 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 offered below are the result of my extended engagement with his poetic oeuvre.
[From the Introduction, with the permission of the Hebrew Union College Press and the University of Pittsburgh Press]
Early in his memoir, A Short Long Life, Tuvia Ruebner describes his move from writing poetry in German, his mother-tongue, to Hebrew, the language of his adopted homeland. At the relatively late age of twenty-nine, in a Hebrew he learned from “the new Hebrew poetry, the Bible and Agnon,” Ruebner “ … started trying to write in Hebrew” (the qualifying “trying” in his description emblematic of his characteristic modesty). The passage continues, but instead of elaborating on the struggles or joys of composing poetry in this new/ancient language, Ruebner unexpectedly shifts his attention to the issue of translation:
Once I started [writing in Hebrew], I was addicted and I didn’t want my poems translated into any other language. As a devoted student of Ludwig Strauss, I knew that sound plays a central role in the meaning of a poem, and aside from rare instances, we are unable to transfer sound from one language to another. (69)
Thus, from the very start of his Hebrew writing career, which is the start of his poetic career, Ruebner is preoccupied by issues of translation, a preoccupation that undoubtedly emanates not only from the multilingual nature of his upbringing, but also from the violent translocations and dislocations he experienced in his young life. It seems as though the ancient and melodious Hebrew rhythms offered Ruebner a refuge of beauty and fashioned-wholeness in a ruptured world, and the early refusal to have his Hebrew poems translated into other languages speaks to a refusal to undergo additional loss — the inevitable loss that accompanies any transfer from language to language, as from land to land.
However, this resistance belies the fact that Ruebner’s poetry and poetic sensibility occupied from the very beginning a place of being “always already in translation,” a place of in-betweenness, doubleness and 