I: Don’t Make a Mess
1 Translated literally, the words mean, “Cleanliness is a virtue/Please don’t leave any spots.” But in German, the words at the ends of the two lines rhyme—Zier and mir. So the quip is actually more playful than an exact translation suggests, more like “Behold my album’s cleanliness,/and when you write don’t make a mess.” Translating rhyming poetry is often a matter of interpretation like this. To capture the overall sense or feeling of the poem, the translator must sometimes go beyond a simple word-by-word translation. This is the approach taken in this book.
2 Jutta is pronounced YU-tah.
IV: Thinking of God
1 Trayfe refers to forbidden, or nonkosher, foods, including ham and other pork products.
VI: Near and Far
1 This poem is by the German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who lived from 1749 to 1832.
XVI: To Poland
1 Pabianice is pronounced pub-YAH-nitz or pub-yah-NITZ-a.
2 Eliza Orzeszkowa was a famous Polish writer who lived from 1842 to 1910.
XIX: Help!
1 This quotation is from the writings of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
XXIV: Paris
1 Guy is pronounced Gee, with a hard g, as in the word game.
XXV: Like a Bird
1 Grynszpan is pronounced GREEN-span.
Acknowledgments
1 This is a poem that children often wrote on the final page of a poesiealbum. The joke was, as there were no more pages to write on, no one could possibly write “behind” this last poem—and therefore, no one could love the poesiealbum’s owner more than the writer. In this case, the writer was Jutta’s sister, Ruth.
2 And this is another clever poesiealbum feature—sometimes girls didn’t write the date, but instead wrote this little verse that played off the rhyme with the word for the forget-me-not flower.