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Translation Functions in Yiddish Folk Paraphrases of Psalm 118: Aims and methodology

Paper · 2026 · Michael Lukin

Summary

Lukin studies a genre of Eastern Ashkenazi religious folk songs that he calls "multiplication-paraphrases." In these songs a canonical Hebrew verse is sung and then rendered in turn into Yiddish, and sometimes into a local Slavic vernacular, usually to the same tune. Earlier scholarship looked mainly at the language mixing and largely ignored the music and its meaning. To fill that gap, the author takes the paraphrases of Psalm 118 as a case study. He reconstructs them from documented texts, melodies and the occasions on which they were sung, and compares them with three other traditions: macaronic folk songs, late-medieval bilingual Hebrew-Yiddish literary songs, and Christian bilingual cantiones.

His central claim is that the translation in these songs is not there to explain the Hebrew to people who cannot follow it. It works as an added expressive layer, mainly serving Jakobson's poetic and metalingual functions, with a mystical dimension as well. This matters because it shows that translation inside a text can be an aesthetic device rather than a practical one, and it identifies a distinct folk repertoire with its own typology.

Key points

  • The core sources are two early anthologies of Yiddish folk songs: Ginzburg & Marek (St. Petersburg, 1901) and Prilutsky (Warsaw, 1911).
  • The term "multiplication" goes back to Yoysef Goldberg and was later used by Idelsohn, Beregovski and Verschik.
    • Verschik separates multiplication songs from macaronic ones by how evenly the languages are represented: roughly equal in multiplication songs, uneven in macaronic ones.
    • Beregovski points to the same melody being repeated in each language.
  • Paraphrases of Psalm 118 are attested from Lithuania to Romania. Appendix B lists ten versions and three parodies.
    • The worked example is "Ley omus" (Levin 1974, Nevel), which covers verses 17–20 in Hebrew, Yiddish and Russian with a "dunay" refrain.
  • The songs were performed at transitional rites: the close of the seder, moytsey-shabes, yortsayt, and probably simkhes-toyre.
  • The late-medieval bilingual literary songs differ from the folk genre in several ways:
    • they circulated mainly in writing;
    • they were laid out as parallel texts for two audiences (those who knew Hebrew and those who did not);
    • they were tied to a named author and set to fixed popular tunes.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Classify a translation by the function it serves, using Jakobson's scheme, rather than by how faithful it is: a rendering may exist to invite reflection, not to carry new content.
  • I2. Use a simple measurable criterion, whether the languages in a text are equally or unequally represented, to tell two otherwise similar genres apart.
  • I3. Establish a genre through "family resemblances," comparing many divergent versions, their melodies and their performance contexts, instead of relying on a single canonical text.
  • I4. A serial structure in which each source unit is followed by its renderings yields naturally aligned triples that say the same thing in different words.
  • I5. Parodies of a song are a sign that the original had already settled into a stable form, and they make contrastive near-copies of it.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (frames): tag restated or translated spans as poetic or metalingual acts, so the pragmatics layer does not read them as new assertions or as separate events.
  • I2 (tokens): per-span language identification plus a code-balance ratio could flag mixed-language input and route it to the right handling before tagging.
  • I3 (learn): treat textual variants of the same story as extra witnesses, and keep a parse only where the variants agree, much like the silver-data agreement scheme.
  • I4 (back): such aligned restatements are a good test that the text → graph → text compressor maps different wordings to one meaning graph.
  • I5 (learn): parodic or altered near-copies could serve as negative controls, checking that the system notices when a familiar frame has been deliberately bent.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 worksLiterature and Literary Theory · 519 worksMusic · 6 works

🧭 Topics 2Research subjects and languages the work is about.Semitic languages · 2,908 worksHebrew & Aramaic · 496 works

Cite

Cite as Michael Lukin. 2026. Translation Functions in Yiddish Folk Paraphrases of Psalm 118: Aims and methodology. Yod 25.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.4000/15npm

@inproceedings{lukin2026translation,
  title = {{Translation Functions in Yiddish Folk Paraphrases of Psalm 118: Aims and methodology}},
  author = {Michael Lukin},
  booktitle = {Yod 25},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.4000/15npm},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.4000/15npm}
}

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  73. Wasilievsky Sholem (singer), 1948, “Ov a foter to otets [audio-recording]” in NLI, Israel, ZP_00024_008(17), recorded by Ruth Rubin. A BSTRACT This study explores a distinctive genre of Eastern Ashkenazi folk songs, termed “multiplication-paraphrases,” in which canonical Hebrew verses are rendered sequentially into Yiddish and sometimes into non-Jewish vernaculars. Although the oral tradition in Eastern Europe was largely lost with the demise of the Translation Functions in Yiddish Folk Paraphrases of Psalm 118: Aims and Methodolog y Michael Lukin find

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