Post by Seany-D on Nov 7, 2004 13:54:09 GMT -5
from the Sun:
Found in translation
By Robert Alter
Originally published November 7, 2004
WE HAVE HEARD a good deal of talk in recent days about the time-tested truths of the Bible in which the life of this country is purportedly grounded. I would not want to shake the faith of those who hold that belief. But as someone who has spent the last few years contending with the original text of the Hebrew Bible word by weighted word, my own conclusion is that biblical truths are more various, more complex and more interesting than our popular preconceptions of them.
Translating the Bible has been a compelling activity for me, one that has made me see the boldness and the power of the ancient Hebrew with fresh eyes.
There is nothing like translating a great work to force you to grapple with its nuances of meaning, with the many ways in which its word choices and its rhythms and its ordering of syntax convey a vision of the world and of the human or divine figures that inhabit it. As a translator, I found myself repeatedly confronted with the twin challenge of getting the original right (not a simple matter for an ancient text) and finding an English equivalent that might do some justice to the literary effect of the Hebrew.
Let me give an example in which meeting the first challenge led to a response to the second. In Exodus 19:9, when the Lord descends on Sinai to deliver the Ten Commandments, He announces, according to the King James version and almost all later translations, that He is coming "in a thick cloud." But this confuses the Hebrew adjective aveh, "thick," with the noun av that appears here, one of two words in this phrase that mean "cloud."
Now, in biblical Hebrew, when two synonymous nouns are locked together as they are here, the idiomatic effect is a kind of high-voltage intensification of their shared meaning. And so I translated, using a deliberately poetic turn of phrase, "the utmost cloud."
It may not be a perfect solution, but it gets beyond the flatness of the incorrect "a thick cloud" and suggests something of the awesome manifestation of a God who remains enveloped in a daunting cosmic mantle as he descends on Mount Sinai. It was only after wrestling with these two Hebrew words, one of them generally misconstrued, that I realized the full power with which they represent God.
The biblical choice of language is equally strong and unpredictable in dealing with human characters. When Hagar is banished to the wilderness by Abraham with her young son Ishmael, she despairs of his life after their water supply is exhausted. Then, according to the various English versions, she "left him," "placed him," "lay him," "thrust him" - under a bush to die. What all these translators have done, guided by a tamer sensibility than that of the biblical writers, is to blink at what the Hebrew unflinchingly says. For this Hebrew verb, wherever it occurs, means "to fling." (It is the same verb Pharaoh uses in Exodus when he orders that every male Hebrew baby should be flung into the Nile.)
We may not be very comfortable with the idea of a mother who flings her child under a desert bush, but what the writer understood was that the violence of the emotion dictated the violence of the act. Hagar, in a paroxysm of despair, convinced that her beloved only son is about to perish, does not gently lay him down but flings him under a bush. The explosive psychological force just beneath the surface of this extremely terse narrative makes itself felt in a single strategic word, and one finds this to be the case again and again in the biblical text.
Looking scrupulously at the fine stylistic maneuvers of the Hebrew in the attempt to convey them aptly in English led me especially to see biblical dialogue in a new light.
The vague impression of most readers is that all the characters in the Bible speak more or less in the same way. Translating, I came to realize that in the dialogue - which is crucially important in these stories - some characters may stammer, others speak with legalistic calculation; some are blunt or impetuous, others deferential or diplomatic or fearful. What lies behind all this is a subtle and searching sense of how people relate to each other through language in their unique individuality, and that I take to be one of the Bible's important breakthroughs in representing the human condition.
What I've discovered, in sum, in my adventure as a translator is that the Bible is more complex and more daring, more surprising, than our Sunday School notions of it.
Robert Alter is the author of The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary.
Found in translation
By Robert Alter
Originally published November 7, 2004
WE HAVE HEARD a good deal of talk in recent days about the time-tested truths of the Bible in which the life of this country is purportedly grounded. I would not want to shake the faith of those who hold that belief. But as someone who has spent the last few years contending with the original text of the Hebrew Bible word by weighted word, my own conclusion is that biblical truths are more various, more complex and more interesting than our popular preconceptions of them.
Translating the Bible has been a compelling activity for me, one that has made me see the boldness and the power of the ancient Hebrew with fresh eyes.
There is nothing like translating a great work to force you to grapple with its nuances of meaning, with the many ways in which its word choices and its rhythms and its ordering of syntax convey a vision of the world and of the human or divine figures that inhabit it. As a translator, I found myself repeatedly confronted with the twin challenge of getting the original right (not a simple matter for an ancient text) and finding an English equivalent that might do some justice to the literary effect of the Hebrew.
Let me give an example in which meeting the first challenge led to a response to the second. In Exodus 19:9, when the Lord descends on Sinai to deliver the Ten Commandments, He announces, according to the King James version and almost all later translations, that He is coming "in a thick cloud." But this confuses the Hebrew adjective aveh, "thick," with the noun av that appears here, one of two words in this phrase that mean "cloud."
Now, in biblical Hebrew, when two synonymous nouns are locked together as they are here, the idiomatic effect is a kind of high-voltage intensification of their shared meaning. And so I translated, using a deliberately poetic turn of phrase, "the utmost cloud."
It may not be a perfect solution, but it gets beyond the flatness of the incorrect "a thick cloud" and suggests something of the awesome manifestation of a God who remains enveloped in a daunting cosmic mantle as he descends on Mount Sinai. It was only after wrestling with these two Hebrew words, one of them generally misconstrued, that I realized the full power with which they represent God.
The biblical choice of language is equally strong and unpredictable in dealing with human characters. When Hagar is banished to the wilderness by Abraham with her young son Ishmael, she despairs of his life after their water supply is exhausted. Then, according to the various English versions, she "left him," "placed him," "lay him," "thrust him" - under a bush to die. What all these translators have done, guided by a tamer sensibility than that of the biblical writers, is to blink at what the Hebrew unflinchingly says. For this Hebrew verb, wherever it occurs, means "to fling." (It is the same verb Pharaoh uses in Exodus when he orders that every male Hebrew baby should be flung into the Nile.)
We may not be very comfortable with the idea of a mother who flings her child under a desert bush, but what the writer understood was that the violence of the emotion dictated the violence of the act. Hagar, in a paroxysm of despair, convinced that her beloved only son is about to perish, does not gently lay him down but flings him under a bush. The explosive psychological force just beneath the surface of this extremely terse narrative makes itself felt in a single strategic word, and one finds this to be the case again and again in the biblical text.
Looking scrupulously at the fine stylistic maneuvers of the Hebrew in the attempt to convey them aptly in English led me especially to see biblical dialogue in a new light.
The vague impression of most readers is that all the characters in the Bible speak more or less in the same way. Translating, I came to realize that in the dialogue - which is crucially important in these stories - some characters may stammer, others speak with legalistic calculation; some are blunt or impetuous, others deferential or diplomatic or fearful. What lies behind all this is a subtle and searching sense of how people relate to each other through language in their unique individuality, and that I take to be one of the Bible's important breakthroughs in representing the human condition.
What I've discovered, in sum, in my adventure as a translator is that the Bible is more complex and more daring, more surprising, than our Sunday School notions of it.
Robert Alter is the author of The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary.
