Biblical Hebrew Forum

[CS Bartholomew <jacksonpollock AT earthlink.net>]

On 8/14/03 12:55 AM, "Jan-Wim Wesselius" <jwwesselius AT mail.thuk.nl> wrote:

> This is an interesting question. The problem is largely dependent on
> Biblical Hebrew prose style, where repetition is often highly meaningful. n
> an ideal world we would know which repetitions of words, expressions and
> clauses are meaningful on the literary level and which are not, so that we
> could consistently translate only the first group with the same word etc. in
> the target language. As this is apparently not the case, we must either
> follow Alter, with grave consequences for the readability of the
> translation, or work out a compromise, which may have to be modified with
> the progress of literary studies.

Jan-Wim,

Haven't actually read Alter's translation yet, but I suspect that he does
not apply this principle woodenly. A local recognition of the significance
of repeated terms which serve a  literary purpose, sounds like a good plan.
How local is local? This might end up being a sticky problem. One might
discover a term which is repeated throughout the Pentateuch which serves a
literary purpose but if the contextual meaning of this term makes concordant
translation counter productive semantically, the trade off between the
meaning and the literary structure is going to cause heart burn for a lot of
SIL people. 

However, SIL people are not in the same world as Robert Alter. His target
audience is not tribal cultures getting the bible for the first time. Alter
is translating for a highly literate audience which has had the bible for
eons in their own language. So target audience is a big issue here.  Just
because I like Everett Fox's "Five Books of Moses" does not mean that I
would give a copy to someone who just arrived from Cambodia.

> 
> Note also that the pressure on the translator to translate one and the same
> word in Hebrew with different words in the target language becomes
> especially heavy in cases of intertextual connection, where it is often
> characteristic of the words in question that they do not fit very well in
> their present context ...

Yes, ambiguity in the original can produce incomprehensible text in a
translation if one carries Alter's suggestions to extremes. But not even a
Berkley processor is going to do that, is he?

> 
> Maybe we should in cases such as the first one take for granted that the
> English translation sounds unusual, if only because the choice of words in
> the Hebrew is unexpected also. But in cases like the last one it seems
> impossible to render the allusion in English in any meaningful way. I would
> hesitate to translate the same Hebrew with the same English word in every
> case, but it should certainly be done in every case where it can serve to
> express literary features of the original.

There are some folks on this list which might not be willing to go this far.

I think Alter is highlighting some issues which are well worth careful
consideration. I was already leaning in Alter's direction but was kind of
shocked to find someone with good credentials making this proposal.

I have some more reading to do, before commenting more on this.

Thanks for your comments. Thanks to the others who contributed.




greetings,
Clay Bartholomew