I recently re-read Lenart de Regt’s paper critiquing Alter’s translation of
Genesis, and specifically his use of word-order. One thing that Alter doesn’t
really discuss is how English handles topic, contrastive focus, and salient
information. In order to properly critique Alter one would need to know this.
Who has done work on discourse analysis of English?
REF:
Hebrew Syntactical Inversions and their Literary Equivalence in Robert
Alter’s Translation of Genesis, unpublished paper from seminar on Hebrew
Discourse Features at HG, UK, Autumn 2002.