Rebecca Weingart, 2022 Virtual Travel Fellow (Yiddish)

Rebecca Weingart’s path to literary translation was circuitous, beginning in high school with her love of Greek literature in translation and her observation that editions of The Iliad were vastly different based on the translator. This fascination with the complexity and possibilities of translation led to studying Greek in college out of the desire to read the original words herself.

After graduating with a BA in Latin and Greek, Rebecca became a high school English teacher, reading the same books in translation with her students that she loved at their age. As a teacher, she introduced her students to literary translation through Poetry Inside Out, a curriculum developed by the Center for the Art of Translation, and encouraged artistic expression as a school coordinator of Poetry Out Loud and a staff advisor for the student literary magazine. While teaching, she earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Missouri–St. Louis.

While working towards her MFA in poetry, Rebecca sought opportunities to practice literary translation, translating poems by the Roman poet Sulpicia and eventually taking a Spanish translation course at a neighboring university, translating poems by Pablo Neruda, Jorge Luis Borges, and Norah Lange. When she began studying and translating from Yiddish, she decided to seek an audience for her translations and applied for the Yiddish Book Center Fellowship, which she received in 2021 to support her translation of poetry by Roshelle Weprinsky.

As an emerging translator, Rebecca is excited to learn and grow in this supportive community of translators and is equally passionate about translating poets whose writing has not been widely available in English. She is particularly interested in translating Yiddish women poets, beginning with the poetry of Roshelle Weprinsky. Rebecca was drawn to Weprinsky’s use of unexpected imagery to describe the speaker’s solitude and intimate relationship with the natural world.

Yiddish was spoken by Rebecca’s maternal great-grandparents, who immigrated to the United States from Poland and Ukraine in the early 1900s. By her generation, Yiddish only remained in the form of a handful of phrases spoken by her mother. When she discovered and enrolled in YIVO’s Yiddish Summer Program in 2020, she felt a deep connection with the language and was compelled to play a small role in rebuilding this lost part of her culture through translation.

Rebecca will continue translating poetry as a PhD student in Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis, while engaging in her favorite pastimes of running at dusk and translating Emily Dickinson’s poems into Yiddish. She is honored to be a 2022 ALTA Virtual Travel Fellow and is looking forward to sharing her work with the ALTA community.