ARCHIWUM EMIGRACJI Studia – Szkice – Dokumenty http://dx.doi.org/10.12775/AE.2020.013 Toruń, Rok 2020, Zeszyt / Volume 28 _________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ GRACCHUS’S BOAT: EMIGRATION, TRADITION, AND TRANSLINGUALISM IN THE WORK OF TUVIA RÜBNER Michal BEN-HORIN (Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan) ORCID: 0000-0002-0606-5767 Introduction Immigration radicalizes the question of language. The urge to adopt the language of the new land, at times under conditions of a state of emergency, threatens the ability to retain the language of the homeland. In the case of writers, for whom language serves as a major tool of expression, this urge becomes even more crucial. Emigration to Israel is not exceptional. From the Zionist aliyot at the end of the 19th century to the massive emigrations during the second half of the 20th century from North Africa, Russia and the Former Soviet Union, and up to the current emigration from France, Jewish writers who immigrated to Israel have had to confront the question of language. What choices are open to them, and how are they to convey the complexities inherent in the formation of an Israeli identity? Should they replace the diasporic languages with Hebrew? Should they continue expressing themselves in their mother tongue and publish their work in translation? Or should they perhaps use both languages in their writing, which opens the way for translingualism? One of these writers was Tuvia Rübner (1924–2019). Born as Kurt Tobias Rübner into a German-speaking Jewish family in Slovakia, he emigrated from Europe in 1941 at the age of 17. On arrival in Palestine, he kept his German family name (Rübner), but for his given name he preferred the Hebrew (Tuvia) to the German (Tobias). This entwining of German and Hebrew in the name becomes an integral part of Rübner’s poetics. He wrote his first poems in German. In 1957 he published his first poetry collection written in Hebrew. In the 1990s Rübner started to translate his own Hebrew 184 poems into German and published them with Rimbaud Verlag.1 His writing in German included his autobiography published in 2004 (which two years later he translated into Hebrew) and a series of fragments published in 2018 in the journal Zwischenwelt: Zeitschrift für Kultur des Exils und Widerstands.2 Similarly, Rübner translated the German works of Ludwig Strauss, Christoph Meckel and Werner Kraft into Hebrew, and the Hebrew works of Shmuel Yosef Agnon, the Israeli Nobel Prize laureate, into German. He also edited a series of Hebrew translations of German canonical writers, such as Friedrich Schiller, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Friedrich and Wilhelm Schlegel. Despite this massive engagement with German linguistic and aesthetic traditions, Rübner was known more as a Hebrew writer until his death in July 2019. Three years earlier in the introduction to his German translation of his Hebrew poems, Rübner asks: “Am I a Hebrew or a German poet?”3 What could have been a rhetorical question obtains a surprising answer, which I intend to examine in this article. Moreover, in a recent conference held at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem on Rübner’s work, some scholars claimed that one can hardly speak of translation in Rübner’s case.4 In their view, Rübner does not translate his Hebrew poems into German, but writes two different poems — one in Hebrew, the other in German. It seems to me, however, that by separating the Hebrew from the German, one ignores a crucial aspect of Rübner’s poetics. Instead of separating one from the other I would like to explore their meeting points, intersections and mutual relationships. Jan Hokenson and Marcella Munson defined the bilingual text as a self-translation authored by a writer who can compose in different languages and who translates his or her texts from one language into another: “Bilingual self-translators produce two texts, often publish them under the same title, and usually consider them to be comparable versions.”5 In referring to how both translation and literary theorists deal unsatisfactorily with this phenomenon they claim: “To date most critics ably describe the dissimilarities between the two versions of a bilingual text, and they end up with an accurate list of details without (as most admit) really illuminating the phenomenon of duality.”6 In contrast to the binary theoretical models of “gaps” between texts, languages and cultures, Hokenson and Munson suggest examining the textual intersections and overleaps of versions. They conclude that “once one overleaps the monolingual horizon and can read stereoscopically, the similarities signify as instantiations of a singular poetics in dual discourse.”7 While focusing on what Hokenson and Munson defined as an intercultural “mid-zone of overlaps and intersections,” I would like to take their criticism of the monolingual binary a step further. is difficult for native Hebrew (ריבּנר) Interestingly, because the German name Rübner 1 which appeared in the Hebrew poetry ,(ריבנר) speakers to pronounce, it was changed into Rivner collections published since the 1950s. In more recent years, however, also because the German is inscribed on ריבנר instead of ריבּנר collections were published by Rimbaud Verlag, the name the Hebrew collections. 2 For the German see Tuvia Rübner, Ein langes kurzes Leben: Von Preßburg nach Merchavia (Aachen: Rimbaud Verlag, 2004); for the Hebrew see Tuvia Rübner, Khayyim arukim ktzarim (Tel Aviv: Keshev Leshira, 2006). 3 Tuvia Rübner, Im halben Licht. Gedichte (Aachen: Rimbaud Verlag, 2016), 5. 4 Belated Beauty: In Memory of Tuvia Rübner, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, January 23, 2020. 5 Jan Walsh Hokenson and Marcella Munson, The Bilingual Text: History and Theory of Literary Self-Translation (Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing, 2007), 3. 6 Ibid, 4. 7 Ibid, 206. 185 In discussing the linguistic paradigms of modern Jewish literature based on various theories of translation,8 Naomi Brenner emphasizes the role of self-translation: “In Hebrew and Yiddish literature at the beginning of the twentieth century, the individual writer was most commonly the locus of translation, writing and then rewriting his or her texts in Hebrew and Yiddish in some order. The prevalence of self-translation challenges fundamental assumptions about the translator as a mediator and the translated text as being transported across cultural boundaries.”9 Brenner adopts the term of translingualism as an alternative to the binary oppositions of bilingualism to “emphasize the movement across languages, […] the movement of people, ideas and institutions across linguistic boundaries.”10 According to her, rather than the transpositions of a text into a different culture, translingual writers provided intercultural literary-linguistic exercises with aesthetic and ideological implications that challenge the boundaries of hegemonic national culture. Amily Apter, for her part, critically addresses another binary relationship by exploring translation issues around the beginning of the 21st century. In challenging existing practices of translation based on similarity, she claims the need to “recognize the importance of non-translation, mistranslation, incomparability and untranslatability.”11 Accordingly, she suggests that one “understand the Untranslatable not as a pure difference in opposition to the always translatable (rightly suspect as just another non- coeval form of the romantic Absolute, or fetish of the Other, or myth of hermeneutic inaccessibility), but as a linguistic form of creative failure with homeopathic uses.”12 Following these theoretical approaches, this paper intends to explore the relationship between German and Hebrew language traditions in light of Tuvia Rübner’s emigration from Slovakia during the first years of the Second World War. As a consequence of his immigration to Israel and the loss of his family in the Holocaust in 1942, an unhealed wound which recurs in another personal disaster, Rübner moved to Hebrew.13 The language of the land of immigration becomes his formal poetic language, even though he continued to think through central modes and figures of the German tradition. I claim that this shift, which can be understood both in existential and political terms, is not monolithic or one-directional but rather translingual. In crossing the lines between separate traditions of language, Rübner’s poetics transcends the binary model based on monolingual poles and hegemonic culture, while escaping the dead-end dichotomy of “everything is translatable” and “nothing is translatable.” I intend to demonstrate this movement by focusing on varied examples of autotranslation, as well as on Rübner’s late poems that refer to Franz Kafka’s mythical figure of the hunter Gracchus. 8 For instance, Brenner mentions how translation, once regarded as a derivate art form or second-order representation, has more recently garnered attention as a mechanism of literary change in Itamar Even-Zohar; a means of establishing literary value in Pascale Casanova; a process of literary manipulation in Andre Lefevere; and an interpretative art in Lawrence Venuti (2016, 15). 9 Naomi Brenner, Lingering Bilingualism: Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literatures in Contact (NY: Syracuse University Press, 2016), 15. 10 Ibid, 16. 11 Emily Apter, “Against World Literature,” in World Literature in Theory, ed. David Damrosch (Malden MA: Wiley Blackwill, 2014), 347. 12 Ibid, 356. 13 Compare with Giddon Ticotsky, “A German