User:Agrand~enwiki

Gilbert and Sullivan in Yiddish Yiddish is a vivid and expressive language—you don’t even have to understand it to feel it. Isaac Bashevis Singer called it a language of “quiet humor” and “frightened and hopeful humanity.” It’s given us undeniably great words like chutzpah, mentch, shlock and shtick. No wonder it’s been experiencing a revival. And one of the passionate players behind that revival is Al Grand.

Al Grand has been combining his passion for Yiddish with his lifelong love of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas for a while now. He produces Yiddish translations of the seminal comic operas. It’s a highly unusual combination—British comic operas from the Victorian Age in Yiddish? It’s hard to come up with two cultures any more different. Plus, William S. Gilbert’s fanciful lyrics employ double and triple rhyming and punning. How do you properly translate that into any language?

Somehow, Grand pulls it off. His Yiddish adaptation of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance (1879) has been praised by Yiddish enthusiasts and Gilbert and Sullivan afficionados alike. Even the late Isaac Asimov was a fan. Agrand 20:39, 2 September 2006 (UTC)Al Grand