Antiquitopia

There is a nice review of Robert Alter's newest installment of his translation of the Hebrew Bible in the Tablet. In   Ancient Israel , Alter has reached the part of the Bible with the most to say about history. The Pentateuch begins in myth and ends in moral exhortation; its most famous legends are precisely that, legends, which can only be accepted as true by an act of faith. Adam eating the apple, Abraham sacrificing Isaac, Moses parting the Red Sea—these are not the kinds of things that can be corroborated with outside evidence. Starting with the Book of Joshua, however,   Ancient Israel   moves into a more recognizable world of power politics, in which the main events are wars between tribes, states, and empires, and the intrigues of kings and courtiers. Toward the end of Kings, when we read of the destruction of the northern kingdom of Israel by the Assyrian Empire and the sacking of Jerusalem by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar, we are dealing with events that...

Earlier I noted a typo in my particular edition of the RSV that I use for class in which the LORD says to Cain that sin is "couching" at the door (Gen. 4:7). I took it as a typo, since it would be better rendered as "crouching." It would be a simple typographical error of the omission of one letter, but would totally change the meaning of the verse from a menacing predator to sexually seductive. Kevin Edgecomb, however, noted that all the RSV editions he could find say "couching," and so it might be the actual translation choice of the RSV. I had a hard time believing this, since "couching" just did not make sense, and "crouching" does, in fact, work with the Hebrew at this point. Other translations, for example, use "lurking" (NRSV). I suggested in the notes to that post that this might be an even bigger modern scribal error--one in the base text of the RSV that never got emended. Nonetheless, Kevin's suggestion th...

In her editor's preface to M.M. Bakhtin's Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics , Caryl Emerson writes regarding translating Bakhtin: On the issue of repetition, Bakhtin is his own best counsel. His understanding fo the word, and of the specificity of the utterance, invalidates the very concept of repetition. Nothing "recurs"; the same word over again might accumulate, reinforce, perhaps parody what came before it, but it cannot be the same word if it is in a different place.

Translation attains its full meaning in the realization that every evolved language (with the exception of the word of God) can be considered a translation of all the others.... Translation is removal from one language into another through a continuum of transformations. Translation passes through continua of transformation, not abstract areas of identity and similarity. (Walter Benjamin, "On Language as Such and the Language of Man," in Reflections ; trans. Edmund Jephcott)

I just stumbled on this site for the Bible and leading translations. The site appears quite useful. You can read a text in parallel translations, although I didn't see the rather standard RSV or NRSV. You can read at least Hebrew Bible texts in parallel form in Hebrew, Paleo-Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. The Hebrew includes the BHS, the Leningrad Codex, the Aleppo Codex, and then Paleo texts (although you need to have the font to access those). You can also read in parallel Spanish, French, German, and Chinese translations--each, again, with multiple translations in each language. There are many many many more translations available. Just see this page for Gen. 1:1. The site also includes Strong's Concordance, commentaries that evince more of a Protestant, perhaps Evangelical, perspective. It contains cross-references (like the ones you find in the margins of many bibles), but with full verse quotatoins rather than just citations. There are also atlases, seemingly relevant pi...

I just read Walter Benjamin's essay, "The Task of the Translator: An Introduction to the Translation of Baudelaire's Tableaux Parisiens ," and I thought I would give some choice morsels for your eyes' delight: No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener. One might...speak of an unforgettable life or moment even if all men had forgotten it. If the nature of such a life or moment required that it be unforgotten, taht predicate would not imply a falsehood but merely a claim not fulfilled by men, and probably also a reference to a realm in which it is fulfilled: God's remembrance. Translation...ultimately serves the purpose of expressing the central reciprocal relationship between languages. It cannot possibly reveal or establish this hidden relationship itself; but it can represent it by realizing it in embryonic form or intensive form.