Abstract
Among Robert Alter’s many publications, his distinctive contribution to biblical scholarship goes back to The Art of Biblical Narrative (1981, revised 2011) and The Art of Biblical Poetry (1985), and he has hit the headlines more recently with the publication of his three-volume The Hebrew Bible: a translation with commentary (2018). The Art of Bible Translation contains a fascinating personal account of the problems and pleasures he has faced. An ‘autobiographical prelude’ explains how he was initially trained in European, American and modern Hebrew literature and later encouraged by positive emails from Jewish and Christian readers of his publications on the Hebrew Bible. He then introduces this study with a fierce criticism of the King James Version (1611), the Jewish Publication Society translation (1988), the Revised English Bible (1970) and other versions, under the title ‘The eclipse of Bible translation’. For example, the King James translators, ‘following the Vulgate, transposed concrete terms into theologically fraught ones: “soul” for nefesh and “salvation” for yeshu’ah’ (pp. 7–8), and among ‘real howlers’ they ignore the Hebrew word for Leviathan in Job 3.8.
The five chapters that follow contain an overview of the principal aspects of biblical style as keys to the most accurate translation. Syntax concerns word order and the repetition of ‘and’, which produces force and subtlety in the original Hebrew but is almost always avoided in English translations. A chapter on word choice highlights numerous inaccuracies in English translations: for example, ‘the utmost cloud’ captures more of the original than ‘thick cloud’ (Exod. 19.9) (pp. 47f). The special problems for translators that are caused by sound play and word play in Hebrew are discussed at length with helpful suggestions of how to solve them, as in ‘welter and waste’ for tohu wavohu (Gen. 1.2) and ‘he hoped for justice and, look, jaundice, for righteousness and, look, wretchedness’ (Isa. 5.7). Next, on a chapter on rhythm, Alter suggests that the King James Version succeeded in reproducing in English some approximate equivalents to Hebrew prose rhythms, but modern translations ignore it. A final chapter illustrates how the language of dialogue – between Abraham and Sarah (Gen. 18), Joseph and his brothers (Gen. 42), and Jephthah and his daughter (Judg. 1), for example – is more difficult to translate than prose narrative, but not impossible, and can express the speaker’s confused mind, his ‘anguished father’s psychology’, dramatic irony and much else.
Alter demonstrates how most translators ignore these subtle characteristics of biblical Hebrew, ‘domesticating’ their English rather than ‘foreignizing’ it (p. 22), producing a ‘rather undistinguished contemporary text’, quite unlike the original literary work composed in the Ancient Near East (p. 28). Although there is a brief, not entirely negative, comment on recent feminist Bibles and colloquial American Bibles (p. 25), there is no reference to the recent prominence in biblical scholarship of the Bible in literature, visual exegesis and other areas of reception history down the ages to modern Judaism and Christianity.