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 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, announc