veying as accurately as possible the intention of his poems and the experience of reading them from the Hebrew into the English language texts. Accurately, however, does not mean equivalently, and reading the translations for one-to-one equivalencies with the Hebrew (a great temptation in a bilingual edition) undermines the essence and purpose of the translated poem — which is, finally, to stand in its own right (though ever acknowledging its place of origin, the Hebrew original). As Ruebner’s translator, I must attend religiously to the formal, lexical and syntactic choices he makes (from poem length, length of individual lines, stanzaic structure, to gendered discourses and addresses, inverted syntax, etc), and strive to be faithful to these elements in my translation choices. However, the issue of “faithfulness” to the origin is significantly complicated by the fact that the practical “kinship” between English and Hebrew is a distant one indeed, and the transfer from a highly inflected, gendered and syntactically more flexible language like Hebrew to a weakly inflected, ungendered and syntactically rigid language like English results in countless instances where deviations from the original are not only unavoidable but are in fact essential. As Ruebner’s translator, I must listen closely for the many allusions, primarily biblical and liturgical, that are often the “warp and woof” of his poems. However, once the allusion is uncovered, the question of how to convey it — through direct insertion into the text, through notes, or not at all — remains to be answered and carries with it numerous considerations. As Ruebner’s translator, I must follow the sound patterns of the Hebrew original and register their effect, then work to create in the English translation “a new music,” a music that is true in the English even as it evokes, in Walter Benjamin’s phrase, “the echo of the original” — though that “echo of the original” also marks what is, inevitably, lost.
But that which is lost is hardly the last word on the translation project (contrary to oft-quoted axioms on the matter). For whatever is lost in the transfer, other attributes and elements are gained. Indeed, the art and act of translating poetry is, finally, an art and act of transformation; as Benjamin states, there is “a renewal of something living — the original undergoes a change.” Through that renewal, the original gains a new life it might not have had otherwise — a presence in the world that is, as the epigraph to this piece suggests, “ … the same — different — the same attributes, / different yet the same as before” (H.D.). The language into which the poem is translated is, ideally, also transformed through its wrestling with the foreignness of the original language. In the best cases, the language-wrestling leaves an origin-telling mark on the target language — reminiscent, perhaps, of the mark left on Jacob’s thigh after his own night of wrestling with an unnamed, intimate, other.
As previously stated, Ruebner’s early resistance to having his poems translated dissolved and he eventually became an important translator in his own right. One of his most significant translation projects was the translation into German of the work of Nobel Prize winner S.Y. Agnon, work that played a part in Agnon achieving the world-wide recognition he did. “Gershom Scholem wrote,” states Ruebner in his memoir, “ … that it was my translation [of Agnon] that was before the eyes of the judges on the Nobel Prize committee. I am proud of that” (96). But a different effect of his translations seems to be of even greater importance to Ruebner and articulates most elegantly the power of the literary translation. After journeying to Agnon’s home in the Talpiot neighborhood of Jerusalem, precious pages of his translation in hand (a journey that involved Ruebner getting drawn into an antiquarian bookstore beside his bus stop in Jerusalem’s city center, getting distracted by forty five volumes of Goethe in translation, then missing his bus and arriving in Talpiot late — to find Agnon himsel