The Limits of Translation

Abstract

The Limits of Translation Martin I. Lockshin Robert Alter . The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary. New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 2004. Pp. l + 1064. Michael Carasik . The Commentators' Bible: The JPS Miqra'ot Gedolot: Exodus. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2005. Pp. xix + 349. One of the many difficult though rarely discussed choices made by translators is the question, "What aspects of the original work should I not bother to translate?" Given that no translator can convey every nuance of the original, where does the intelligent translator draw the line? Robert Alter and Michael Carasik have obviously thought about this issue very seriously and have come to interesting and rather different conclusions. Each of them has translated Hebrew texts that were already available in modern English translations and each has tried to accomplish something new through a different method of translation. The primary audience for a translation of the Pentateuch is not all that clear. Bible translations can be used by scholars and by lay people. They can be used by pious Jews, pious Christians, and avowed secularists. They can be of value both to people who have no access to the original and to those who know the Hebrew well but are interested in seeing a good interpretation of a challenging passage. Robert Alter's translation attempts, with a fair amount of success, to appeal to multiple audiences. He has smoothly negotiated some, but not all, of the difficult audience issues. Translations, like the original text, have to be subdivided into units in order to make the text readable and [End Page 578] accessible. I know of no recent translator who ignores the often illogical but universally used division of the books of the Bible into chapters. But Jews also generally divide the Pentateuch into fifty-four units for weekly reading, and individual Jews frequently open their humashim and search for the week's portion. Alter has chosen, reasonably enough, not to mark his book as Jewish by delineating where the week's portion begins or ends (as opposed to the new Jewish Publication Society translation, which does provide such information). But the more difficult "inclusion" questions faced by translators are about words, not about the text's structure. Eighty years ago Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig revolutionized the field of modern Bible translations when they began their project of translating the Bible into German. Buber and Rosenzweig also wrote a series of seminal essays on issues of translation.1 Thirty-five years ago Buber's student and my teacher, Nehama Leibowitz, told me that whenever she saw a new translation of the Bible into any language, the first thing that she did was to check the Decalogue to see whether the translator had succeeded in preserving in the target language the play on words between the first and second commandments. When I admitted to her that I was unaware of any such play on words, she explained that the first commandment introduces God, who took the Israelites out of the land of Egypt, the house of 'avadim, and the second commandment enjoins the Israelites to eschew idol worship, using the words lo ta'ovdem. (Ex 20.2-5) When I protested to Nehama (whose English was good, but imperfect) that there was no elegant way to convey that in English, she retorted that there certainly was. Egypt may be described as "the house of servitude" in the first commandment, and the second commandment can enjoin the Israelites not to "serve" idols. Buber, Rosenzweig, and Leibowitz set a high bar for translation, demanding that the translator preserve more of the Hebrew than most translators are willing to do. Were this principle applied consistently, all forms of the biblical Hebrew root '-b-d in the Bible, not just in the Decalogue, would be translated with forms of the English word, "serve," since plays on words and resonances are often found not only within the same chapter but across biblical books.2 This would raise questions such as: when Ex 13.5 instructs the Israelites ve-'avadta et ha-'avodah ha-zo't, should [End Page 579] the translator attempt to use two English words...