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Robert Alter : Pentateuch :: VN : Pushkin's Onegin ?
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----- Forwarded message from spklein52@hotmail.com -----
Date: Mon, 25 Oct 2004 07:31:02 -0400
From: "Sandy P. Klein" <spklein52@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: SPKlein52@HotMail.com
Subject: NabokovXs translation of XEugene ...
To: spklein52@hotmail.com
[1] http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/?041101crbo_books[2] THE
GREAT I AM
New Yorker, NY - 6 hours ago
... However, in his very zeal to communicate the nuances of the
underlying Hebrew, Alter falls into the error of VLADIMIR NABOKOVÂ’s
translation of “Eugene ...
October 25, 2004 | home
[3]
THE GREAT I AMby JOHN UPDIKERobert AlterÂ’s new translation of the
Pentateuch.Issue of 2004-11-01
Posted 2004-10-25
In this age of widespread education and flagging creativity, new
translations abound. The old standbys who nurtured our
youth—Constance Garnett rendering the Russians, C. K. Scott Moncrieff
putting his spin on Proust, the Muirs translating Kafka, H. T.
Lowe-Porter doing Thomas Mann—are all being retired, with
condescending remarks about their slips and elisions, by successors
whose more modern versions infallibly miss, it seems to this possibly
crotchety scanner, the tone, the voice, the presence of the text that
we first read. In general—if it’s generalizations you want—the closer
the translator is in age to the translated, the more closely shared
their vision and style will be. The Modern Library chose to reprint
the 1700-03 translation of “Don Quixote” by Peter Motteux; after that
peppery stew of italicized names and apostrophe-bedeckÂ’d past tenses,
every other “Quixote” feels watered down.
Of all translations into English, the one most read and universally
admired is, of course, the King James Bible (1611), our languageÂ’s
lone masterpiece produced by committee, at least until this yearÂ’s
“9/11 Commission Report.” Nevertheless, new translations of the
Bible—the world’s best-seller, long out of copyright—tumble forth,
for the reasons, if any are offered, that contemporary scholarship
presents a superior understanding of ancient Hebrew and that
Renaissance English is increasingly, inconveniently archaic. The
Hebrew scholar and literary critic Robert Alter, in introducing his
thousand-page version, with copious commentary, of the first five
books of the Bible—commonly called the Pentateuch or Torah—under the
title “The Five Books of Moses” (Norton; $39.95), writes:
Broadly speaking, one may say that in the case of the modern
versions, the problem is a shaky sense of English and in the case of
the King James Version, a shaky sense of Hebrew. The present
translation is an experiment in re-presenting the Bible—and, above
all, biblical narrative prose—in a language that conveys with some
precision the semantic nuances and the lively orchestration of
literary effects of the Hebrew and at the same time has stylistic and
rhythmic integrity as literary English.
Professor Alter, whose earlier works include “Fielding and the
Nature of the Novel” (1968) and “A Lion for Love: A Critical
Biography of Stendhal” (1979), has been tilling the Biblical fields
ever since “The Art of Biblical Narrative” (1981) and “The Art of
Biblical Poetry” (1985). As his footnotes, which take up at least
half of all but a few pages, make clear, Alter is profoundly steeped
not just in the linguistic details of Hebrew but in the
nigh-overwhelming amount of previous commentary, including the
Midrash of rabbinical interpreters going back to the early centuries
of the Christian era. At the same time, he has, as his oeuvre shows,
an appetite for literary theory—“Motives for Fiction” (1984),
“Partial Magic: The Novel as Self-Conscious Genre” (1975)—and, as the
passage quoted above indicates, a resolute sense of the Biblical style
to be achieved.
He sees Biblical Hebrew as a “conventionally delimited language,
roughly analogous in this respect to the French of the neoclassical
theatre” and significantly though indeterminately distinct from the
vanished vernacular of three thousand years ago. (The vernacular
vocabulary, according to the Spanish Hebrew scholar Angel
Sáenz-Badillos, must have exceeded the Bible’s—a lexicon “so
restricted that it is hard to believe it could have served all the
purposes of quotidian existence in a highly developed society.”)
Alter has set himself to create a corresponding English—“stylized,
decorous, dignified, and readily identified by its audiences as a
language of literature,” with a “slight strangeness,” “beautiful
rhythms,” and other qualities (suppleness, precision, concreteness)
that “by and large have been given short shrift by translators with
their eyes on other goals.” Why should not Alter’s version, its
program so richly contemplated and persuasively outlined, become th e
definitive one, replacing not only the King James but the plethora of
its revised, uninspired, and “accessible” versions on the shelf?
Several reasons why not, in the course of my reading through this
massive tome (sold sturdily boxed, as if to support its weight),
emerged. The sheer amount of accompanying commentary and philological
footnotes is one of them. The fifty-four churchmen and scholars
empowered at a conference at Hampton Court in January of 1604 to
provide an authoritative English Bible had a clear charge: to supply
English readers with a self-explanatory text. When they encountered a
crux, they took their best guess and worked on; many of the guesses
can be improved upon now, but no suggestion of an unclear and
imperfect original was allowed to trouble the Word of God. AlterÂ’s
more academic and literary commission allows him to luxuriate in the
forked possibilities of the Hebrew text, in its oldest forms written
entirely in consonants, and without punctuation. Sample footnotes,
taken at random from Deuteronomy:
Some recent scholars have accepted Jacob MilgromÂ’s proposal that
here the verb q-r-b (“approach”) is used in a political extension of
its cultic meaning, “to encroach upon,” though there is no compelling
necessity to see that sense of the word in this verse.
The second of the two Hebrew words here, weÂ’oyveinu pelilim, is a
notorious crux, evidently already a source of puzzlement to the
ancient Greek translators. . . . If one notes that pelilim rhymes
richly with ’elilim, “idols,” and if one recalls this poet’s verbal
inventiveness in coining designations for the nonentity of the pagan
gods, “would-be gods” is a distinct possibility.
It is difficult for the reader, given the overload of elucidation
imposed upon the basic text, to maintain much momentum, and, indeed,
one finds welcome refuge from the tedium and harshness of some
Biblical passages in the companionable contemporary voice of the
learned commentator. However, in his very zeal to communicate the
nuances of the underlying Hebrew, Alter falls into the error of
Vladimir Nabokov’s translation of “Eugene Onegin”: in the effort to
achieve absolute fidelity, he settles on rather odd English.
Take AlterÂ’s version, for starters, of the opening verses of
Genesis:
When God began to create heaven and earth, and the earth then was
welter and waste and darkness over the deep and GodÂ’s breath hovering
over the waters, God said, “Let there be light.” And there was light.
The King James has it thus:
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the
face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the
waters.
And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
Alter is the more concise, and is not above duplicating certain
phrases of the King James, much as the royal committee drew upon the
translation of Tyndale. But AlterÂ’s syntax goes off the rails when
“God’s breath hovering over the waters” is tacked onto a series of
non-parallel nouns; by comparison, “And the Spirit of God moved upon
the face of the waters” is clearer narrative and great poetry. It may
stray minutely from the Hebrew but it is theologically intelligible.
Both translations can be usefully compared with that of Everett Fox,
also titled “The Five Books of Moses” and published in 1995. Alter
cites Fox as the outstanding exception to the general trend of a
blandly readable English Bible—an extremist after Martin Buber and
Franz Rosenzweig, whose German Bible “flaunts Hebrew etymologies,
preserves nearly all repetitions of Hebrew terms, and invents German
words.” Fox’s version, set in lines like poetry, reads:
At the beginning of GodÂ’s creating of the heavens and the earth,
when the earth was wild and waste,
darkness over the face of Ocean,
rushing-spirit of God hovering over the face of the waters—
God said: Let there be light! And there was light.
This is a relatively tame specimen; elsewhere, Fox liberally coins
compound adjectives like “heavy-with-stubbornness” and verbs like
“adulter”—the seventh commandment becomes “You are not to adulter.”
Alter is less extreme, but he does keep the ubiquitous
sentence-beginning “and,” derived from the Hebrew particle waw; he
retains emphatic repetitions, as in “she, she, too” and “this red red
stuff.” He strives to preserve ambiguities and puns in the original.
He conspicuously bends colloquial English in such renderings as:
“Pharaoh will lift up your head from upon you”; “The land in the
seven years of plenty made gatherings”; “A lion’s whelp is Judah, /
from the prey, O my son, you mount”; “Israel saw the great hand that
the Lord had performed against Egypt”; “Moses would speak, and God
would answer him with voice”; “Whether a son it gore or a daughter it
gore, according to this practice it shall be done to him”; “and a man
lie with her in seed-coupling”; “In the hand of the priest shall be
the bitter besetting water”; “And it happened that there were men who
were defiled by human corpse”; “‘Let us put up a head and r eturn to
Egypt’”; “And the Lord said to me, saying, ‘Long enough you have
swung round this high country.’” Alter has an annoying trick, no
doubt in deference to the Hebrew, of putting a comma where we expect
an article or preposition: “It was evening and it was morning, second
day”; “the tree of knowledge, good and evil.” Translating Exodus, he
persists in using, in reference to PharaohÂ’s heart, the verb
“toughened” where the usual translation uses “hardened” (“And
Pharaoh’s heart toughened”; “And the Lord toughened Pharaoh’s
heart”). He tests our knowledge of livestock terminology by employing
“get” as a noun, as in Deuteronomy 28:4: “Blessed the fruit of your
womb and the fruit of your soil and the fruit of your beasts, the get
of your herds and the offspring of your flock.”
A reader should, however, not shy from the rare but exact word, and
none of AlterÂ’s eccentricities of diction substantially undermine his
attempt to deliver a strongly rhythmic and ruggedly direct equivalent
of the Hebrew. But who will read it? Fanciers of sheer literature
will be put off by its bulk and its pedantic cross-weave, and the
millions of believers, Christian and Jewish, already have their
versions, with cherished, trusted phrasings. The Bible in its
centuries of recitation and memorization has generated a host of
familiar images that turn out to be mistranslations. JacobÂ’s ladder
is really, it seems, Jacob’s “ramp,” the word in Hebrew occurring
only in this instance and suggestive of a Mesopotamian ziggurat. Nor
did Jacob, dreaming his dream of angels ascending and descending,
have his head pillowed on a stone: “Rashi, followed by some modern
scholars, proposes that the stone is not placed under JacobÂ’s head
but alongside it, as a kind of protective barrier.” J oseph’s coat of
many colors has been altered to a mere “ornamented tunic.” Onan, it
turns out, was guilty not of onanism but, more likely, of prudent
coitus interruptus with his brotherÂ’s widow. Michelangelo was wrong:
Moses did not come down from the mountain with the second edition of
the Ten Commandments having sprouted horns, as recorded in the
Vulgate and AquilaÂ’s translation into the Greek. His face merely
glowed, from its recent exposure to the Divinity.
Reading through this book, or five books, is a wearying,
disorienting, and at times revelatory experience. Our interest trends
downhill. Of Genesis, Alter writes, “If this were the work of a single
writer, one would say he begins at the top of his form.” The Creation,
the Garden, the Fall, the Flood, the Tower of Babel, and the
patriarchal saga of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph make a more or
less continuous story. Rereading it awakened certain sensations from
my Sunday-school education, more than sixty years ago, when I seemed
to stand on the edge of a brink gazing down at polychrome miniatures
of abasement and terror, betrayal and reconciliation. Jacob deceiving
blind Isaac with patches of animal hair on the backs of his hands,
Joseph being stripped of his gaudy coat and left in a pit by his
brothers, little Benjamin being fetched years later by these same
treacherous brothers into the imperious presence of a mysterious
stranger invested with all Phara oh’s authority—these glimpses into a
world paternal to our own, a robed and sandalled world of origins and
crude conflict and direct discourse with God, came to me via flimsy
leaflets illustrating that weekÂ’s lesson, and were mediated by the
mild-mannered commentary of the Sunday-school teacher, a humorless
embodiment of small-town respectability, passing on conventional
Christianity by rote. Nevertheless, I was stirred and disturbed,
feeling exposed to the perilous basis beneath the surface of daily
routine, of practical schooling and family interchange and popular
culture.
The curious, heated familial closeness of the Biblical narrative
distinguishes it from other compilations of legend. Erich Auerbach,
in the first chapter of his masterly “Mimesis” (1946), compares
AbrahamÂ’s near-sacrifice of Isaac with an incident in the Odyssey,
and exclaims of the Biblical characters, “How much wider is the
pendulum swing of their lives than that of the Homeric heroes!” He
explains:
For they are bearers of the divine will, and yet they are fallible,
subject to misfortune and humiliation. . . . There is hardly one of
them who does not, like Adam, undergo the deepest humiliation—and
hardly one who is not deemed worthy of GodÂ’s personal intervention
and personal inspiration.
Leaving God out of it, Auerbach claims that the Biblical
protagonists give
a more concrete, direct, and historical impression than the figures
of the Homeric world—not because they are better described in terms
of sense (the contrary is the case) but because the confused,
contradictory multiplicity of events, the psychological and factual
cross-purposes, which true history reveals, have not disappeared in
the representation but still remain clearly perceptible.
In Exodus, dominated by Moses, the narrative begins to sour; the
warmth and humanity of Genesis drain away. Moses is IsraelÂ’s foremost
prophet, but he is not a patriarch, and lacks the charm that ancestors
possess. The intimate family scale of Genesis yields to something
cooler and more mechanical; Alter in his introduction speaks of a
“new wide-angle lens” and “the distancing of the central character
and the distancing of the figure of God.” Not that God is silent; he
has more to say than before or since. Moses is his mouthpiece and,
like any lawyer with a demanding client, sometimes loses his temper.
The long negotiation with Pharaoh over the release of the Jews from
captivity (chapters 7 to 14) is especially aggravating, as God sends
plague after plague upon Egypt, only to “toughen” Pharaoh’s heart,
each time, just as a deal seems cinched. The plea, in the King James
version, “Let my people go,” has become in Alter the more
businesslike “Send off My people.” God directs Moses to “tell in the
hearing of your son and your son’s son how I toyed with Egypt”; the
King James has “what things I have wrought in Egypt,” but Alter’s
“toyed” better catches the mood of mounting sadism and vengefulness,
up to God’s killing “every firstborn in the land of Egypt from the
firstborn of man to the firstborn of beast.” He vows, “From all the
gods of Egypt I will exact retribution.”
In the vaulted, newly fashioned skies over Genesis, God, as Auerbach
notes, “was not fixed in form and content, and was alone.” In the more
crowded and pluralistic world of Exodus, God appears to forget that He
is the object of a monotheistic cult. He competes with Pharaoh as an
equal. His first commandment declares him to be a jealous god. A
footnote to “Who is like You among the gods, O Lord,” admits, “Hebrew
writers had no difficulty in conceding the existence of other deities,
though always stipulating, as here, their absolute inferiority to the
God of Israel.” Not only does primitive polytheism haunt Exodus’s
long sojourn in the wilderness but there is a flavor of stage magic:
pillars of smoke and flame, rocks that gush water, manna from Heaven,
finger-writing in stone, and elaborate specifications for the Ark
containing the tablets of the Covenant and the tent enclosing the
Ark. The magic of equivalence roughly shapes justice: “You shall pay
a life for a life, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a hand for
a hand, a foot for a foot, a burn for a burn, a wound for a wound, a
bruise for a bruise.”
Strictures and specifications continue in Leviticus; indeed,
Leviticus contains little else, and reads like an instruction manual
for the emergent priestly class and its Levite assistants.
Multitudinous avoidances of impurity define the solidifying Israelite
identity. Unclean are: carcasses; menstruating women; men who have
just had a seminal emission; the meat of reptiles, amphibians, birds
of prey, pigs, bats, rats, animals that bring up the cud but lack
hooves, and animals that go on four paws. (From the injunction “You
shall not boil a kid in its mother’s milk,” presumably a pagan
delicacy, was derived the Jewish prohibition of any combination of
meat and dairy products.) A vast prophylaxis regulates every bodily
activity and constantly reminds the Israelites of their
responsibility: they must be kept pure, unique, chosen. An offender
shall be “cut off from his kin.” Amid these relentless pages of
exclusionary litany, it is a salutary shock to find the inclusive
injunc tion “And you shall love your fellow man as yourself.”
The Book of Numbers extends the enumerative trend with a proud
toting up of the Israelite tribes, reckoned to include more than six
hundred thousand adult males, and an account of conquests that
prepares us, Alter states, “for the defining moment of the crossing
of the Jordan, with Joshua in command.” In Deuteronomy, Moses
delivers a lengthy, highly rhetorical valedictory to the Israelites
as they prepare to cross the Jordan into the Promised Land. He
rehearses their forty years of wandering; he repeats laws enunciated
in Exodus and Leviticus; he threatens his audience with an outpouring
of curses. Consumption and jaundice, madness and blindness,
hemorrhoids and drought: “All these curses will come upon you and
pursue you and overtake you until you are destroyed.” Moses recites
two long and obscure poems that, dating back perhaps to the eleventh
century B.C., the time of the Judges, are among the oldest texts in
the Bible. The historical events, if any, behind the Biblical
descriptions of Exodus are dated to the thirteenth century B.C., and
the passionate rhetoric of Deuteronomy was meant, according to Alter,
“to persuade audiences in the late First Commonwealth and exilic
period of the palpable and authoritative reality of an event that
never occurred, or at any rate surely did not occur as it is
represented in this text.” The definitive collection and composition,
by priestly writers, of much of the Old Testament belongs to the sixth
and fifth centuries, in the Babylonian exile, after the descendants of
Abraham had seen, GodÂ’s promises to the contrary, Jerusalem conquered
and the Temple destroyed. The gathering fierceness and strictness of
the Torah are those of an embattled people and an embattled
priesthood.
In the course of the Pentateuch, GodÂ’s personality deteriorates. The
deity of Genesis—Who with His own hands fashions Adam from dust
(“humus” in one of Alter’s less happy improvements upon the King
James text) and Who strolls in the evening cool of Eden, teases Sarah
into geriatric childbearing, and wrestles the night away with her
grandson Jacob—becomes, after His implacable hail of plagues upon
PharaohÂ’s land in Exodus, dismayingly cruel. More than once, he urges
Moses’ followers to put opposing nations “under the ban”—that is, to
massacre them, to commit genocide. “He will cast off many nations
from before you,” Moses promises in Deuteronomy:
And the Lord your God will give them before you and you shall strike
them down. You shall surely put them under the ban. You shall not seal
a covenant with them and shall show them no mercy.
In a footnote, Alter uneasily explains that one commentator calls
the emphasis on herem (“the ban”) “utopian” and “wishful thinking.”
He adds, “There is, thankfully, no archeological evidence that this
program of annihilation was ever implemented.” God advocates herem
not just for Canaanite foes but for Israelite cities that have
backslid into pagan practices: “You shall surely strike down the
inhabitants of that town by the edge of the sword, putting it under
the ban, it and everything in it, and its beasts, by the edge of the
sword.” Again, Alter pleads utopian thinking. Utopian also must be
stoning to death “a man or a woman who does evil in the eyes of the
Lord,” or cutting off the offending hand of a woman who, in trying
“to rescue her man from the hand of the one striking him,”
inadvertently seizes his genitals. Such punishments persist in parts
of the Middle East, though the Koran, a th ousand years younger than
the Pentateuch, is relatively lenient.
The LordÂ’s striking dead a number of hungry Israelites who have
begun to eat some sun-dried quail—“The meat was still between their
teeth, it had not yet been chewed, when the LordÂ’s wrath flared
against the people”—seems savage, as does the slaying of Korah,
Dathan, and Abiram, the leaders of some grumblers. In embarrassment,
before their consumption in GodÂ’s wrathful fire, Moses tells them,
“The Lord has sent me to do all these deeds. . . . It was not from my
own heart.” And God’s treatment of Moses, his servant and spokesman
through forty years of trial, puzzles the modern reader: Moses is
sentenced to die on Mt. Abarim, in sight of the Promised Land,
because he and his brother Aaron, in God’s words, “betrayed Me in the
midst of the Israelites through the waters of Meribath-Kadesh in the
Wilderness of Zin.” Beg Your pardon? Zin and Kadesh are mentioned in
Numbers in connection with a scouting party that came back and said
the Canaanites were too big to attack; the alarmed Israelites
expressed the view that it might be better to go back to Egypt. For
these qualms all the scouts but two, Caleb and Joshua, are slain by
God, and the wandering multitude is condemned to forty years of the
wilderness. Moses, though he does his best to soothe the indignant
deity, is contaminated by this collective faltering of faith, and is
left behind on the mountain.
The ferocity of this tribal God measures the ferocity of tribal
existence. In Exodus 3:14, when Moses asks God his name, the answer
in Hebrew, Â’Ehyeh-Â’Asher-Â’Ehyeh, has been commonly rendered i am that
i am but could be, Alter reports, simply i am, i am. An impression
grew upon me, as I made my way through these obdurate old texts, that
to the ancient Hebrews God was simply a word for what was: a universe
often beautiful and gracious but also implacable and unfathomable. In
this encompassing semi-darkness, the figures in the Bible pursue
difficulties oddly similar (compared with those of Greek gods and
aristocrats) to those in our own problematical, mostly domestic
lives, and in this they are the patriarchs and matriarchs of modern
fiction, which also offers to illuminate the human predicament. The
miracle of the Pentateuch is that, unlike the numerous other tribes
and gods that vitally fig ure in it, the Jews and their God have
survived three millennia. The IsraelitesÂ’ effort to claim and
maintain their Promised Land fuels a contemporary crisis and occupies
todayÂ’s painful headlines. It is still cruelly true that, as we read
in the Alter version of Numbers:
If you do not dispossess the inhabitants of the land from before
you, it will come about that those of them you leave will become
stings in your eyes and thorns in your sides, and they will be foes
to you on the land in which you dwell.
Links:
------
[1] http://condenet.com/
[2] http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/?041101crbo_books
[3] http://www.newyorker.com/main/start/
----- End forwarded message -----
Date: Mon, 25 Oct 2004 07:31:02 -0400
From: "Sandy P. Klein" <spklein52@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: SPKlein52@HotMail.com
Subject: NabokovXs translation of XEugene ...
To: spklein52@hotmail.com
[1] http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/?041101crbo_books[2] THE
GREAT I AM
New Yorker, NY - 6 hours ago
... However, in his very zeal to communicate the nuances of the
underlying Hebrew, Alter falls into the error of VLADIMIR NABOKOVÂ’s
translation of “Eugene ...
October 25, 2004 | home
[3]
THE GREAT I AMby JOHN UPDIKERobert AlterÂ’s new translation of the
Pentateuch.Issue of 2004-11-01
Posted 2004-10-25
In this age of widespread education and flagging creativity, new
translations abound. The old standbys who nurtured our
youth—Constance Garnett rendering the Russians, C. K. Scott Moncrieff
putting his spin on Proust, the Muirs translating Kafka, H. T.
Lowe-Porter doing Thomas Mann—are all being retired, with
condescending remarks about their slips and elisions, by successors
whose more modern versions infallibly miss, it seems to this possibly
crotchety scanner, the tone, the voice, the presence of the text that
we first read. In general—if it’s generalizations you want—the closer
the translator is in age to the translated, the more closely shared
their vision and style will be. The Modern Library chose to reprint
the 1700-03 translation of “Don Quixote” by Peter Motteux; after that
peppery stew of italicized names and apostrophe-bedeckÂ’d past tenses,
every other “Quixote” feels watered down.
Of all translations into English, the one most read and universally
admired is, of course, the King James Bible (1611), our languageÂ’s
lone masterpiece produced by committee, at least until this yearÂ’s
“9/11 Commission Report.” Nevertheless, new translations of the
Bible—the world’s best-seller, long out of copyright—tumble forth,
for the reasons, if any are offered, that contemporary scholarship
presents a superior understanding of ancient Hebrew and that
Renaissance English is increasingly, inconveniently archaic. The
Hebrew scholar and literary critic Robert Alter, in introducing his
thousand-page version, with copious commentary, of the first five
books of the Bible—commonly called the Pentateuch or Torah—under the
title “The Five Books of Moses” (Norton; $39.95), writes:
Broadly speaking, one may say that in the case of the modern
versions, the problem is a shaky sense of English and in the case of
the King James Version, a shaky sense of Hebrew. The present
translation is an experiment in re-presenting the Bible—and, above
all, biblical narrative prose—in a language that conveys with some
precision the semantic nuances and the lively orchestration of
literary effects of the Hebrew and at the same time has stylistic and
rhythmic integrity as literary English.
Professor Alter, whose earlier works include “Fielding and the
Nature of the Novel” (1968) and “A Lion for Love: A Critical
Biography of Stendhal” (1979), has been tilling the Biblical fields
ever since “The Art of Biblical Narrative” (1981) and “The Art of
Biblical Poetry” (1985). As his footnotes, which take up at least
half of all but a few pages, make clear, Alter is profoundly steeped
not just in the linguistic details of Hebrew but in the
nigh-overwhelming amount of previous commentary, including the
Midrash of rabbinical interpreters going back to the early centuries
of the Christian era. At the same time, he has, as his oeuvre shows,
an appetite for literary theory—“Motives for Fiction” (1984),
“Partial Magic: The Novel as Self-Conscious Genre” (1975)—and, as the
passage quoted above indicates, a resolute sense of the Biblical style
to be achieved.
He sees Biblical Hebrew as a “conventionally delimited language,
roughly analogous in this respect to the French of the neoclassical
theatre” and significantly though indeterminately distinct from the
vanished vernacular of three thousand years ago. (The vernacular
vocabulary, according to the Spanish Hebrew scholar Angel
Sáenz-Badillos, must have exceeded the Bible’s—a lexicon “so
restricted that it is hard to believe it could have served all the
purposes of quotidian existence in a highly developed society.”)
Alter has set himself to create a corresponding English—“stylized,
decorous, dignified, and readily identified by its audiences as a
language of literature,” with a “slight strangeness,” “beautiful
rhythms,” and other qualities (suppleness, precision, concreteness)
that “by and large have been given short shrift by translators with
their eyes on other goals.” Why should not Alter’s version, its
program so richly contemplated and persuasively outlined, become th e
definitive one, replacing not only the King James but the plethora of
its revised, uninspired, and “accessible” versions on the shelf?
Several reasons why not, in the course of my reading through this
massive tome (sold sturdily boxed, as if to support its weight),
emerged. The sheer amount of accompanying commentary and philological
footnotes is one of them. The fifty-four churchmen and scholars
empowered at a conference at Hampton Court in January of 1604 to
provide an authoritative English Bible had a clear charge: to supply
English readers with a self-explanatory text. When they encountered a
crux, they took their best guess and worked on; many of the guesses
can be improved upon now, but no suggestion of an unclear and
imperfect original was allowed to trouble the Word of God. AlterÂ’s
more academic and literary commission allows him to luxuriate in the
forked possibilities of the Hebrew text, in its oldest forms written
entirely in consonants, and without punctuation. Sample footnotes,
taken at random from Deuteronomy:
Some recent scholars have accepted Jacob MilgromÂ’s proposal that
here the verb q-r-b (“approach”) is used in a political extension of
its cultic meaning, “to encroach upon,” though there is no compelling
necessity to see that sense of the word in this verse.
The second of the two Hebrew words here, weÂ’oyveinu pelilim, is a
notorious crux, evidently already a source of puzzlement to the
ancient Greek translators. . . . If one notes that pelilim rhymes
richly with ’elilim, “idols,” and if one recalls this poet’s verbal
inventiveness in coining designations for the nonentity of the pagan
gods, “would-be gods” is a distinct possibility.
It is difficult for the reader, given the overload of elucidation
imposed upon the basic text, to maintain much momentum, and, indeed,
one finds welcome refuge from the tedium and harshness of some
Biblical passages in the companionable contemporary voice of the
learned commentator. However, in his very zeal to communicate the
nuances of the underlying Hebrew, Alter falls into the error of
Vladimir Nabokov’s translation of “Eugene Onegin”: in the effort to
achieve absolute fidelity, he settles on rather odd English.
Take AlterÂ’s version, for starters, of the opening verses of
Genesis:
When God began to create heaven and earth, and the earth then was
welter and waste and darkness over the deep and GodÂ’s breath hovering
over the waters, God said, “Let there be light.” And there was light.
The King James has it thus:
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the
face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the
waters.
And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
Alter is the more concise, and is not above duplicating certain
phrases of the King James, much as the royal committee drew upon the
translation of Tyndale. But AlterÂ’s syntax goes off the rails when
“God’s breath hovering over the waters” is tacked onto a series of
non-parallel nouns; by comparison, “And the Spirit of God moved upon
the face of the waters” is clearer narrative and great poetry. It may
stray minutely from the Hebrew but it is theologically intelligible.
Both translations can be usefully compared with that of Everett Fox,
also titled “The Five Books of Moses” and published in 1995. Alter
cites Fox as the outstanding exception to the general trend of a
blandly readable English Bible—an extremist after Martin Buber and
Franz Rosenzweig, whose German Bible “flaunts Hebrew etymologies,
preserves nearly all repetitions of Hebrew terms, and invents German
words.” Fox’s version, set in lines like poetry, reads:
At the beginning of GodÂ’s creating of the heavens and the earth,
when the earth was wild and waste,
darkness over the face of Ocean,
rushing-spirit of God hovering over the face of the waters—
God said: Let there be light! And there was light.
This is a relatively tame specimen; elsewhere, Fox liberally coins
compound adjectives like “heavy-with-stubbornness” and verbs like
“adulter”—the seventh commandment becomes “You are not to adulter.”
Alter is less extreme, but he does keep the ubiquitous
sentence-beginning “and,” derived from the Hebrew particle waw; he
retains emphatic repetitions, as in “she, she, too” and “this red red
stuff.” He strives to preserve ambiguities and puns in the original.
He conspicuously bends colloquial English in such renderings as:
“Pharaoh will lift up your head from upon you”; “The land in the
seven years of plenty made gatherings”; “A lion’s whelp is Judah, /
from the prey, O my son, you mount”; “Israel saw the great hand that
the Lord had performed against Egypt”; “Moses would speak, and God
would answer him with voice”; “Whether a son it gore or a daughter it
gore, according to this practice it shall be done to him”; “and a man
lie with her in seed-coupling”; “In the hand of the priest shall be
the bitter besetting water”; “And it happened that there were men who
were defiled by human corpse”; “‘Let us put up a head and r eturn to
Egypt’”; “And the Lord said to me, saying, ‘Long enough you have
swung round this high country.’” Alter has an annoying trick, no
doubt in deference to the Hebrew, of putting a comma where we expect
an article or preposition: “It was evening and it was morning, second
day”; “the tree of knowledge, good and evil.” Translating Exodus, he
persists in using, in reference to PharaohÂ’s heart, the verb
“toughened” where the usual translation uses “hardened” (“And
Pharaoh’s heart toughened”; “And the Lord toughened Pharaoh’s
heart”). He tests our knowledge of livestock terminology by employing
“get” as a noun, as in Deuteronomy 28:4: “Blessed the fruit of your
womb and the fruit of your soil and the fruit of your beasts, the get
of your herds and the offspring of your flock.”
A reader should, however, not shy from the rare but exact word, and
none of AlterÂ’s eccentricities of diction substantially undermine his
attempt to deliver a strongly rhythmic and ruggedly direct equivalent
of the Hebrew. But who will read it? Fanciers of sheer literature
will be put off by its bulk and its pedantic cross-weave, and the
millions of believers, Christian and Jewish, already have their
versions, with cherished, trusted phrasings. The Bible in its
centuries of recitation and memorization has generated a host of
familiar images that turn out to be mistranslations. JacobÂ’s ladder
is really, it seems, Jacob’s “ramp,” the word in Hebrew occurring
only in this instance and suggestive of a Mesopotamian ziggurat. Nor
did Jacob, dreaming his dream of angels ascending and descending,
have his head pillowed on a stone: “Rashi, followed by some modern
scholars, proposes that the stone is not placed under JacobÂ’s head
but alongside it, as a kind of protective barrier.” J oseph’s coat of
many colors has been altered to a mere “ornamented tunic.” Onan, it
turns out, was guilty not of onanism but, more likely, of prudent
coitus interruptus with his brotherÂ’s widow. Michelangelo was wrong:
Moses did not come down from the mountain with the second edition of
the Ten Commandments having sprouted horns, as recorded in the
Vulgate and AquilaÂ’s translation into the Greek. His face merely
glowed, from its recent exposure to the Divinity.
Reading through this book, or five books, is a wearying,
disorienting, and at times revelatory experience. Our interest trends
downhill. Of Genesis, Alter writes, “If this were the work of a single
writer, one would say he begins at the top of his form.” The Creation,
the Garden, the Fall, the Flood, the Tower of Babel, and the
patriarchal saga of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph make a more or
less continuous story. Rereading it awakened certain sensations from
my Sunday-school education, more than sixty years ago, when I seemed
to stand on the edge of a brink gazing down at polychrome miniatures
of abasement and terror, betrayal and reconciliation. Jacob deceiving
blind Isaac with patches of animal hair on the backs of his hands,
Joseph being stripped of his gaudy coat and left in a pit by his
brothers, little Benjamin being fetched years later by these same
treacherous brothers into the imperious presence of a mysterious
stranger invested with all Phara oh’s authority—these glimpses into a
world paternal to our own, a robed and sandalled world of origins and
crude conflict and direct discourse with God, came to me via flimsy
leaflets illustrating that weekÂ’s lesson, and were mediated by the
mild-mannered commentary of the Sunday-school teacher, a humorless
embodiment of small-town respectability, passing on conventional
Christianity by rote. Nevertheless, I was stirred and disturbed,
feeling exposed to the perilous basis beneath the surface of daily
routine, of practical schooling and family interchange and popular
culture.
The curious, heated familial closeness of the Biblical narrative
distinguishes it from other compilations of legend. Erich Auerbach,
in the first chapter of his masterly “Mimesis” (1946), compares
AbrahamÂ’s near-sacrifice of Isaac with an incident in the Odyssey,
and exclaims of the Biblical characters, “How much wider is the
pendulum swing of their lives than that of the Homeric heroes!” He
explains:
For they are bearers of the divine will, and yet they are fallible,
subject to misfortune and humiliation. . . . There is hardly one of
them who does not, like Adam, undergo the deepest humiliation—and
hardly one who is not deemed worthy of GodÂ’s personal intervention
and personal inspiration.
Leaving God out of it, Auerbach claims that the Biblical
protagonists give
a more concrete, direct, and historical impression than the figures
of the Homeric world—not because they are better described in terms
of sense (the contrary is the case) but because the confused,
contradictory multiplicity of events, the psychological and factual
cross-purposes, which true history reveals, have not disappeared in
the representation but still remain clearly perceptible.
In Exodus, dominated by Moses, the narrative begins to sour; the
warmth and humanity of Genesis drain away. Moses is IsraelÂ’s foremost
prophet, but he is not a patriarch, and lacks the charm that ancestors
possess. The intimate family scale of Genesis yields to something
cooler and more mechanical; Alter in his introduction speaks of a
“new wide-angle lens” and “the distancing of the central character
and the distancing of the figure of God.” Not that God is silent; he
has more to say than before or since. Moses is his mouthpiece and,
like any lawyer with a demanding client, sometimes loses his temper.
The long negotiation with Pharaoh over the release of the Jews from
captivity (chapters 7 to 14) is especially aggravating, as God sends
plague after plague upon Egypt, only to “toughen” Pharaoh’s heart,
each time, just as a deal seems cinched. The plea, in the King James
version, “Let my people go,” has become in Alter the more
businesslike “Send off My people.” God directs Moses to “tell in the
hearing of your son and your son’s son how I toyed with Egypt”; the
King James has “what things I have wrought in Egypt,” but Alter’s
“toyed” better catches the mood of mounting sadism and vengefulness,
up to God’s killing “every firstborn in the land of Egypt from the
firstborn of man to the firstborn of beast.” He vows, “From all the
gods of Egypt I will exact retribution.”
In the vaulted, newly fashioned skies over Genesis, God, as Auerbach
notes, “was not fixed in form and content, and was alone.” In the more
crowded and pluralistic world of Exodus, God appears to forget that He
is the object of a monotheistic cult. He competes with Pharaoh as an
equal. His first commandment declares him to be a jealous god. A
footnote to “Who is like You among the gods, O Lord,” admits, “Hebrew
writers had no difficulty in conceding the existence of other deities,
though always stipulating, as here, their absolute inferiority to the
God of Israel.” Not only does primitive polytheism haunt Exodus’s
long sojourn in the wilderness but there is a flavor of stage magic:
pillars of smoke and flame, rocks that gush water, manna from Heaven,
finger-writing in stone, and elaborate specifications for the Ark
containing the tablets of the Covenant and the tent enclosing the
Ark. The magic of equivalence roughly shapes justice: “You shall pay
a life for a life, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a hand for
a hand, a foot for a foot, a burn for a burn, a wound for a wound, a
bruise for a bruise.”
Strictures and specifications continue in Leviticus; indeed,
Leviticus contains little else, and reads like an instruction manual
for the emergent priestly class and its Levite assistants.
Multitudinous avoidances of impurity define the solidifying Israelite
identity. Unclean are: carcasses; menstruating women; men who have
just had a seminal emission; the meat of reptiles, amphibians, birds
of prey, pigs, bats, rats, animals that bring up the cud but lack
hooves, and animals that go on four paws. (From the injunction “You
shall not boil a kid in its mother’s milk,” presumably a pagan
delicacy, was derived the Jewish prohibition of any combination of
meat and dairy products.) A vast prophylaxis regulates every bodily
activity and constantly reminds the Israelites of their
responsibility: they must be kept pure, unique, chosen. An offender
shall be “cut off from his kin.” Amid these relentless pages of
exclusionary litany, it is a salutary shock to find the inclusive
injunc tion “And you shall love your fellow man as yourself.”
The Book of Numbers extends the enumerative trend with a proud
toting up of the Israelite tribes, reckoned to include more than six
hundred thousand adult males, and an account of conquests that
prepares us, Alter states, “for the defining moment of the crossing
of the Jordan, with Joshua in command.” In Deuteronomy, Moses
delivers a lengthy, highly rhetorical valedictory to the Israelites
as they prepare to cross the Jordan into the Promised Land. He
rehearses their forty years of wandering; he repeats laws enunciated
in Exodus and Leviticus; he threatens his audience with an outpouring
of curses. Consumption and jaundice, madness and blindness,
hemorrhoids and drought: “All these curses will come upon you and
pursue you and overtake you until you are destroyed.” Moses recites
two long and obscure poems that, dating back perhaps to the eleventh
century B.C., the time of the Judges, are among the oldest texts in
the Bible. The historical events, if any, behind the Biblical
descriptions of Exodus are dated to the thirteenth century B.C., and
the passionate rhetoric of Deuteronomy was meant, according to Alter,
“to persuade audiences in the late First Commonwealth and exilic
period of the palpable and authoritative reality of an event that
never occurred, or at any rate surely did not occur as it is
represented in this text.” The definitive collection and composition,
by priestly writers, of much of the Old Testament belongs to the sixth
and fifth centuries, in the Babylonian exile, after the descendants of
Abraham had seen, GodÂ’s promises to the contrary, Jerusalem conquered
and the Temple destroyed. The gathering fierceness and strictness of
the Torah are those of an embattled people and an embattled
priesthood.
In the course of the Pentateuch, GodÂ’s personality deteriorates. The
deity of Genesis—Who with His own hands fashions Adam from dust
(“humus” in one of Alter’s less happy improvements upon the King
James text) and Who strolls in the evening cool of Eden, teases Sarah
into geriatric childbearing, and wrestles the night away with her
grandson Jacob—becomes, after His implacable hail of plagues upon
PharaohÂ’s land in Exodus, dismayingly cruel. More than once, he urges
Moses’ followers to put opposing nations “under the ban”—that is, to
massacre them, to commit genocide. “He will cast off many nations
from before you,” Moses promises in Deuteronomy:
And the Lord your God will give them before you and you shall strike
them down. You shall surely put them under the ban. You shall not seal
a covenant with them and shall show them no mercy.
In a footnote, Alter uneasily explains that one commentator calls
the emphasis on herem (“the ban”) “utopian” and “wishful thinking.”
He adds, “There is, thankfully, no archeological evidence that this
program of annihilation was ever implemented.” God advocates herem
not just for Canaanite foes but for Israelite cities that have
backslid into pagan practices: “You shall surely strike down the
inhabitants of that town by the edge of the sword, putting it under
the ban, it and everything in it, and its beasts, by the edge of the
sword.” Again, Alter pleads utopian thinking. Utopian also must be
stoning to death “a man or a woman who does evil in the eyes of the
Lord,” or cutting off the offending hand of a woman who, in trying
“to rescue her man from the hand of the one striking him,”
inadvertently seizes his genitals. Such punishments persist in parts
of the Middle East, though the Koran, a th ousand years younger than
the Pentateuch, is relatively lenient.
The LordÂ’s striking dead a number of hungry Israelites who have
begun to eat some sun-dried quail—“The meat was still between their
teeth, it had not yet been chewed, when the LordÂ’s wrath flared
against the people”—seems savage, as does the slaying of Korah,
Dathan, and Abiram, the leaders of some grumblers. In embarrassment,
before their consumption in GodÂ’s wrathful fire, Moses tells them,
“The Lord has sent me to do all these deeds. . . . It was not from my
own heart.” And God’s treatment of Moses, his servant and spokesman
through forty years of trial, puzzles the modern reader: Moses is
sentenced to die on Mt. Abarim, in sight of the Promised Land,
because he and his brother Aaron, in God’s words, “betrayed Me in the
midst of the Israelites through the waters of Meribath-Kadesh in the
Wilderness of Zin.” Beg Your pardon? Zin and Kadesh are mentioned in
Numbers in connection with a scouting party that came back and said
the Canaanites were too big to attack; the alarmed Israelites
expressed the view that it might be better to go back to Egypt. For
these qualms all the scouts but two, Caleb and Joshua, are slain by
God, and the wandering multitude is condemned to forty years of the
wilderness. Moses, though he does his best to soothe the indignant
deity, is contaminated by this collective faltering of faith, and is
left behind on the mountain.
The ferocity of this tribal God measures the ferocity of tribal
existence. In Exodus 3:14, when Moses asks God his name, the answer
in Hebrew, Â’Ehyeh-Â’Asher-Â’Ehyeh, has been commonly rendered i am that
i am but could be, Alter reports, simply i am, i am. An impression
grew upon me, as I made my way through these obdurate old texts, that
to the ancient Hebrews God was simply a word for what was: a universe
often beautiful and gracious but also implacable and unfathomable. In
this encompassing semi-darkness, the figures in the Bible pursue
difficulties oddly similar (compared with those of Greek gods and
aristocrats) to those in our own problematical, mostly domestic
lives, and in this they are the patriarchs and matriarchs of modern
fiction, which also offers to illuminate the human predicament. The
miracle of the Pentateuch is that, unlike the numerous other tribes
and gods that vitally fig ure in it, the Jews and their God have
survived three millennia. The IsraelitesÂ’ effort to claim and
maintain their Promised Land fuels a contemporary crisis and occupies
todayÂ’s painful headlines. It is still cruelly true that, as we read
in the Alter version of Numbers:
If you do not dispossess the inhabitants of the land from before
you, it will come about that those of them you leave will become
stings in your eyes and thorns in your sides, and they will be foes
to you on the land in which you dwell.
Links:
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[1] http://condenet.com/
[2] http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/?041101crbo_books
[3] http://www.newyorker.com/main/start/
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