Biblical Hebrew Forum

["B. M. Rocine" <brocine AT twcny.rr.com>]

Hi Clay,

I have been taking much of the summer--when I haven't been painting the
house<ugh!>-- to read Alter's Genesis.  I have the HB in one hand and his
translation/commentary in the other.  (My wife even asked me what is taking
me so long to read "that book.")  It's fun!  I find his translation very
readable and uniquely sensitive to the literary achievement of the Bible's
writers/redactors (what ever you want to call them).

This is the thing with Alter:  he is a literary critic by trade.  With the
special sensitivity that comes from his guild, he doesn't want the delicious
ambiguities, patterns, repetitions, concreteness, figures, or syntax to be
obscured by a translation that *explains* or paraphrases under the rationale
of dynamic equivalence.  Thus he refers to the "heresy of explanation."   He
considers explanation (in the guise of translation) to be a breach of trust
in the text to communicate for itself.  With the expression "heresy of
explanation," which he also uses in the introduction to _The David Story_, a
translation of Samuel, he is alluding to a famous essay of the literary
critic W.K. Wimsatt entitled "The Heresy of Paraphrase" which argued that
paraphrasing a poem violated the poem's own complex meanings.  Of course, he
"explains" in his extensive notes.  He is not against explanation per se.
He is against passing off explanation as translation.

I think one of the most powerful arguments that Alter offers for translating
the Hebrew somewhat literally or "woodenly" is his observation that the
narrative of the Bible is achieved with such a limited Hebrew lexicon.  The
creators of the Biblical narrative worked within the constraint of a
literary convention that esteemed economy in diction.  It seems sometimes
that the variety of stories are expressed by the same words and structures
re-used.  Alter does not want a translation to spoil this ancient
achievement by relying on or showing off a vast lexicon in a target language
like English.  He finds that the King James translation is one of the best
in preserving this leanness of diction/structure.

Shalom,
Bryan

You wrote:

-----
> Was reading Robert Alter's "To The Reader" in "Genesis" (Norton 1996) and
> found some of his comments eyebrow raising.
>
> For example, he advocates rendering a repititous Hebrew word with a
> repititous English equivalent. He firmly denounces altering the English
> equivalent based on contextual considerations.
>
> At first glance this sounds like concordant translation.
>
> Has translation theory come full circle while I was napping?
>
> Is Robert Alter using some irony here? Overstating his position as a
protest
> against the bland flat insipid fare that we find in the mainstream English
> versions of the Pentateuch?
>
> Good reading anyway.
>
> Thanks to David Gray for reminding me to read Robert Alter.
>
> greetings,
> Clay Bartholomew
>
>


B. M. Rocine
Living Word Church
6101 Court St. Rd.
Syracuse, NY 13206

ph: 315.437.6744
fx: 315.437.6766