Rachel Tzvia Back discusses the art of translation after working with the poetry of Tuvia Ruebner
“the same – different – the same attributes,
different yet the same as before.”
~H.D., Tribute to Angels
The modern Hebrew word for “translation” — tirgum (root letters t-r-g-m) — can be traced back to Aramaic, with cognates in the ancient Semitic languages of Akkadian and Ugaritic. In its earliest incarnations, the word carried with it the meaning of “interpretation,” and the simpler notions of reading and speaking — lexical evidence, it seems, that in ancient cultures the one who could read, and then speak about what he had read, occupied by definition an interpreting role. The single biblical usage of the word in the Book of Ezra references a letter written and translated into Aramaic: “ … the writing of the letter was written in the Aramaic character, and set forth [meturgam] in the Aramaic tongue” (4:7). By the third century CE, the word had evolved into the term Targum, denoting Aramaic versions of the Hebrew Bible, versions that were hybrids of translation, interpretation, and paraphrase. In an age when Aramaic was ascendant as the common language of communication and Hebrew was less understood, the purpose of the various Targumim (plural of targum) was to facilitate for the community bridges to the sacred texts that defined them as a people.
In the Jewish world, the translator’s role was from the outset imbued with sacred value. The translator would ensure the survival of a text-based identity, even when the original language of that text was no longer understood. Thereafter, a tradition evolved whereby during the weekly Torah reading, the original Hebrew text would be chanted (filling the room with the musical components of the original language), each verse followed by the same verse in Aramaic translation/interpretation/paraphrase. In this fashion, the translator’s work was instrumental in identity-formation, in community-building, and in ensuring that the original texts were always accessible to more than the elite few.
With these ponderings on the origins of the Hebrew word for translation, I come to the poetry of Tuvia Ruebner — one of the last surviving Hebrew poets of the Holocaust. An “Elder of the Tribe” in Hebrew arts and letters, having published widely and received every major literary award in Israel and many in Europe too, Ruebner marked his 90th birthday in January 2014 (his ninth birthday falling on the exact date Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933 — a bitter coincidence Ruebner notes in the opening page of his memoir). Though his poetry orbits the many losses that came to define his life — from the killing of his entire family in the Holocaust, to his first wife’s death in a car accident and, finally, to his youngest son being lost without a trace in South America — Ruebner steadfastly refuses positioning himself or his nation as victims; similarly, he eschews narratives of ethnic exceptionalism, insisting instead on shared and common truths of the individual heart. Ruebner’s fifteen poetry collections offer the reader gems of compassion and beauty, necessary poems of deep humanity. And yet, no volume of his work in English has existed until now.
Thus, translation as an act and art of preserving the essential — that which tells us who we are as human beings in the world and the communities we might build, even across language divides — is the ethos which has led me to translating Ruebner’s poetry. As conflict, violence, and self-righteous posturing continue to define broad regions of our planet, I find in Ruebner’s poetry alternative responses to the broken realities we live in, responses that are honest, open-hearted, embracing of the other, and ever-attentive to moments of grace when they might come. Because this is poetry we need, I bring it into English; the fruit of my labor is the first-ever English collection, In the Illuminated Dark: Selected Poems of Tuvia Ruebner (Hebrew Union College Press and University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014). The reflections on translating Ruebner’s poetry 