Charming, entertaining and deeply thought-provoking analysis takes as its jumping off point the problem of translating the Bible into English but ranges over etymology, philosophy, linguistics and grammar. What a sentence means and even what meaning means is a hoary chestnut debated for eons but the translation question crystallizes the issue. There is so much in here, rarely have I read as thought-provoking. This book for nearly anyone will change the way he or she thinks about the world: about language, about the Bible, about meaning in general.
The book is more focused in scope than many other books in the area. Hofstadter's book on language and translation, Le Ton Beau de Marot comes to mind, which was also very interesting but again I liked the concreteness - and the importance - of the problems addressed here. Hoffman is able to focus far more deeply and specific problems, sometimes devoting a chapter to a single word (like "kill" or "covet" or "shepherd") whereas the Hofstadter book is more general. And although translations like Alter's great works, as well as his exegeses, are powerful, this book has a much narrower focus but also more sensitivity and care not just to the Hebrew source but also to the English target.
Indeed, this book is terrifically enjoyable just for what it says about English.The apparent contranym lurking in "patent"; the use of the past to denote formality; the question of why the present could not replace the future tense in the sentence: "You get the milk, and I will get the eggs"; the use of future for past in some sports contexts; the emphasis on specific words supposedly placed by airline hostesses; the term "pleonastic subject"; the rare instances, like after "nor", where English can invert subject and verb; all these and more are just delightfully put forth. The author has indeed a sensitivity to English - its register, sound, emphasis - that is rarely seen in translators. Let me point, though, that although the author does rightly object to overuse of the etymology in construing a word, there is another side: Harold Bloom argues in his Art of Reading Poetry (c.f. his Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate at 18) that poetry hinges on "romancing the etymon" - the interplay of past and present meanings of a word.
My favorite part of this book was probably the discussion of the translation of ro'eh (shepherd) in Psalm 23. The author presents a beautiful and persuasive argument that biblical shepherds connoted far more power and strength than either modern shepherds on the one hand or, more important, than our pastoral image of them on the other (e.g. from Exodus 2:16-20, "Moses saved us from the shepherds"; Jeremiah 25:35, "the shepherds shall have no way to flee"; Micah 5:5, "we will raise against them seven shepherds and eight rulers"; Nahum 3:13 "Your shepherds are asleep, O king...your nobles slumber"). Huffman argues that a "ro'eh" is more of a "hero" or a "marine" or a "knight in shining armor" than what we think of as "shepherd." Although deep gloss or annotation might be a more practical solution than changing the word, there is no doubt that for me the author powerfully elucidated a psalm I had read many times - in fact, the whole psalm seems more logical now.
The argument that "covet" is mistranslated in the Commandments is similarly powerful, persuasive, and eye-opening. So much has been written about the psychology and its effects of that word too.
I also thought the discussion of word order in Breishith very interesting, in a wide ranging discussion comparing word order and register in Russian, English, and Hebrew; Hoffman's point being that there is no reason necessarily for the time indicator ("in the beginning") to precede the action (who created what) in the iconic first sentence.
Despite the fascinating arguments in the book, I did have some complaints.
- Although the Kindle (for iPad actually) version is of high quality compared to the usual unedited typo-strewn junk that Amazon relentlessly markets as so-called "Kindle versions" of books, there were some typos or conversion issues. Several times I noticed that there was a missing space after a period so that the period ran into the next punctuation mark. The first paragraph of chapter 5 has missing word after the word "widely." I highly doubt that Kindles, or at least Kindle for iPad, could seamlessly handle mixed-language text, and the author - prudently, I think - transliterates the Hebrew and Greek in the text. In the text at the beginning of chapters, however, the author includes the Hebrew and Greek, but, at least in my version, this is done with images and does not look right, as the background is of a slightly darker shade than the page background.
- For some enigmatic reason the author quotes Polonious' "this above all to thine own self be true" as an instance of iambic pentameter, and he stresses the "a" in "above" to make it scan, an unnatural scansion to modern ears. Surely a more natural instance could be found, e.g. "By any other name would smell as sweet.".
- I thought the example of metonymy - "Get a load of the sombrero" for "Get a load of the guy wearing the sombrero" was obscure, since the first sentence could very well mean (likely would mean, it seems to me) to note the sombrero per se, not its wearer.
- the author's rhetoric can sometimes risk confusion for the sake of simplicity, as for example complaining that because "ro'eh" is common in Hebrew that it would "always [be] a mistake" to translate it as the more uncommon "shepherd" (#2267), although this could be an editing infelicity. For that matter, though, a more salient objection to the use of an alternative like "hero" for "shepherd" is that it places the protector and protectees on a more equal relationship than the original.
- I am less bothered by translating ratsach as "murder" instead of "illegal killing" than the author. The author argues that manslaughter would be subsumed under the latter but not the former, but it would be hard to fit manslaughter, which after all is typically unintentional, into the pattern of the other commandments. It's possible, but it's somewhat obscure.
Two other nice points I had not known. The first was the meaning of "Like Water for Chocolate."
The second, of course, and a point on which I will end this review is this: "glamour" and "grammar" are cognate.
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MR P J MEASURES
Too limited in its message
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 5, 2012