The machines in the shop roar so wildly that often I forget in
the roar that I am; I am lost in the terrible tumult, my ego
disappears, I am a machine. I work and work and work without
end. I am busy and busy and busy at all time. For what and for
when? I know not, I ask not! How should a machine ever come to
think?
There are no feelings, no thoughts, no reason; the bitter bloody
work kills the noblest, the most beautiful and best, the
richest, the deepest, the highest, which life possesses. The
seconds, minutes and hours fly; the nights like the days pass as
swiftly as sails; I drive the machine just as if I wished to
catch them; I chase without avail, I chase without end.
The clock in the workshop does not rest; it keeps on pointing
and ticking and waking in succession. A man once told me the
meaning of its pointing and waking—that there was a reason in
it; as if through a dream I remember it all; the clock awakens
life and sense in me, and something else—I forget what; ask me
not, I know not, I know not, I am a machine!
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.