Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter Kirk <peter AT qaya.org>]

On 22/11/2005 00:26, B. M. Rocine wrote:

> Hi Peter,
>
> I think you may be confusing Fox's translation, which is quirky, with 
> Alter's, which is not.  Alter is a fine literary critic who often amazes 
> me with his power of expression.  If there is one thing Alter is 
> well-equipped to do, it is to write.  He's a master at the English language.
>
>  
If anyone is confusing them, it is Bill, for he wrote of "Alter's 
slightly quirky translation style". What I said was that Alter's 
translation was "bad English", and I was referring to Alter, not Fox.

But let's examine the hypothesis that Alter is "a master at the English 
language". Start with the first two verses of his translation:

> “When God began to create heaven and earth, and the earth then was 
> welter and waste and darkness over the deep and God’s breath hovering 
> over the waters, God said, ‘Let there be light’. And there was light.”


That's as much as I can find online, but that is enough to prove my point.

"The earth then was welter"? What on earth does that mean? It may sound 
nice and poetic with its alliteration with "waste", but as far as I am 
concerned it is nonsense, a bit like Jabberwocky. Then we have "and 
God’s breath hovering over the waters" with no main verb, a clear 
grammatical error which would be marked wrong in first grade. (Well, I 
suppose the point could be that "the earth then was... God's breath...", 
but this is both bad punctuation and a translation error.) This is no 
more and no less than bad English, and would be marked as such by any 
teacher. I suppose there is a fashion in certain literary circles for 
writers to ignore the basic rules of English and still be considered 
"literary", but I don't judge English by those people's standards.

--
Peter Kirk
peter AT qaya.org (personal)
peterkirk AT qaya.org (work)
http://www.qaya.org/