We recently sat down for an interview with translator and poet, Mildred Faintley, about her new translation of the poetry collection, Styx, the Poetry of Else Lasker-Schüler.

Keshet: Tell us about Else Lasker-Schüler and how your translation of her poetry came to be.

I’m very interested in poetry by Jewish women. Amongst the greatest of these are four poets. There’s Else Lasker-Schüler from Germany before World War I. There’s Masha Kaléko, who’s from Weimar, Germany. Anna Margolin, who writes in Yiddish in New York City. And of course, Rahel Bluwstein, who writes in Hebrew from Israel. Of these four titans, Else Lasker-Schüler is the first one I was able to find a publisher for. But I’ve been working on all four of them.

Else is particularly interesting to me because the Berlin of her time was very much like Greenwich Village in the early 1960s. It was little more than a village. And it was the confluence of all kinds of countercultural currents. You had back to nature, vegetarianism, Eastern mysticism. It was a wide-open psychedelic kind of milieu and her poetry really reflects that. So as myself a child of the 1960s, it seemed particularly congenial.

She wrote at a very interesting point in literature. The 19th century was over, but modernism hadn’t really kicked in. So her poetry is clear and intelligible, even as its content becomes more daring and modern and is bursting the seams of the poetic form.

Keshet: How would you describe the through line of your work?

Since I began to transition a year and a half ago, I’ve become exclusively interested in writing by women. Perhaps it’s a sort of a psychological reaction formation. But I have found that I’m tired of hearing what men have to say. Women and women’s writing have been studiously ignored and sidelined. Everybody I’ve translated has been carefully excluded from major anthologies. So it’s not just a personal psychological quirk I think. It’s a reaction to something which is a real part of the literary sociology.

Keshet: How does transness connect to your translation work?

Well, here I think it gives me a certain advantage. Although some of the writings by these women I want to concern myself with have been translated, they have usually been translated by men who don’t really get the female sensibility at all. Or by women who are concerned to make it sound like real serious poetry and thus kind of give a masculine cast to the translation.

My relation to femininity is a precarious one. It’s sort of analogous to someone who is an immigrant to another country. And an immigrant will be able to see aspects of the national character which might not be easily visible to someone who is actually born there.

Since I’ve had to struggle to attain femininity — not only in terms of physical appearance, but in terms of cast of thought, values, and philosophy — I think I have more awareness in some ways of what constitutes a female poetic voice than others would. 

 Keshet: What else should our LGBTQ+ Jewish audience know?

I’m happy to see our understanding of gender has changed in the last 20 years. People are now able to be open to a lot more things, not only in the gender end of the spectrum, but also in the spiritual end of the spectrum. The very idea of there being a gay synagogue would have been considered a punchline in the 1980s, although now it’s become kind of a mainstream concept.

In the spirit of so much Jewish renewal, I would like to see it come about that poets and artists are truly celebrated. If I were composing a new siddur, I would mine the works of poets from Else Lasker-Schüler to Julia Vinograd. She’s a Berkeley street poet from the 1960s to 1980s who wrote a book called The Book of Jerusalem, which is, I think, probably one of the most important Jewish documents, certainly in English, of the 20th century.

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Mildred Faintly, transgender woman, poet and translator, holds a doctorate in Classics from Brown University, and taught Classics and History of Religions at Haifa University. She is a contributor to The Jewish Women’s Archive, and reviews books for 96thofoctober.com. Her most recent publication, from the Ben Yehuda Press, is a translation of Styx, the poetry of Else Lasker-Schüler, the only woman to play a central role in German Expressionism.