First appeared in the Boston Globe.
www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/09/02/qa_with_robert_alter
ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS OF the Hebrew Bible -- most notably the
King James version -- have been key not only for the believers who look to them
for instruction and inspiration, but to the evolving literary and cultural
sensibility of the West. It's no wonder, then, that the radical approach to
translating biblical texts that Robert Alter has taken -- first in "The
Five Books of Moses" (2004) and now in "The Book of Psalms" --
has been greeted with responses ranging from delight to irritation.
As Alter explained when I called him in Berkeley, where he
has taught literature since 1967, he was drawn to biblical translation almost
despite himself, propelled by a sense that recent translations were badly
flawed. Often, translations lacked sensitivity to English literary values,
modeling themselves on the lingo of "high-school textbooks, bureaucratic
directives, and ordinary conversation." And almost always, according to
Alter, translators simply failed to recognize that the Hebrew Bible, whatever
its religious content, was a collection of masterpieces composed by authors who
took "writerly pleasure" in their work.
The Psalms, he writes, are among the oldest of biblical
texts, dating from the late Bronze Age and reflecting a worldview that can
often feel "quite alien to modern people." In addition to rescuing
and protecting, the God of these poems is routinely expected to execute
terrible acts of vengeance.
IDEAS: John Updike, in his review of "The Five Books of
Moses," wondered who would read it, since, after all, "millions of
believers, Christian and Jewish, already have their versions, with cherished,
trusted phrasings."
ALTER: In fact, I get very enthusiastic responses from
seriously religious readers.
IDEAS: Jews and Christians?
ALTER: Jews and Christians. Even if your interest in the
Bible is overridingly religious, you get a much better handle on what the
writers are actually saying -- the sometimes paradoxical, contradictory nature
of things they say -- if you follow how the narrative and poetry works.
Some e-mails report that Bible study groups in synagogues
are using my text. I got an e-mail from a nun saying she was grateful for
"The Five Books of Moses" and hoped I would go on to translate the
Psalms -- which, as it happens, I wound up doing -- since they were so
important in her devotions.
And I find that people who don't have a religious stake in
the Bible feel that its greatness as literature is brought home to them by what
I've done. I was almost flabbergasted by the enthusiastic response of people
like Seamus Heaney to the "The Five Books of Moses."
IDEAS: Did you grew up with Hebrew?
ALTER: I had the classic American bar mitzvah, which meant I
could read the Hebrew alphabet and knew about 100 words. Then I got into a
Hebrew class for kids who had just finished their bar mitzvah. Then, in my
mid-teens, I went to a Hebrew-speaking summer camp, where I got fluency in the
modern language.
IDEAS: Why did you get so strongly drawn to the Bible as literature
when you did, in the 1970s?
ALTER: Since my late teens I've been fascinated with
biblical narrative -- why it seems so great and yet also so simple. I couldn't
explain that. Then, in the late '70s, when I was writing regularly for
Commentary, the idea popped into my head that maybe I could say something about
biblical narrative.
I wrote a piece arguing that biblical scholars lacked any
sort of literary approach, and got a shower of letters. Then I wrote a second
article, and my book "The Art of Biblical Narrative," all the time
thinking, this isn't my field, I'm going to get this out of my system. But I
found the intrinsic literary and intellectual interest of the biblical stories
and poems so compelling that I've kept working at it ever since.
IDEAS: You've written that reading the Bible "helped
shape our collective lives, and it may still have a vital task to
perform." That's a bit mysterious. What do you mean?
ALTER: I think certain modes of imagination by which we
conceive who we are, the nature of the human animal, once they get started in
the culture, maintain a certain momentum and continue to shape us.
IDEAS: Why, in "The Book of Psalms," do you pretty
much eliminate all reference to "sin"?
ALTER: My goal in this experiment is, in modern English
that's readable and that is poetry, to take the Psalms back to the mind-set,
the verbal texture of the original.
So, because of the social, legal, and political framework of
the Psalms, I prefer words like "crime" and "wrongdoing"
instead of "sin." The wrongdoers are conspiring, maybe trying to
kill, maybe fixing the legal system against someone. Those acts need words more
oriented to society and less to God and man.
IDEAS: What is God to the Psalmists? When they write about
thirsting or yearning for God, what do they mean?
ALTER: In the Psalms, they're thirsting for the being they
conceive of as having consciousness and as caring about humankind. They're
searching for the being that has created them, holds them to a certain standard
of ethical behavior, and at the same time sustains them through the terrors and
hardships of life.
IDEAS: Aren't we very far away from that worldview, from
believing we really have that kind of pact with a God?
ALTER: Putting it personally, I find that because of what
happens in the world, to people around me, and in events like the Holocaust, I
really can't sustain belief in a personal God, a God who intervenes, who
rewards and punishes, as the Psalmists do. And I should underline that there
are some biblical books which did not accept this view, either, most notably
Job, which seems to be directly debating it.
IDEAS: Let's come back to Updike for a minute. One thing
that exasperated him about "The Five Books of Moses" was, he wrote,
"The sheer amount of accompanying commentary and philological
footnotes." That feature is shared by your Psalms, where commentary is on
the same page as translated text.
ALTER: Yes, Updike huffed and puffed about the commentary:
Why do we need commentary? The King James version didn't have it.
I would propose that's a particularly Christian way to look
at the Bible. The idea of vernacular Bibles, beginning with Luther, was that
the reader would have an unmediated relation to Scripture. But the way a
traditional Jew in a synagogue or yeshiva sees and engages with the text is
different. The standard rabbinical Bible has a small lozenge of the biblical
text, all in Hebrew, in the middle of the page. Opposite are two different
Aramaic translations. Along the margins and underneath you have Rashi, Abraham
Ibn Ezra, and other commentators.
These commentaries, by the way, don't agree with each other;
they're a sort of running debate around the text. I find it very enlivening.
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