fragmentation, eschewing in content and form notions of poetic (and political) completion, perfection or redemption. The seeming redemption offered in poetic music — the untranslatable sound of a poem that carries and conveys so much of the poem’s meaning and essence — is fleeting and changing, and the ancient homeland-contours of Hebrew in no way counters the enduring exilic resonances of Ruebner’s work. Indeed, Ruebner’s early and youthful resistance to translation ebbs, and he agrees to having his poetry translated; his poetry eventually finds an avid reading public in other languages beyond the borders of Hebrew, most pronouncedly in the German-speaking world. In addition, the poet himself becomes a renowned translator (from Hebrew to German, and German to Hebrew), best-known for his translations of the work of S.Y. Agnon.
I offer this passage describing Ruebner’s early resistance to poetry-in-translation, and the changes that resistance undergoes, as a portal into my own evolving understanding of the translator’s work. Doubtlessly, translation of poetry is a daunting task, deemed by many as destined to fail, seemingly impossible from the outset. Unlike prose that often has plot, character and other elements to rest on, the primary world of the poem is its language — the sounds and shapes of that language, the manner in which individual words and entire phrases rest upon or push against each other. Extracted from the original language and transplanted elsewhere, what can the poem still say? How can the poem still evoke the affects it means to evoke? What, finally, should the translator’s objectives be? Theoreticians of verse translation often find themselves engaged in debates regarding these questions (and others) based on dichotomous positions: is the translator’s goal to familiarize and domesticate the poem-in-translation — that is, make the poem “at home” in the translation, as though it were originally written in that language — or is the translator’s goal to “foreignize” the poem-in-translation, announcing 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 con