Now at the Threshold: The Late Poems

of Tuvia Ruebner

2021 PEN Translation Award Longlist.​

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In late 2013, preeminent Hebrew poet Tuvia Ruebner published his fifteenth poetry collection, which he titled Last Ones. But it was not his last; he continued writing and publishing, even into the summer of his death in 2019. The translated poems in Now at the Threshold: The Late Poems of Tuvia Ruebner are from Ruebner’s final three collections, poems all written from 2014 onward, after the poet’s 90th birthday. Translated into English by award-winning translator Rachel Tzvia Back, these late and last poems both celebrate life’s enduring small graces and converse quietly-even negotiate- with death. With love and loss ever intertwined, and a protesting voice still fierce, this collection offers the reader illuminating and beautiful poetry from a great humanist and a great poet.

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There is suffering and rage, disappointment and regret in Tuvia Ruebner’s late poems written at the threshold of death, but there is also something else, something moving and unexpected—a deep and abiding sense of wonder and amazement. These last poems, excellently translated by Rachel Tzvia Black, face the world with a marvelous feeling of awe.

—Edward Hirsch

 

Rachel Tzvia Back’s wise and attentive translations of Tuvia Ruebner’s late poems present us with a poet as curious and contemporary in his nineties as in his earlier work. In these poems, death is an approaching horizon, but Ruebner’s present carries far more than the memories and ghosts of his past. For Ruebner, the present is time that must not be taken for granted, a deep well from which he draws his dynamic poetry of desire, inquiry, and critique. “How many nearing ninety still write/ love poems?” he writes in a poem that—filling the page before us—answers its own question.
—Adriana X. Jacobs 

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Read reviews in Asymptote here, and in Restless Messengers here.

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