Everyone seems to be writing and talking about forgetting the past year, but I’ve been wondering about taking what we learned in the past 20 odd months that we can take into the new year and maybe use to improve our future years.  Me, I’m not even going to begin to talk about what I’ve missed, what I’ve lost, and what can be recovered.  But I can begin to plan how to use what I learned, and what my future will look like.  Okay, one of the first things I want to work with is what I learned by translating my Yiddish poems into English.  There’s something so stark, so bare, so real in these poems precisely because of my limited vocabulary, that even though I thought I was writing the translations as a favor to the publisher, I was getting to the bone, and even if I never write another Yiddish poem  (and I will) I am somewhere better.