The Translator as Hero Daniel Rosenberg Nutters (bio) A Life in a Poem: Memoir of a Rebellious Bible Translator David Rosenberg Shearsman Books www.shearsman.com 402 Pages; Print, $27.50 David Rosenberg's A Life in a Poem: Memoir of a Rebellious Bible Translator is a strange book. For readers unfamiliar with Rosenberg's work, he is a prolific poet, essayist, biographer, and editor, but mainly known for his biblical translations, A Poet's Bible (1991) in particular, as well as The Book of J (1990), which was accompanied by Harold Bloom's provocative commentary. His latest work is "a creative memoir" that might be more aptly described as a conglomeration of genres: autobiography, essay, theory, poetry, translation, and experimental writing. It is easier to state the goal of the book than describe it. Simply put, Rosenberg reflects on his passion for translating the Bible and, in this regard, presents snapshots from his life that help explain his fascination with, and devotion to, the ultimate poem. Yet Rosenberg's understanding of biblical translation is unconventional. He approaches it from the point of view of a poet schooled in the history of poetry, albeit partial to those celebrated modernists such as Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens, and also, it would seem, a writer in dialogue with those so-called postmodern theories of literature that developed out of the modern tradition. It is these influences that inform Rosenberg's view of translation and make his approach unique and ambitious. For example, Rosenberg's translations aim to capture what he calls the "biblical scene of writing." The phrase "scene of writing" may be familiar to those versed in the French critical theory that dominated academic thought during the last three decades of the twentieth century. A central problem for someone like Jacques Derrida, who coined the phrase in his essay "Freud and the Scene of Writing," is how to deal with the problem of lost origins. Where, for example, might we locate the origin of our identity? Is it innate or something we find in the past? Do we look to our family history or a broader context, say regional identity, national, or culture writ large? Where, moreover, is the Bible's origin and how do we locate it? For postmodern theorists, origins are irretrievable and unknowable. Derrida argues that identity or selfhood emerges during the act of writing. It is a function of writing and, to borrow a famous phrase from D. H. Lawrence, the Derridean scene of writing disrupts "the old stable ego" to disclose a condition of radical alterity (i.e. otherness) or "another ego, according to whose action the individual is unrecognizable." Yet Rosenberg implies something else when he uses the phrase "scene of writing." As he sees it, the search for the scene of writing of the biblical writers is an effort to "restore ancient Hebraic culture to the life of imagination." The question of biblical translation is historical. Rosenberg imagines its writers as distinct individuals with a lived history: Just like a writer today, the ancient Hebraic author sat in a chair, drank his ancient tea or beer, and surveyed his sources in the form of papyrus scrolls spread across his table and shelves. That writer did not start from scratch or catch inspiration like lightening in a bottle. Like writers today (and long before the great rabbis) he or she felt the weight of history, worldly and literary, stretching back for two millenniums of written texts before the Bible, to the cradle of civilization in Sumer and beyond. What differentiates Rosenberg's scene of writing from theorists such as Derrida is the emphasis he places on the life of the biblical writers. He does not simply want to translate the words on the page. Instead, his project is to recover "the cultural context in which [the biblical writers] wrote." The translator wants to see through the text to the world the poet inhabits; to see "the poet sitting at her desk" in the act of creation. To retrieve the biblical writers, it is important to imagine their writing as poetry since, Rosenberg writes, "it is poetry that most gives...
Search from 250 M+ research papersSearch from 250 M+ research papers
Open Access
Jun 20, 2021
Yichen Zhao + 4
