Dr Seuss in Yiddish — vey iz mir!

Yiddish House press has translated several classic kids’ books into Yiddish, a curious and wonderfully expressive language spoken mostly by Jews of Eastern European descent. I just picked up their Eyn Fish Tsvey Fish Royter Fish Bloyer Fish, a translation of Dr Seuss’s classic One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish by Sholem Berger.

Dr Seuss works improbably well in Yiddish. Yiddish’s strength is its onomatopoeic expressiveness; and it contains a lot of Germanic words that are cognates for their English equivalents (such as “bloyer,” which means “blue;” and “fish,” which means “fish!”), but they’re pitch-bent enough to make them sound a little off-kilter, which makes them perfect for a Seussian rhyme.

Berger’s translation is funny and tight, his rhymes are as sweet as Seuss’s originals. The text is written in both Hebrew script and Latin-alphabet transliterations (which is good, since I read Hebrew at the rate of about three words per hour).

I grew up speaking Yiddish, having learned it at the Workman’s Circle center in Toronto in after-school classes. It was my father’s first language, and the language spoken by my grandparents and their friends. I love its eye-rolling irony and humor, and can’t think of a better text to appear in Yiddish translation. You don’t have to speak Yiddish to enjoy the sheer poetry of Seuss rendered in it, either. I read bits out to my wife (who speaks some Welsh, but no Yiddish), and she concurred.

Eyn Fish Tsvey Fish Royter Fish Bloyer Fish