ing through syntactic and lexical choices its other language origins? Is fidelity (which seems to mean literalness) to the original text paramount, or should the translator enjoy freedom to depart from the original in the interest of producing the “best” translation? Is the poem-in-translation meant to re-enact the original poem in the foreign language, or is the poem-in-translation in fact an independent artistic entity?
The debates are important and fruitful, and the temptation to adopt one position over another is great; and yet, the most successful poetry translations very well may emanate from resistance to singular and categorical positions. Thus, I offer the following as an articulation of how I see the verse translator’s responsibilities and aspirations: the translator of poetry must strive toward loyalty to the original and must also exercise a significant degree of creative freedom in order to convey in translation the poem as a whole in the best fashion. The translator of poetry must immerse herself fully in the lexical, linguistic, cultural and musical world of each poem she’s translating, and must also, at a certain point, separate herself from that world in order to hear the translated text in its own literary and sound contexts. The translated poem is beholden to and an extension of the original poetic text, just as the translated poem must also stand on its own as a successful poetic entity. Of course these objectives seem, and in many ways are, oppositional to each other; indeed, the translator’s craft and art is a confluence of paradoxes. The challenge to the translator is to negotiate these paradoxes without attempting to resolve them, for it is the very paradoxes of translating poetry that are the source not only of translation problems, and even failures, but also of generative possibilities in literary representation and cultural bridgings.
Locating my translation praxis and poetics within this arena of paradox, as the translator of Tuvia Ruebner’s poems into English I am responsible for conveying 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 tra