‘The Face of Water : a
Translator on Beauty and Meaning in the Bible’, by Sarah Ruden (New York,
Pantheon Books, 2017) ISBN 978-0-307-90856-8
This review by Philip Harvey
first appeared in the March 2018 issue of The Melbourne Anglican.
In a world where literalism
is allowed the final say, where religion’s foundational words are used for
nationalist and divisive ends, we are moved to ask, as Sarah Ruden does, “Okay,
the Bible – what about it?” How we read Scripture, our attitude to it, always
remain significant issues, even if we say we’re ‘No Religion’. For Christians
and Jews it can never be a matter of indifference.
Roaming in from the wilds of
classical studies, Ruden was floored by a rediscovery: “The Bible, I
recognised, was a book that profoundly mattered, more even than ancient pagan
literature (in which I do have qualifications).” Some classicists would deem
this a provocative admission, especially coming from an acclaimed translator of
Homer, Aeschylus, and Virgil. (She’s the first woman ever to translate the
entire Aeneid.)
Her objective is to introduce
us to the biblical languages of Hebrew and Greek, and how they work, through
the eyes of someone who was born to translate. A combination of lightly handled
erudition, poetic sensibility, and spectacular left-field humour turns this
exercise into a reading pleasure. I never thought I could get mesmerised by
explanations of vav consecutives or hapax legomenon. Her ear for metre is
fabulous.
What to do with a literature
where “form and content are inseparable, and equally important”? How to deal
with language where “if we can’t dance to it, we don’t understand it’? How do
you make that happen in English? Ruden describes the process with the Bible
whereby she is “trying to make the book less a thing of paper and glue and ink
and petrochemicals, and more a living thing.”
Ruden’s concern is how
English, for all its vast vocabulary and intricate varieties of nuance, still
cannot say everything being said with brevity and wit in the original. The King
James Version (KJV) is her default “because of its beauty and familiarity”, but
it too is oft wanting. Then there’s the whole dimension known as context,
contexts at times “invisible”.
The book proceeds by
exposition. Ruden chooses Old and New Testament passages that illustrate her
own challenges and theories as a translator. She stands her versions against
the King James, showing up shifts in meaning, accent, and pitch. We have space
for two examples.
Ecclesiastes famously calls
life ‘vanity’, the KJV repeating the Latin tag. Eugene Peterson, almost as
famously, translates this word (‘hevleh-ka’) as ‘smoke’. Ruden’s word is
‘evanescence’, the thing at issue being insubstantiality, “a wisp of vapor or a
puff of wind … blended back into the air, before you can even focus on it.” But
she goes further. ‘Hevleh-ka’ matches in sound ‘helkeh-ka’ in the same verse, a
word the KJV has as ‘thy portion’. In other words, whoever you are and whatever
you own, it’s all evanescence, saith the Preacher.
‘Rei-a’ is a Hebrew word
Ruden calls “helpfully, dynamically untranslatable”. It can mean fellow,
friend, equal, companion, member, depending on (you’ve heard it before)
context. Indeed, it’s the context that provides the meaning, every time. In the
Ten Commandments the KJV translates the word ‘neighbour’. And who is my
neighbour? When a certain lawyer puts Jesus on the spot about who shall inherit
eternal life, he finds himself in a context where the discussion turns on a
definition of ‘rei-a’. But that’s nothing. Jesus tells a shocker of a story
where the most reviled claimants to the lawyer’s own tradition are, by the
lawyer’s own admission, neighbour to the man who was beaten up. It’s the Samaritan who shows mercy. Ruden
goes on to explain how the Greek equivalent (‘pleision’) adds further surprise
and depth to the parable.
Last year, Sarah Ruden
published her version of Saint Augustine’s Confessions. It’s good news for all
of us that, according to her website, she now plans to translate the Four
Gospels. Given the respectful and creative relationship to scriptural language
on display in ‘The face of water’, both translation and any attendant critical
commentary are sure to keep us on our mettle, and offer something new.
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