Yehudith Dashevsky

on translating Tuvya Ruebner

Be well, thanks:

I found this poem can be read either with a bite of sarcasm or with sincerity. If we take the latter approach, this poem is about genuinely putting in effort to “exchange a few words” even if it’s a little forced at first and follows a script, “like in a story.” It is about valuing those exchanges, even if they’re mundane, like “hey, the water’s growing things in it” or “look, we have enough bread.” There is an acceptance of loneliness too. “We all were” here, in this lonely place, where we craved a few words from another human being. If instead, we read the poem with the former, there is a hint of bitterness, which can be felt in the staccato of the periods in “Yes. I was. Here. We all were.” The narrator is stuck in this ridiculous situation of small-talk, in which roles have to be assumed and conversations playacted, “like in a story.” The “Yes, thanks,” is not the sincere gratitude of the lonely, but the acerbic retort of someone who finds these minute exchanges unsatisfactory and not real enough.

Although the words in this poem are simple, there were a few translation difficulties. One was the problem of the pronoun. The original poem is in the singular third person, reading “what is a person / with his evil heart....” I chose to use plural to avoid having to use the masculine pronoun, even though I feel something is lost when the singular is not emphasized: the feeling of loneliness is dispelled and instead there is a generalization about a “they.” The emphasis is more on a shared experience of loneliness than loneliness itself. This is a particular example of when translating with an intention (attempting to avoid a gendered pronoun), even if that intention is well-meaning, creates a new, although perhaps not quite as insidious, complication.

In front of you is this ancient rain:

The loneliness in this poem is muted by the comforting ache of memory: a person is standing alone by a window inside, being warmed by a source of heat inside, and his mind gives way to thoughts of others. What I found surprising about this poem is the adjective it uses for rain. It describes the way water recycles itself as “ancient,” a term that is also colloquially used for human things: physical structures built by people that fell to ruin, challenges that humans have been dealing with for eons. This adjective, “ancient,” might be the piece that ties the poem together. The cyclical, long-lasting nature of the environmental process leads the muser to think about a longtime human issue in the second part of the poem: how people need just a few words in their lives.

That phrase actually posed a difficulty in interpretation. Literally it reads “how few are the words / a person needs in his life.” The question is: what is emphasized, “few” or “need”? Is the speaker surprised at how few words are needed, or is the speaker emphasizing that while the words are few, they are much needed? This led to a translation question. Is it “the” words or “those” words? “The” words would be more straightforwardly faithful to the grammar of the poem. But “those” words emphasized the second interpretation — that despite being small in number, those words exist, and they are specific ones, and they are needed. Although I have the sense that the author meant the former, I chose to play with the latter interpretation to see if the poem could contain it while retaining its original meaning and beauty. In addition, I chose to change “the” rain to “this” rain to convey the focus on the rain and highlight its presence in the poem.