiddish name: kavyokhl, "as if it could be." Sometimes it's added to the word got ("God"), got kavyokhl, "God - as if it could be -" and sometimes it stands alone, as in the poem by Yisroel Shtern in which I came across the term: - "As-If-It-Could-Be walks through hospital rooms."
I gather that this name, though new to me, was familiar to many in the Yiddishist community; so also for its Hebrew equivalent k'viyakhol; Havurah alum Michael Fishbane has written some seventy-five pages about that Hebrew equivalent, in an appendix to his 2003 Biblical Myth and Rabbinic Mythmaking.
As noted, though, it was new to me. Here are the lines from Shtern's poem:
iz a vunder, az di kranke zenen greyt zu vern heylik |
un vartn op di mes-lesn mit simkhe vi men scheydt op mayser … – |
iz a vunder – ven kavyokhl shpatsirt in roym fun di shpiteler, |
vi s’hot zayn gayst a mol geshvebt afn flakh fun ershhtn vaser!
Is it a wonder, if the sick are ready to become holy
and wait day and night with joy as one pays the tithe -
is it a wonder - if As-If walks through hospital rooms,
the way his [sic] spirit once hovered over the surface of the first water!
(My translation, though based on the German translation the khalyastre was making that day.)
I love this name. Many of our God-names, the ones collected on pages 69-70 of our siddur Birkat Shalom, name particular aspects of attributes of God - the creator, the Creator, the Source of Life, the shechinah. Some challenge the idea of naming at all: "I will be-there as the one I shall be-there as," Hashem, the ein sof ("there is no end"). But none, at least for me, is quite as playful and as challenging as kavyokhl, challenging in grammar as in reference, playful as if in a conversation full of shared jokes - "God - so to speak . . . " Or even: "So-to-Speak created the heavens and the earth." Kavyokhl is for me an extension of experience and an unpretentious challenge to belief.
In our first discussion of how to translate Shtern's poem, the one in which I first encountered the name, we ended up rendering it only with the German word Gott, "God." I was too timid to object, and my German, though good, isn't always good enough to dissent from a majority. But I thought about the word the whole week following, and in our second discussion I proposed that we render the meaning of the name as best we could. We ended up with Als ob, "as if," which is the way I've rendered the name in the English translation above.
As-If.
Larry Rosenwald is a long-time member of Havurat Shalom.
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