from Keynote Lecture, Cape Town University Conference on Minority Literature, 2005

Cross cultural writing is more than a practical problem of writing in one language and living in another. It is as if you have come home to discover that the furniture has been moved around, your family has become deaf and you have become mute. Your family has forgotten its intimate knowledge and memories of you. You try to communicate with sign language, but as you look into the uncomprehending faces, you realize that reality itself has changed. It has become untranslatable.

Let me just say that in an ideal world, poets would never leave the soil of their homeland, the price is too high. There is a silence at the heart of a translated poem that is like lovers making love in different languages.

In spite of my formative physical and emotional bonds with South Africa, the country was politically and philosophically alien to me in the ‘sixties, when I left. But when I came to Israel I was faced with alienation of a different kind, one in which language became a lost sense.

In the words of the South African writer, Lionel Abrahams: The literary endeavor places one where individuality and society intersect. The writer without a sense of self has no story to tell. Without a sense of community, he has no one to tell his story to, no means of telling his story, no language. For language is inescapably social, inescapably shared. The nature and business of language is connection.’

When there is a weakening of the sense of self that connects what Carl Jung described as ‘the vast outer realm and the equally vast inner realm’, the writer needs a new code that must reach beyond language in order to cope with threats stemming from elements inherent in locality, ethnicity and other factors.

Poets are engaged in absorbing and conveying subliminal meaning and must salvage what is lost when the struggle to connect with the outer landscape is complicated by the sense of their otherness. They must resist the urge to compromise, writing in order to be comprehensible to the mainstream by  dutifully addressing local themes and issues, if only to stop the village watchdogs from barking at their different scent and to earn a sort of patronizing approval, at best. This process of regaining the sense of self by adding new codes of perception devours energy – and the energy that is lost is creative energy. The writer is then in danger of falling silent. 

Obviously, one solution to the problem of writing without an audience in the local context is to master the mainstream language. Another solution is to find a good translator. Both mean compromise and compromise for a writer is just another kind of silence. With regard to the first solution, I know writers who have mastered Hebrew and no longer write in their native Polish, English, Hungarian or what have you. In many cases, they seem like swimmers who have jumped into the stream from one bank and are floundering in the shallows because they can’t quite make it to the other side.  If the solution were as simple as mastering the mechanics and nuances and even the spirit of the mainstream language, I would be writing in Hebrew. But my mind is structured in English. I can mean only in English. For me, what Lionel Abrahams called ‘the aesthetic transmutation of experience’ can’t take place in any language other than English.

The second solution, translation, is a risk-loaded compromise, but isolation and the hunger for interaction with the surrounding literary community and audience make it a valid compromise, but the inevitable absences and near-misses, the untranslatable elements at the heart of a work leave me feeling no less isolated and frustrated.

Is translation ever adequate? Adam was given the task of naming everything in Eden, to give all things their pure meaning. But when he left his garden, did this thing called language that he had shaped help him to express himself, to understand and be understood? Outside of Eden, he had to find a new, coherent frame of reference for that apple or mushroom or tomato that he and Eve had eaten, and the labor he was sentenced to was the labor of words. In Eden, when he said ‘We have a green leaf, now’, Eve knew he meant the cover-up and the pleasure and the consciousness of shame. But outside of Eden, the same words could just as well be understood to mean a new beginning, or bitter food, or a new fashion. Meaning melted away in adapting integral vocabulary to a new landscape.   

Minority literature falls into three main categories: indigenous writing from a separate ethnic group within a national entity; the writing of immigrants from a country with a different language; and the writing of immigrants from various countries with the same language, but differences in accent and idiom, culture and other formative components of the writer’s inner landscape (for example, from one anglophonic country to another).  The problem of language and meaning is particularly significant in poetry, which builds on the way words are pronounced, on rhythm, phrasing and, primarily, on culture-based allusions and symbols - with the result that the meaning of a whole poem can be thrown off balance even when the reader and the writer have the same mother tongue from different localities. In all cases, the energy is diverted and meaning itself is lost.

The Israel writer, Rina Litvin, addressing the subject of identity, quotes from the conversation between Alice and the caterpillar in  Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: ‘Who are you?’ the caterpillar asks and Alice answers ‘I... hardly know, Sir, just at present I can’t remember things as I used – and I don’t keep the same size for 10 minutes together...’ The caterpillar advises her to seek her identity in the texts imprinted on her memory.

Alice’s quest in the subterranean realms of herself leads me to consider the nature of roots. I used to think that the ideal is one unbroken root tapping some kind of archetypal soil, or, failing this, one divided root. However, neither of these applies to me. My origins are in a branched root system spreading over three continents and at least two religions. This root system supplied me with English, the voice of my mind. It supplied me with Hebrew to add dimensions to my spirit. It supplied me with South Africa to hone my senses, the way a first love does.   

When I came across a description of Kroonstad, a town I knew well in my childhood, it was like finding a letter from that first love.  It appeared in the book A change of Tongue by the Afrikaans writer, Antjie Krog. My response proves Krog’s assertion that ‘You have a voice solely through your community – whether it is language they give you or ancestral stirrings, it doesn’t matter’.

However, the myth-creating zone of the mind is common to most people, beyond individual language; minds remote from each other in time and culture have a tendency to produce similar ideas and images, but in order to release meaning, what Krog calls the ‘community voice’ must be evoked -- and language is the instrument.

In Israel, where the human infrastructure is essentially multi-cultural, multi-ethnic and multi-lingual – one might even say multi-minority – the community voice had to be defined without drowning the mother-culture. Nevertheless, mainstream attitudes remain patronizing or indifferent. Some minority language writers concentrate on publication overseas, but this is complicated because, in addition to international sanctions and prejudices against Israel that amount to book-burning, writing at a distance from the natural language center contributes to marginalization. Therefore, some writers leave Israel and return to their center. Others simply fall silent, although, again in Lionel Abrahams’ words: ‘Defection into silence would annul the inner galaxy’.

The late Olga Kirsch, who was born in South Africa and lived in Israel from 1948 until her death in 1997, is ranked among such esteemed Afrikaans poets as Elisabeth Eybers and Ingrid Jonker, although her mother tongue was English and she later became fluent in Hebrew. She began writing in Afrikaans when she was still at school and her affinity for the language stood apart from any exterior association. Afrikaans was simply where she found her poetry and where her meaning came to life. In Israel, she chose not to fall silent, even though she wrote purely for a distant, minority readership in a language virtually unknown outside South Africa. These lines, which I have translated from Afrikaans, speak of the connection that cannot be erased: My life will remain cracked:/ Green stalks, when the axe/ has chopped them core deep/will never regain wholeness./ But the sap sticks to the axeblade.

In conclusion, I will refer to “Locality and Language”, a critical essay by Professor Yaffah Berlovitz which is a rare mainstream critical response to minority writing in Israel. She chose to discuss a poem of mine, Museum Piece, because, in her opinion, it reveals the juxtaposition of the poet’s inner and outer landscapes. She analyzes the poetic metaphors drawn from physical environment, such as dry eucalyptus leaves and harsh awakening into fatigue, helplessness, heaviness. She says, ‘The third stanza takes the reader to the time before waking, to what Rubin describes as a visit to the museum of her sleep, rich in objects of beauty and art, where Eastern and classical Western cultures blend in objects of bone, silk, silver and porcelain... one speaks in whispers here... but a shock is recorded in the seismograph of the walk among the treasures when the poet encounters her dead young husband, who implies that the treasures in the museum are not immune to dissolution and threaten to return to clay.’

Berlovitz wonders if the figure of the husband whispering clay to the poet is there to ‘warn her of the collapse of her ‘museum’, which means the death of the poem or the collapse of poetic potential.... in the midst of her treasures, is the poet vulnerable to poetic exhaustion in the absence of an audience, to creative despair... the threatened loss of creative power...?’

Analyzing the poetic metaphors, Berlovitz points to the Mesopotamian/Semitic/Middle Eastern elements in the poem, such as references to the ritual cycle of death and rebirth and she remarks, “It seems to me that Rubin withstands the threat of her poetic death. Writing, she demonstrates that the poetic act is present and functioning....Above all, “Museum Piece” is inherently a local creation, since in a sophisticated, dialectical manner it ... employs the local environment and its symbols for the poem’s purposes.” Professor Berlovitz’s incisive essay is a rare expression of the respectful critical response that writers in minority languages desire and deserve.

By line…….