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TRANSLATING THE HEBREW BIBLE from the Bible, to English- speaking people, is the Authorized Version rendering of the p= THE BEST-KNOWN PASSAGE 23rd Psalm: ‘The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want, He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: hy ee pastures: he Ieadeth me beside the stil He restoreth my soul: name’s sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou are with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou annointest my head with oil: my cup runneth over, ; Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and { will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever. he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his This is an English poem, grave and pellucid in style, and it has left a permanent influence on the imagery of English poetry and the rhythms of English prose. The tone, one might say, is Anglican, the same tone that we find in that great Church of England poet, George Herbert Al Hcbreye atta version become an Anglican poem; it is a rendering of the original Hebrew, true enough, but the rendering is stamped with the temper of those who made it. Phrases such as “green pastures and ‘still waters’, which are so important in setting the tone of the whole poem, are not, in fact, literal renderings of the Hebrew ‘binoth deshe’ and ‘al mai m'nuchoth’, which mean, respectively, ‘by pastures of tender grass’ and “by waters cof quietness’. The Douay version, translating from. the Latin Vulgate, renders the second verse: ‘In place of pasture there he hath placed me. Upon the water of refection he hath brought me up’, and though the literal meaning is similar, the lyric flow has disappeared. a The difference is not doctrinal. The Anglican calm of Authorized Version rendering does not arise from the fact tl 191 LITERARY Essays translators were drawing on the special stianity, for mant 1560, which was the work of P Anglican compromise and who would not have ace they had known of it. The Geneva version begins: * my shepherd, I shall not want. He maketh me to Pasture, and leadeth me by the soule,...” The English lorde is my pastore and nritans who worked before at Test stil waters. He re h psalter of 1530 begins the d feader: wherfore I shal not want made me to feade on a full plenteous batle grownde: dryve and retche me at layser by the swete ryvers? The personality of the psalm, as it were, differs in ene ing. In the Vulgate the notion of ‘Shepherd’ disappeatse and instead of the psalm opening “The Lord is my sh shall not want’, it begins: ‘Dominus regit me, et nihil (The Lord rules me, and nothing will be lac “green pastures’ of the Geneva and Authorized v Vulgate the much more factual, even technical, while ‘super aquam refectioni’ (‘upon the water o we have seen Douay translate it) stresses the rev the waters and says nothing about their stillne of the psalm is more businesslike and practica Luther’s German version has the greenness, | fresh rather than still: “Er weidet mich auf ei hret mich zum frischen Wasser? This is not too ‘the Authorized Version, though the first verse Herr ist mein Hirte; mir wird nichts mangeln’— the English, due largely to the accumulation of ¢ wird nichts mangeln’ is a clumsy mouthful beside with its liquid ‘I’ and ‘w’. And no Et perfect simplicity of the Hebrew: “Yahw If you cannot achieve the simplicity you can always try for a quite different e i TRANSLATING THE HEBREW BIBLE 1s eae 1 m’a Etabli fortfiante. This is translated from the Vulgate equally removed in tone ftom both. NY blance to the efficient German or he verse reads like a line ftom a neo-clasg, dans un liew abondant en Paturages: il ma dev pres d'une not the Hebrew, but it j lor does it bear a ie limpid English. The first imagine someone inquiring of the heroine: pees a mos —Phédre, say, ‘Ah Phédre, who leads you yonder through the dark? and Phédre answering, C'est le Seigneur qui me conduits ("Tis the noble lord Miwa can ick mfg ag : Further, ‘eau fortifiante’ suggests smelling salts, and the ‘liew ah dant en pdturages’ suggests Marie Antoinette pis ‘in eo a milkmaid rather than the realities of pastoral litein oe a Every language, and sometimes every age, produces its own Bible. The Authorized Version, with which English-speaking readers are most familiar, represents the final successful attempt, ‘er nearly a hundred years of continuous effort, to put the Bible into an English which does no violence to the natural genius of the language: the Hebrew Bible is in this version a work of English literature, and has all the assurance of an original work. can see this assurance developing through the earlier versions. Here is the Authorized Version rendering of Joshua 24.26: “And Joshua wrote these words in the book of the law of God, and et it up there under an oak, that was by d This is a simple enough sentence, flowing naturally with nothing forced or artificial about it. Compare it with the version im Matthew’s Bible of 1537: ‘And Josua wrotte these wordes in the boke of the law of God, and toke a great stonne and pitched it on ende in the sayde place euen. es os that stode sanctuary of the Lorde.’ There is a verbosity et aiae the eselaroes anxiety to get in all of his original, and the tone is somewhat forced, the passage is not yet acclimatized in English. took a great stone, and s the sanctuary of the Lor done in workmanlike prose, 104 LITERARY BSSAYS The Hebrew Bible, when properly domiciled in century English (and sevent Johnson in his Dictionary dre eenth century English seer ‘w on as the great standard of Basie vocabulary, has become the norm of English *eligious speedy has a quality, a tone, even a meaning, as different from that of dy original as from that of any other translation. Luther Bible which is the German equivalent of the English Authorized Version, gives a very different feel to the passage from Joshua which T have Just quoted: ‘Und Josua schrieb dies alles ins Gesetzbuch Gottes; ing riahn einen grossen Stein und richtete thn auf daselbt einge Eig bey dem Heilighhum des Herm war.’ How different in cx “ meaning is ‘ins Gesetzbuch Gottes’ from. ‘in the book of the law of God’, and again how different both these renderings ane frou three stark Hebrew words, ‘b'scfer torath elohim’. The Germa stark in its own way, but with the starkness of a report by an efficient civil servant. The English, with its long rum monosyllables, each a word of elemental significance (‘b ‘law’, ‘God’,) has certain overtones of familiarity, or at least ¢ 7 simple customariness, for all its dignity. Yet Hebrew, Authe Version and Luther are more like each other than cither is English version of Monsignor Knox, who renders the the book which contained the divine law’, adding changing a noun phrase into an adjective and in so do Sophisticated abstractness to the whole notion, A good test of the intention of any translator, or gt translators, is their rendering of the very first verse 0 Bible. The Authorized Version translates: ‘In the b created the heaven and the earth’, and you might th was the only possible way to translate a very original (unless, perhaps, you decided to make because of the form ‘shamayin’). Monsignor X renders the sentence: ‘God, at the beginning heaven and earth’, which is a very different idiom of didactic elegance rather than of pr The French has something of Monsign commencement Dien créa le ciel et la terre’, TRANSLATING THE HeMnEW prayp seonounced int the following verse: ‘La tome dh i Fie; les téntbres couvraient la face de Cabimes et Prone et foe pons Tes es. "The difference between this nc {rersion—‘And the earth was without form, anda ness was upon the face of the earth, And thecrsy yn dake upon the face of the waters’, is the differencetarnnse ne moved Homer, between the artificial epic and the natural ane ee auch a phrase as ‘les téndbres couvraient ta face de Pabtngt ieee come out of Victor Hugo, Luther is much more like te nine ized Version: ‘Am Anfang schuf Gott Hinmel und Bide, Bak pe ide war wiste und ler, nd es war finstr auf der Tees und den aig Goties schibebete ai in eee a The interesting word in the German is ‘schwebete (hg i suspense, hovered) as a rendering of the Hebrew ‘merachephth. Both the Authorized Version and Douay render simply ‘moved while the Vulgate has ‘ferebatur’ (was bore), translated in the French version as ‘était porté’. There is a long exegetical tradition, both Jewish and Christian, attached to this word. The great eleventh century Jewish commentator Solomon ben Isaac (gener ally known as Rashi) explains that the Throne of Glory was suspended in the air and hovered over the face of the waters, sustained by the breath (the Hebrew ‘ruach’ means both ‘breath’ and ‘spirit’) of God and God’s command, like a dove hovering over the nest. Basil and other patristic commentators render ‘incubabat’, which again has the notion of brooding and hatching. And in Paradise Lost Milton (who knew: Hebrew) wrote of the Holy Spirit: ‘Thou from the first Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread Doverlike satst brooding on the vast Abyss ‘And mad’st it pregnant. Sir Thomas Browne, 10. his Religio Medici, has the sentence: per is that gentle heat that brooded on the waters, and in oE day: hatched the world” And Andrew Marvell, in his Poa Waterfall’, has the following lines: 196 LITERARY ESSAYS Unlless that spirit lead his mind Which first upon thy face did move, And hatch’d all with his quickning love, In the face of this strong dition in favour of the brooding and hatching as impli ied in ‘merachepheth’, the ized Version translators stuck to the simple ‘moved’, interesting, for as a rule the use of biblical ideas of English literature after 1611 came through the Authori; There was, in fact, no word which would express in varied suggestions attached to the original, and rather t violence to the language, the translators kept the general word, ‘moved’. It is testimony to the store 1 simple and idiomatic English. Consider another example. Most of us know the the goth chapter of Isaiah from Handel’s magnific ‘Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people’, in his Me: of that passage in English has a grand cadence t climax on ‘her iniquity is pardoned’ and dying a afterwards to a perfect close. (Handel, who the climax, left out the closing phrase.) mfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your G ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and ery unto: accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned: for she has hand double for all her sins, i S F The meaning of the fine opening phrase is not « to mean ‘Comfort yourselves, my people’, but in & not reflexive and the sense is, ‘Comfort my people the prophet)’. The Authorized Version pa guity, not this time in order to keep the indivi but for the sake of the cadence, (There is ¢ believing that they deliberately tried to i original Hebrew, and put in the ambiguous would correspond in its cadence with TRANSLATING THE HEBREW BIBLE cansolamini popule meus, dicit Deus ders: ca re peuple he ceremonial note of the Englall 44 ; ae (though the Latin a in epeers in the utilitarian more completely, in the elegant French, "The gag eve sounds to English ears rather like a ticket eget ides, politely to a crowd of customers that all his eben ae BAER out , a vester,” which the French ten. » consolez-vous, dit votre Dien? ion, ; and they must comfort themselves as best th : ; ey can. L I a lowing the Hebrew meaning) renders: “Tras trdstet, as a] pri ever Got which is forceful and effective, ‘The Gemma ; } continues: “Redet mit Jerusalem freundlich und prediget ihr, dass ihre ve | Ritterse haft cin Ende hat, denn ihre Missethat ist vergeben; denn sie hat : ziveyfiltiges empfangen von der Hand des Herm, um alle re Siinde? a This sounds a bit like a list of instructions issued in triplicate to subordinate officials, but it has good prose rhythm and a fine e solidity. Solidity is perhaps the characteristic quality of Luther's a Bible. The English Bible, at least in the Authorized Version, has y a flowing limpidity combined with occasional ritual overtones; the French Bible is elegant and polished and discreet; the German Bible has a solid middle-class ring about it: it is a book for substantial biirgerliche readers who stand no nonsense. A simple Bible, a polite Bible, a bourgeois Bible—and the Hebrew Bible is none of these. ‘Another test is the famous and difficult one from the last ! chapter of Ecclesiastes. The Authorized Version reads: ‘ ble, and the strong men ; In the day when the keepers of the house shall tremble, | shall bev themselves, and the grinders cease because ey are Fels and iiss 2 1 of the windows be darkened, “aa ee ‘hall be shut in the strets, when the sound ofthe grinding i Jow, and he shall rise up at the voice of the bird, and all the daughters of music i lows a en eeeae ey shall be afisd ofthat whch big a fas alba tte ish, and the grass burden, the almond tree shall flourish, and oe it fil: because man goeth to his long homes an the Sout che streets: — ir the silver cord be loos : ee broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at ° 198 LITERARY ESSAYS Pouay, rendering literally from the Vulgate, reads: When the keepers of the house shall tremble, and the ine geet and the grinders shall be idle in a small namaber, and they ‘thas ia through the holes shall be darkene: And they shall shut the doors in the street, when the grinders voice shall ird, and all the daughters of muse low, and they shall rise up at the voice of the bi shall grow deaf. ‘And they shal fear high things, and they shall be afraid in the way, the tree shall flourish, the locust shall be made fat, and the caper-tree shall he destroyed : because man shall go into the house of his eternity, and the moutnes, shall go round about in the street. : Before the silver cord be broken, and the golden fillet shrink and. Pitcher be crushed at the fountain, and the wheel be broken upon the The obscurity is equal in both versions, ‘The Authorized sion makes capital out of the obscurity by choosing words wh although simple in themselves, have Overtones of vague sug, tion. “And all the daughters of music shall be brought lone more suggestive than the matter-of-fact ‘shall grow deaf? Vulgate, and ‘or ever the silver cord be loosed’ more than ‘before the silver cord be broken’, Douay tries to true sense out of the words by rendering each one correctness; the Authorized Version, while as literal as chooses words which suggest meanings even when significance is obscure. ‘Thus in the Authorized Ve siastes is an English prose poem, and in the Dot Ecclesiastes is a very competent rendering of a dif text. Dr Robert Gordis, in his edition and translatio published in New York in 1945, gives us the n view of what the Hebrew really means: In the day when the watchmen of the house tren And the strong men are bent, . And the grinding maidens cease, for they a And the ladies peering through the lattices When the doubled doors on the street And the voice of the mill becomes low. One wakes at the sound of a bird, TRANSLATING THE HEBREW fr BLE And all the daughters of son, cong. are laid Jo ‘When one fears to climb a heak gis And terrors lurk in a walk, ie pals grows white like ripe almond-blos he frame, bent like a grasshoy id-blossom, ‘asshopper, becor And the eaperbery canna loeee es eaeden, : sire, So man goes to his eternal home i While the hired mourners walk about in the street, ‘ = rae This certainly clears up many obscurities, Much of th IY gestiveness is gone, but we really do know what the pease. Sh Be : t ) asa : about. To read this after reading the Authorized ors actin looking at a distant mountain view after the mist h: eee a ‘a . i e mist has clear fhe sum has come out; in the mist it seemed wondleel romantic, but we could not make out the individual features of . +e Re a = though the Authorized Version » Tea pond more often than they think to the vague thrills of the mist-enwrapped view rather than to the details of the landscape. (One could go through the Book of Job, for example, and point out scores of phrases which, in the Authorized Version, have had an immense influence on the de- velopment of English religious thought—every one of themt mis understood. But this is partly due to mistranslation of a difficult text.) But to return to Ecclesiastes. Consider now de Saci’s French translation of the passage I have been discussing: Torsque les gardes de la maison commenceront 2 tremblr; que les hommes les plus qui avaient accoutumé de moudre, seront réduites en ceux qui regardaient par les trous, seromt de celle qui avait accoutumé de les files de Charmonie forts scbranleront; que celles ‘ett nombre et deviendrontosives, et qe ‘ouverts de téndhres; quand on fermera les port mmoudre sera faible, qu'on Se viele es sit rompue, que la bandelene dor se rete, que Ta ‘avant que la chaine d'argent 3 “ pee am la fontaine, et que la roue se rompe su laces thms here are not dissimilar from those of the Author- they derive from the grouping of the phrase es de la rue, quand lav levera au chant de Uoiseau et que cruche se The rhyt ized Version— 200 romantic suggestion, it seems more solidly g: occurrences than it does in the English: sicud te Thiren auf der Gasse geschlassen werden, dase de Stas Miillerin lei ir ir ich bil = ee ee id erwacet, wenn der Vogel singet, und sich bithen op There is something about ‘Voge! that is lacking in “bint and. Phrase such a5 ‘und erwacht, wenn der Vogel singe? suggea characteristic phase of German romantic poetry, while ‘and he shall rise up at the voice of the bird’ (every word a monosyl has an clemental folk fecling. The whole German rendeg this passage is to the English of the Authorized Version rath what the heavy magic of Heine’s ‘Das ist der alte Marchenwald’ to the less sophisticated mystery of one of Wordsworth’s ‘Inc poems: Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course ‘With rocks and stones and trees. There are, of course, other translations of the Hebr besides English, French and German, each of which has its © special flavour. The Italian, for example, sounds curio scriptural to those (and they probably include most readers of the language) who have got used to D standard Italian example of a serious, formal, yet sin and vocabulary, and it is always a shock to find Bible sounds much more like the Decameron than Commedia. There is no limit to the comparing of: lations of the Hebrew Bible or to the different kinds narrative, prophetic, lyrical, gnomic—whose varyi in different languages can be discussed. The source of many different Bibles, each dra in the original which would not at first reader of the Hebrew text; each is bibl TRANSLATING TH 5S THE HEBRE EBREW BIBLE none can claim to reflect whol ‘hat ‘the Hebrew Bible’ is. car jus been a different book gq generations. © There are other, and perhaps more asked nae the ie of the Bibl Have different religions, and ; op prodice Seiten Bhai : ‘Apnea eae their own beliefS? This is certainly true of some ay pee example, in the prophets and in the Book of Job, Fact heen my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the Leen at upon the ¢: wrth’, is the Authorized Version renderin, of oie 7 and the reference is considered to be to the eonting of Ghar The American Jewish translation of 1917 renders: ‘Bie as for me Iknow that my Redeemer liveth, and that He will witness at the last upon the dust’, where the Redeemer is, of course, God. In fact, however, the Hebrew word ‘goal’ probably has a legal much of the Book of Job is couched in legal ter minology, with Job demanding to know what offence he is charged with and asking for a defending counsel to take up his cause. In this verse he seems to be expressing confidence that eventually a defending attorney will stand up for him (against the satan, who is not the Devil but the angel charged with public cutions, as it were, by God). Both Jewish and Christian taken a more general, and indeed a mote im= he text, but in doing so have obscured f its characteristic imagery. This is in lopment of religious ideas changing Isaiah 7.14, where the traditional, centuries: ‘Behold, a virgin shall ‘was taken as a prophecy of the Christian scholarship recognizes lation of the Hebrew, ly the Hebrew Bi ia W Bible, B, n never be fully stated: ty os ifferent readers and to differs Profound, questions to be le besides the literary ones, significance: pros interpreters have pressive, meaning out of th the significance of much o} interesting case of the dev: the meaning of the text. A more obvious case 1s Christian rendering was for o ’ and the passage Christ. Modern. a deliberate mistransl Revised Standard Version 1 c ceive’, in agreement with Jes z conceive - «+ virgin birth of that ‘virgin’ is the American young woman shall con 202 cs LITERARY ESSAYS ings. Then ot Vn ih a, on the morning’, in a i re feeds ee itt ghee)

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