Born in Bratislava in 1924, Tuvya Ruebner came to Mandatory Palestine in 1941; his family, unable to join him, were murdered by the Nazis. He went on to become a translator and editor as well as one of Israel’s leading poets, cultivating a distinctively stark style. In 2008, he was awarded the Israel prize. Ruebner died in July of last year, a few months after the publication of his last collection of poems. Rachel Tzvia Back, his longtime English translator, explores the way in which his poetry turned time and again to the limits of language itself, and to those things that cannot be put into words:
One may argue that Ruebner is referencing primarily, even exclusively, the horrors of the Holocaust when he evokes the unsayable. Indeed, Ruebner often stated, in interviews and in personal communication, that any attempt to speak of or represent Auschwitz would fail: “One word alone suits Auschwitz—silence,” he asserts in a 2014 interview. Later in that same interview he states that Auschwitz is the reference point for all his poetic production. What I’m suggesting is that with that reference point, Ruebner’s poetic iterations come into being with the impossible, the unsayable, the incomplete woven into their fabric. Thus, the poet, this poet, is always threatened by muteness—the words “mute” or “muteness” a scarlet thread woven through his entire oeuvre. Sometimes muteness is the vast and even threatening expanses on the perimeters of his isolated poetic being: “The lines of the poem/ are tiny islands of time/ surrounded by muteness” (from “I Am Still”). And sometimes muteness is the essence of his poetic creation, as in these lines from the poem “In My Old Age.”
The words close in on me and they are mute.
The mute words in their muteness beg:
Open for us a gate at the hour of the gate’s closing, be for us a mouth.The power of the image emanates from its oxymoronic nature: how can words be mute, and how do mute words beg? And how can a poet of “mute words” be a poet at all, as muteness annihilates him. Here, paradoxically, the mute words offer a prayer—a supplication from the Yom Kippur liturgy—that casts the almost-annihilated poet in a god-like role: “Open for us a gate at the hour of the gate’s closing, be for us a mouth.” There, at the threshold, the poet allows mute words to speak—for a single line.
Read more on Marginalia: https://marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org/the-interim-world-the-poetics-of-tuvia-ruebner/