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  • From: "Harold R. Holmyard III" <hholmyard AT ont.com>
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Review Alter's translation
  • Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2005 15:33:30 -0600

Dear Bill,

There is a review of Alter's translation of the Torah at:-

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,923-1419595,00.html

Those who like paraphrases like the New Living "Translation"
you will probably dislike this review. I haven't purchased Alter's
translation yet, I expect when I buy my next batch of statistics
textbooks in February from Amazon I'll add a copy to my list then.

It seems to me, from what I've read about Alter's work, it is a welcome
counter-balance to the excesses of paraphrases posing as translations
which are striving for originality and novelty in English. In the words
of the reviewer:-

There is nothing worse than a religious translation that reaches down to
its intended audience with modernisms and colloquialisms; for one thing,
modernisms and colloquialisms date so quickly.

I heartily agree.

HH: Thanks for the review. I received this book as a Christmas present and am still reading the introduction. Robert Alter basically accepts the JEDP hypothesis, which substantially diminishes my trust in him. He also takes a big swipe at translations that try to do something with words like YD, rendering the idea rather than the literal "hand." While there is something to be said for stylistic authenticity that may be preserved through literal translation, I personally was not impressed with Alter's handling of the issue. He makes it seem that modern translations do the reader a great disservice by giving functional translations rather than a literal "hand" every time YD appears. Yet the lexicons say that the meaning varies. He tries to argue that this is a deeply literary feature of biblical writer's style that draws all sorts of necessary connections that should not be broken. There is validity in preserving for the readers connections that the writer intended, but it seems to me that the word "hand" appears so much in Hebrew because the language had a limited vocabulary. They used one word to serve purposes for which we in English have dozens. Biblical Hebrew uses a tiny vocabulary for the most part. It takes almost no special ability to uniformly translate YD as hand, and it may not do the reader any special service. It is certainly debatable and no new achievement, since, as Alter admits, the KJV did this, for the most part. I'll have to see how the translation actually reads.

Yours,
Harold Holmyard





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