MLA citation: poems in translation

[harpyemma]

I'm hoping you folks can help. I can't find this information in my style guide or... anywhere.

I'm writing a paper on Yiddish poetry in translation (Celia Dropkin and Anna Margolin, FYI) and i'm trying to figure out:

a) how to differentiate between translations in in-text citations, especially where for lots of my quotes it wouldn't matter which one i cite as the translations are, in those parts, the same;

how to list them in the works cited list.

Example: I'm quoting Anna Margolin's poem "My Ancestors Speak" and the primary translation i'm using is by Shirley Kumove. I want to compare one line of it to a translation by Adrienne Cooper. I was intially thinking i could mention with translator it is every time i cite, like: yada yada yada 'men in satin and velvet' (trans. Kumove line 2)... yada yada yada 'speak with God' (trans. Kumove 6) yada yada yada 'like idols' (trans. Cooper 16), but the trouble is that 1) that will eat my word count like woah and 2) lots of the bits i'm quoting have been translated exactly the same--so it's really a toss-up whose name i put. Anyone know what the rules actually are?

re. Obviously the poems will be listed under the poets' names--but after that i'm a little unsure what to do. I would suppose i'd then write it out like:

Margolin, Anna. "Poem A" trans. Whoever [source]; "Poem A" trans. Somebodyelse [source]; "Poem B" trans. Thirdguy [source]

and so on--but would i list the poems in order of appearance or in alphabetical order? Alphabetical is what i'm gut is saying, for obvious reasons, but that'd be a ballache to read... Help?

ARGH! I sooooo wish my Yiddish were good enough that i could skip the translations! This is torture.

[theadvancededit]

For your 'Works Cited' page, they should be in alphabetical order, as hard on the eyes as that would be.

Re: differentiating between citations... I couldn't find the answer for you either. What you explained seems to work the best but, if that messes up your word count, perhaps maybe omitting "trans." after the first mention of each change in citation would help.