f waiting for him in the hot sun), Ruebner shares his translation of Shevuat Emunim (The Oath) with Agnon and remembers the moment thus:
After I read for [Agnon] my translation, tears filled his eyes and he called out: “Estherlein, Estherlein, come and hear how beautiful!” I say the following not out of false modesty … but I know for certain that Agnon was referring to the story itself, which he had not engaged with in a while, and not to the translation. The fact that the translation revived for him the original is praise enough for me. (96)
Hence, Benjamin’s aforementioned “renewal of something living” resonates and is expanded in Ruebner’s vivid description of translation as a “reviving,” a restoring of life to that which is already alive. This “revival” of the living text — for the author, the reader and the translator all — is as apt a way as any to describe the translator’s paradoxical work.
Images are translated by time and by circumstances; across years, resemblances make the connections we seek. Thus, I conclude this brief consideration of the translator’s work with an anecdote mirroring the image offered above. In spring 2013, the journal Modern Poetry in Translation published six of Ruebner’s poems in my renderings. On the Shavuot holiday — the Festival of First Fruits — I travelled to Kibbutz Merchavia to visit with Tuvia and his wife Galila, and to give him a copy of the journal. I left the journal with him; the next day, I received the following email:
Rachel my dear,
Something very nice happened to me this morning. I was reading through the journal you left here yesterday, from right to left as is my fashion, when my eyes fell on a poem that ended with the words “A human being can bear almost everything / and no one knows when and where / happiness will overcome him.” I thought to myself, now that’s a very good poem, I wish I had written it; then I saw my name on the poem and realized, with pleasure, I did write it … ~ Tuvia
The art and act of poetry translation precipitates the unexpected across language borders; the translator of poetry is the privileged practitioner of the multiple, the unexpected, the paradoxical, and the ceaselessly coming into being.
- Ludwig Strauss (1892‒1953), German/Israeli scholar and writer, was a mentor and close friend of Ruebner’s. ↩
- I borrow the wonderfully evocative term of “always already in translation” from Phillip E. Lewis, in “The Measure of Translation Effects,” as quoted by José María Rodríguez-García in “Introduction: Literary into Cultural Translation,” Diacritics, Volume 34, Number 3/4 (Fall-Winter 2004) 27. ↩
- To date, eight collections of Ruebner’s poetry in German have been published. In his memoir, Ruebner epigraphically expresses some of his discomfort over Germany being the country that has embraced his work most avidly through the imagined response of his deceased friend and colleague Swiss playwright Friedrich Durrenmatt (1921‒1990) to this popularity: “‘Grotesque,’ Durrenmatt would say, and he would be right” (69). ↩
- Offering an elegant and powerful argument for the importance of engaging not only in translation work but also in thinking about translation work, Esther Allen and Susan Bernofsky write the following: “Thinking about translation means thinking about the gaps in our literature and our ability to communicate…. It also means thinking about the gaps in our political and cultural discourses, asking ourselves what and who has been left out.” “Introduction: A Culture of Translation,” in In Translation: Translators on Their Work and What It Means, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013) xviii. ↩
- I am alluding here to Walter Benjamin’s striking notion of “the kinship of languages,” the notion that “… languages are not strangers to one another but are, a priori and apart from all historical relationships, interrelated in what they want to express.” From “The Task of the Translator,” 1923; translated by Harry Zohn, 1968. In Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations, edited and with an introduction by Hannah Arendt (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World,