Translator’s Note

I discovered Karpilove’s Diary of a Lonely Girl, or The Battle against Free Love several years ago while researching a footnote on “free love” for my dissertation at Columbia University. I typed “fraye libe” (free love) into the search box on the website of the Yiddish Book Center, found a novel I had never heard of before, and started reading. I was instantly drawn in by the intimacy and immediacy of the text, and as I laughed out loud at the sharp and sassy dialogue I knew that this was a translation project I had to take on. This translation emerges at a moment in political and social discourse in which women’s stories of disempowerment are coming to light and women are mobilizing around them with new vigor. I have been energized by the startling relevance of Karpilove’s text to our own day. I hope readers struggling with experiences of men abusing their social power for sexual gain may find comfort in Karpilove’s narrator’s self-assurance and humor. As I have gotten to know her through the translation process, I have found her to be a plucky friend, and I sometimes hear her sarcastic voice in my ear as I go about my life as a woman in a world still dominated by men.

In my translation I have tried to do justice to the way that the narrator’s economy of words empowers her with men who are annoyingly verbose, and who use “mansplaining” profuseness as a means of asserting their own dominance. I have tried to convey the narrator’s fears for her personal safety and her reputation even as she makes light of the situations in which she finds herself, and I have tried to stay true to her own ambivalent relationship with her lovers, whom she enjoys, fears, and loves to hate.

The most difficult word for me to translate in the entire text has been the titular term meydl, and I want to draw attention here to the problem of translating meydl and how this issue sheds light on the ways that societal attitudes toward women are embedded in the basic terms that we use. It was a hard choice for me to decide to title this translation “Diary of a Lonely Girl.” I wanted to stay close to the original, but I wasn’t sure if “girl” means the same thing to English readers today as meydl meant to Karpilove: Will we read the diarist as younger than Karpilove’s readers would, simply because I call her a girl? Referring to a grown independent woman as a girl can imply intimacy but can also diminish her status and power. I was tempted to give the narrator the dignity of the more mature-sounding “woman,” but I also wanted to indicate that the novel was about a single woman dating, and in the 1910s as well as today “girl” can often be used as shorthand for “single woman.” Moreover, I wanted to convey the way that, because of her status as an unmarried woman, the narrator is devalued even in the basic details of the language that she and others use to describe her. There are also moments in the novel in which the narrator’s suitor, Charles Cheek (C.), explicitly refers to the narrator as a “girl” not simply in light of her marital status but for a more pointed, and accusatory, indication of her virginity; in order to make these moments work I felt that I needed to use a consistent term to encapsulate both marital status and sexual experience. So, with a sigh, I settled on “girl” in most cases, and, despite this choice, I hope the narrator will accept my apologies and profession of respect.

Another difficulty in this translation was that the narrator’s suitors, B. and C., insist on addressing the narrator with the informal, intimate second-person pronoun du in place of the more formal ir. At several points in the novel the narrator corrects them and they ignore her. In order to convey this nonconsensual linguistic intimacy that does not readily map onto English grammar, I have opted to insert endearments such as “darling” into the text and to have the narrator comment upon them.

I have attempted to highlight the multiple languages present in the text, and the social status attributed to various languages. Where possible, I have tried to retain some of the linguistic diversity of the original. One example of this is when the intellectual landlords display their self-importance and snobbery by using Russian terminology. Likewise, the narrator’s female acquaintance Katya uses Russian in her speech in order to signal her leftist political and cultural affiliations. In both cases I left some of the Russian in place, sometimes with English translations embedded in the translated text, though translations into Yiddish were missing from the original. Other characters—such as the landlords’ children and occasionally C.—employ English as a status symbol, showing off, sometimes comically, how modern and Americanized they are. German also enters this text in the figure of the German landlady; Karpilove demonstrates the cultural distance between her narrator and the landlady through the narrator’s use of German in describing the landlady and through the landlady’s use of the language, and at times there is an element of disdain in the way the narrator represents the German woman’s speech. German also enters the narrative with Mr. Eshkin, who courts the narrator with a stilted foreignness and formality born of his German education. I have tried to use awkward sentence structures as well as scattered German words to maintain the multilingual sensibility of this courtship. Lastly, it is not always clear in the original when the narrator and her lovers are meant to be speaking in Yiddish or in English. C. offers to instruct the narrator in English, suggesting that most conversations are imagined to take place in Yiddish, but not all. It was not easy to decide when to leave in signals of this multilayered linguistic complexity and when these would be disruptive or excessive for English readers of the text who are not steeped in the social status the narrator would have attributed to these languages. My aim was to create the feeling of multiple languages existing in the same space without overwhelming today’s reader in English. Because I wanted to retain this multilingual sensibility, I have left several words untranslated and included a glossary at the back of this volume to aid in reading non-English terms and interjections.

Aside from these artistic and linguistic choices, I have made one very significant intervention in my translation. Karpilove’s novel appeared in segments of differing length and frequency during its serialization. The early segments were longer, less frequent, and titled. The later segments appeared more frequently and were shorter, without titles. In its book form, the novel appeared exactly as it did in the pages of the newspaper, including these inconsistencies. The first third of the book is separated into chapters with chapter titles, and the rest of the book has no chapter breaks or chapter titles. In my translation I have separated the novel into chapters and added titles of my own that I felt were consistent with the tone of the titles in the earlier portion of the novel.

Many quotations from other texts appear in this novel. Where possible, I have found these quotations in English translations and replicated the famous quotations as they appear elsewhere, so that they might be searchable or familiar to English-language readers. At one point, the narrator lists quotations she found in a text by Lillian Kisliuk. Lillian Kisliuk (Dinowitzer) was a Washington, DC–based anarchist and schoolteacher. Karpilove’s narrator excerpts an article, perhaps translated into Yiddish by Kisliuk, that was originally written by Austrian freethinker, author, painter, musician and feminist Rosa Mayreder.¹ I have reproduced the quotations in the novel as they appear in an English translation of Mayreder’s article. Karpilove’s reuse of this material with incomplete citations illustrates the way ideas, political rhetoric, and even entire pieces of writing moved between languages and publishing venues to reach new audiences.

At the end of this translation I have also appended my translation of a short story, “The Agitator,” which Karpilove published in the literary journal Di tsukunft in 1915. The story served as a model for the suitor Charles Cheek (or C.) in Karpilove’s Diary, and Karpilove slyly references this earlier story several times during the novel. When C. first encounters the narrator, he asks if her name is Alta, in reference to the protagonist of “The Agitator,” and later when she laughs at him for falling down a flight of stairs he huffily recounts the episode with Alta.

1. The original piece can be found in English translation here: Rosa Obermayer Mayreder, “Outlines,” in A Survey of the Woman Problem, trans. Herman Scheffauer (New York: George H. Doran, 1913), 1–36.