The Art of Bible Translation
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5.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
From the recipient of the National Jewish Book Award for Lifetime Achievement, a "hugely entertaining and irreverent" (Adam Gopnik, New Yorker) account of the art of translating the Hebrew Bible into English
In this brief book, award-winning biblical translator and acclaimed literary critic Robert Alter offers a personal and passionate account of what he learned about the art of Bible translation over the two decades he spent completing his own English version of the Hebrew Bible.
Alter’s literary training gave him the advantage of seeing that a translation of the Bible can convey the text’s meaning only by trying to capture the powerful and subtle literary style of the biblical Hebrew, something the modern English versions don’t do justice to. The Bible’s style, Alter writes, “is not some sort of aesthetic embellishment of the ‘message’ of Scripture but the vital medium through which the biblical vision of God, human nature, history, politics, society, and moral value is conveyed.” And, as the translators of the King James Version knew, the authority of the Bible is inseparable from its literary authority.
For these reasons, the Bible can be brought to life in English only by re-creating its literary virtuosity, and Alter discusses the principal aspects of style in the Hebrew Bible that any translator should try to reproduce: word choice, syntax, word play and sound play, rhythm, and dialogue. In the process, he provides an illuminating and accessible introduction to biblical style that also offers insights about the art of translation far beyond the Bible.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Scholar and critic Alter, who spent two decades producing his own English translation of the Hebrew Bible, takes readers behind the scenes and deep into the footnotes to elucidate the choices translators make when rendering the Bible into other languages. He begins by stressing the literary character of the Bible, which he says most modern translations fail to recognize. He is a fan, with serious reservations, of the canonical King James translation, and, in explaining its merits and shortcomings, sets forth his own version of the fundamentals of good translation. These include a recognition of the terse and ambiguous nature of the text and the study of its peculiarities of syntax, lexicon, literary conventions, and natural narrative dialogue. Some of Alter's objections are common to all translations the sound and wordplay of a text, for instance, can be challenging for translators to preserve but his castigation of many contemporary translation committees, whose work he deems linguistically accurate but oblivious to sound, is lively and fresh. Meticulous and occasionally cranky, Alter provides a refreshing look into the complex work of translating the Bible.
