And at times, when I hear the clock, I understand quite differently its pointing, its language; it seems to me as if the unrest[7] egged me on so that I should work more, more, much more. In its sound I hear only the angry words of the boss; in the two hands I see his gloomy look. The clock, I shudder—it seems to me it drives me and calls me machine, and cries out to me “sew”! Only when the wild tumult subsides, and the master is away for the midday hour, day begins to dawn in my head, and a pain passes through my heart; I feel my wound, and bitter tears and boiling tears wet my meager meal, my bread; it chokes me, I can eat no more, I cannot! O, horrible toil! O, bitter necessity. The shop at the midday hour appears to me like a bloody battlefield where all are at rest; about me I see lying the dead, and the blood that has been spilled cries from the earth. A minute later—the tocsin is sounded, the dead arise, the battle is renewed. The corpses fight for strangers, for strangers, and they battle and fall and disappear into night. I look at the battlefield in bitter anger, in terror, with a feeling of revenge, with a hellish pain. The clock now I hear it aright. It is calling: “An end to slavery, an end shall it be”! It vivifies my reason, my feelings and shows how the hours fly; miserable I shall be as long as I am silent, lost, as long as I remain what I am. The man that sleeps in me begins to waken—the slave that wakens in me is put to sleep. Now the right hour has come, an end to misery, an end let it be! But suddenly—the whistle, the boss, an alarm! I lose my reason, forget where I am; there is a tumult, the battle. Oh, my ego is lost! I know not, I care not, I am a machine! The prose translation reproduces the thought alone; the Yiddish original reproduces also the loud insistent stitching of the machines, and the persistent nagging of the hateful clock. The machine beats out these lines: Ich arbeit, un’ arbeit, un’ arbeit ohn’ Cheschben. Es schafft sich, un schafft sich, un schafft sich ohn’ Zahl.[8] To what he feels to be the hopeless tragedy of the worker is added in Rosenfeld’s verse the hopeless tragedy of the Jew—the wanderer who has lost the power to laugh. In Sephira[9] as well as in other poems, he brings out the fact that the Jew has set his Passover and the period of mourning following it, in the happiest time of the year. This poem, which has been really adequately translated into verse by Alice Stone Blackwell, is one of his saddest and most beautiful: SEPHIRA