Your entry title utterly baffles google translate and so intrigues me.
It's the first line of the Chasidic nigun that opens and closes An-sky's The Dybbuk, which I first heard performed by the Klezmatics:
מפּני מה מפּני מה ירדה הנשׁמה מאיגרא רמא לבירא עמיקתּא הירידה צרך עליה היא
Transliterated Ashkenazically, the only way I've ever heard it:
Mipney ma, mipney ma yoredo haneshomo meigro romo leviro amikto hayerido tsoyrekh aliyo hi
Since I don't actually read Hebrew, I'm relying on Seth L. Wolitz's translation as published in The Worlds of S. An-sky: A Russian Jewish Intellectual at the Turn of the Century (2006), ed. Gabrielle Safran and Steven J. Zipperstein:
Why, why did the soul descend from the highest height to the deepest pit? The descent is on account of the ascent
I've also got it performed in Yiddish—which I do read—as it would have been in An-sky's play:
Makhmes vos, makhmes vos iz di neshome fun hekhster heykh arop in tifstn grunt? Dos faln trogt dos oyfkumen in zikh
The Klezmatics recording comes from their album Possessed (1997), the second half of which is the incidental music they composed/performed for Tony Kushner's adaptation A Dybbuk or Between Two Worlds. It was my introduction to their music and one of the most haunting songs I know. For a dybbuk post, it seemed appropriate.
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It's the first line of the Chasidic nigun that opens and closes An-sky's The Dybbuk, which I first heard performed by the Klezmatics:
מפּני מה מפּני מה ירדה הנשׁמה
מאיגרא רמא לבירא עמיקתּא
הירידה צרך עליה היא
Transliterated Ashkenazically, the only way I've ever heard it:
Mipney ma, mipney ma yoredo haneshomo
meigro romo leviro amikto
hayerido tsoyrekh aliyo hi
Since I don't actually read Hebrew, I'm relying on Seth L. Wolitz's translation as published in The Worlds of S. An-sky: A Russian Jewish Intellectual at the Turn of the Century (2006), ed. Gabrielle Safran and Steven J. Zipperstein:
Why, why did the soul descend
from the highest height to the deepest pit?
The descent is on account of the ascent
I've also got it performed in Yiddish—which I do read—as it would have been in An-sky's play:
Makhmes vos, makhmes vos iz di neshome
fun hekhster heykh arop in tifstn grunt?
Dos faln trogt dos oyfkumen in zikh
The Klezmatics recording comes from their album Possessed (1997), the second half of which is the incidental music they composed/performed for Tony Kushner's adaptation A Dybbuk or Between Two Worlds. It was my introduction to their music and one of the most haunting songs I know. For a dybbuk post, it seemed appropriate.