Gracchus’s Boat: Emigration, Tradition, and Translingualism in the Work of Tuvia Rübner

This article explores the relationship between German and Hebrew in the work of the poet Tuvia Rübner, who emigrated from Slovakia to Israel in 1941. Even though his first poems were written in German, his published poems were in Hebrew. Only in the 1990s did he start translating his poems and publishing in German. I claim, however, that this shift is neither monolithic nor one-directional but rather translingual. In continuously crossing the lines between different traditions of language, Rübner’s poetics transcends the binary model based on hegemonic culture, on the one hand, while providing a countermovement to global standard­ization, on the other. By focusing on examples of autotranslation, as well as on Rübner’s late poems that refer to Franz Kafka’s mythical figure of the hunter Gracchus, I suggest that this oscillation ethically bears witness to the other embodied in different life stories.