anguage 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, 1968) 71‒82. ↩
- See Robert Alter’s discussion of the biblical and liturgical in modern Hebrew poetry and his argument that “…allusion is not an occasional or even frequent elective device but in many texts is the warp and woof of the poem.…” In Alter’s Hebrew and Modernity (Bloomington and Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1994) 10‒11. ↩
- I have borrowed the phrase “a new music” from Eliot Weinberger, who develops this notion beautifully in the following passage: “…the primary task of a translator is not merely to get the dictionary meanings right – which is the easiest part – but rather to invent a new music for the text in the translation language, one that is mandated by the original.” See Weinberger’s “Anonymous Sources: On Translators and Translation,” in In Translation: Translators on Their Work and What It Means, 24. Benjamin’s phrase “the echo of the original” is from “The Task of the Translator,” 77. ↩
- Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” 74. ↩
- Of course, the mark on Jacob’s thigh is only one sign of the ways the night wrestling changes him. At night’s end, he is given a new name and Jacob is transformed – translated – into Israel. See Genesis 32:23‒32. ↩