#maybe I'm not searching right but WHERE is my fungal-piece-of-shit/me-holding-a-gun lovers to enemies fic???

[mashkaroom]

Ok, lmao, I was taken by @raven-harlot​‘s idea to translate popular tumblr posts into Yiddish, and of course my favorite ever tumblr post is “you cannot kill me in a way that matters”, so here is my translation and translator’s notes. I ask that you lmk if you see any errors/have any comments and I would love, love, love to see other people’s translations!

איך, האַלטנדיק אַ פּיסטויל צו אַ שוואָם: דערצייל מיר דער שם, דו פֿונגוס-טינוף 1

שוואָם: פֿילסטו 2 דער פֿאַרברענונג פֿון דייַן האַרץ? 3 פילסטו אין זיך דאָס געראַנגל? די מורא אין מיר איז  מחוץ אַלץ וואָס קען מאַכן דייַנע נשנה. דו קענסט מיך נישט באַטייַטיקלעך דערהרגענען.

איך, אָנשטעלנדיק דאָס צינגל, מייַן פּנים גיסנדיק מיט טרערן: איך האָב דיך נישט קיין מורא, צו אַל די שוואַרצע-יאָר! 4

אָ.פּ, וואָס מיינט עס, האָ?? 5

צעפֿוילונג עקסיסטירט ווי אַן איבערבלייַבנדיק געשטאַלט פֿון לעבן. 6

ס'איז אַ שוידערדיק ענטפער, אַ גוטן טאָג דיר.

1. I translated “you fungal piece of shit” as “du fungus-tinef”. The Comprehensive Yiddish-English Dictionary (CEYD), aka verterbukh.org, gives “tinef” as  “ filth, dirt; excrement; shoddy goods, junk; vulg. good-for-nothing, lowlife”. I also kept the “you” that the original uses for emphasis -- I’m not 100% sure that Yiddish regularly uses this same construction, though I suspect that it certainly exists in English-influenced dialects even if not in others.

2. I chose to have both the mushroom and the narrator be on informal you with each other. This can imply several things: one, they exist in a context where formality is not important to either of them. In a violent situation like this, people are unlikely to use formal you. However, the mushroom might have chosen to use formal you to indicate a sort of distance from the narrator and from this situation, implying potentially that the mushroom is much more important to the narrator than vice versa. Another option is that the mushroom and the narrator have an existing relationship at a sufficient degree of closeness as to have made the switch in the past from formal to informal you. I find this compelling. A third benefit to using informal you is that that’s the register you address G-d in. In using informal you, the possibility that either of them can be G-d is not precluded. If the mushroom is G-d, then this is a scene of a heretic making a last plea -- before he kills his G-d, he wants to know it. If the narrator is G-d, then this is a vulnerable G-d, perhaps an amnesiac one, making a plea to someone -- a believer, a being even more ancient and powerful? -- and the mushroom answers: can you feel your heart burning? (that is god) can you feel the struggle within? (that is god) the fear within me is beyond anything your soul can make. you cannot kill me in a way that matters (you are so powerful that you have created me, and now I, too, can create. even if you kill me, that spark of creation will remain. i am yours.) or maybe (and even that is not enough. you may be god, but I am something more. even a god, even death, cannot take away my essence). Perhaps they are both G-d. The burning heart, the struggle within, the fear more powerful -- they are all elements of G-d. Only together can they discover the true name of G-d. I also like the idea that they are dealing with each other, here, as individuals. A mushroom is only one visible part of a mycelial net, and if the mushroom has already surfaced it has likely spread its spores. The narrator addresses  the mushroom as though it were an individual, as though it were possible for it to be an individual, and the mushroom replies that there is no “me” -- of course you cannot kill a mushroom in a way that matters. You, on the other hand -- what lives on of you? What the narrator is so scared of in the next line is that even if the mushroom cannot die in a way that matters, he can.

3 I also considered ?פילסטו אַז דייַן האַרץ ברענט? & פילסטו ווי ברענט דייַן האַרץ? as options here. I chose the one I did because option 2 (filstu az dayn harts brent) seems to learn towards the question “are you aware that your heart is burning?” while option 3 (filstu vi brent dayn harts) leans towards “can you the particular way in which your heart is burning". I decided not to take a stance either way as to whether the mushroom is bringing the burning to the narrator's attention for the first time or pointing out a new shade to the burning and do the closest literal translation.

4. Something that English has which Yiddish lacks (at least that I don't know a good equivalent to) is the versatility of the word "fuck". The Comprehensive English-Yiddish Dictionary (CEYD) suggests appending 'tsu al di shvartse yor' to phrases where you'd use fucking/wtf/other fuck phrases, so that's what I did here.

5. Chose not to mess with the O.P. acronym esp as origineler poster is a perfectly acceptable translation. You may also remember that the original is "Hey, OP? What the FUCK does this mean?" I chose not to use 'tsu al di shvartse yor' here again because while in the previous sentence the "fucking" is intensifying "not scared", here the 'fuck' is rather intensifying the state of asking a question rather than any individual component, so I instead added the question intensifier "ha?" and an extra exclamation point to make up for lack of capitalization.

6. This line's a bit too literal and I'm not sure if it sounds like a gross calque. I couldn't find a direct equivalent for "extant", so I used "iberblaybndik", left over. The world "geshtalt" literally means form, image, etc. In Russian we also say "to close a geshtalt" to mean "get closure". Geshtalt in Russian has the sense of a whole unified picture rather than the sum of its parts. So I also like that in a more slavic context, the last line could be read as pointing to the idea that decay is what is left to complete the wholeness of life (and without it life is incomplete).