Cynthia Ozick has written an appreciation of Robert Alter’s new translation of the Torah (the first five books of “the foundational document of our civilization”).
Her essay (“And God Saw Literature, That It Was Good”) is an appreciation of the Torah not only as a work of literature but as a work beyond literature — a book with stories, poetry, orations, and language that can “draw us elsewhere, to that indeterminate place where God is not a literary premise but a persuasive certainty.”
Ozick writes that the importance of Alter’s translation is that, at a time “when scriptural references are alien to most undergraduates, and the majority of American synagogue congregations turn from the Hebrew text to the facing page, where the English translation resides,” the “mesmerizing effect of these ancient stories will scarcely be conveyed if they are not rendered in a cadenced English prose that at least in some ways corresponds to the powerful cadences of Hebrew.”
Ozick beautifully conveys how Alter has captured those cadences. Here is Alter’s translation of the beginning verses of Genesis:
When God began to create heaven and earth, and the earth then was welter and waste and darkness over the deep and God’s breath hovering over the waters, God said, “Let there be light.” And there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good, and God divided the light from the darkness.
And here is Ozick showing how Alter’s translation conveys the sounds and rhythms of the original Hebrew:
For ruah, which can mean “breath” or “wind” or “spirit,” Alter chooses “breath,” the more physical — the more anthropomorphic — word. . .[But] [w]hat genuinely startles is the inspired coupling of “welter and waste,” with its echoes of Beowulfian alliteration perfectly conjoined, in sound and intent, with the Hebrew tohu-vavohu.
Using a “plain-speaking, quickly accessible Anglo-Saxon prose, simple monosyllable following simple monosyllable,” Alter lets us “hear God’s imperatives, pleas, hopes, and elations:”
. . . for the Lord shall turn back to exult over you for good as He exulted over your fathers, when you heed the voice of the Lord your God to keep His commands and His statutes written in this book of teaching, when you turn back to the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your being.
For this command which I charge you today is not too wondrous for you nor is it distant. It is not in the heavens, to say, “Who will go up for us to the heavens and take it for us and let us hear it, that we may do it?”
And it is not beyond the sea, to say, “Who will cross over for us beyond the sea and take it for us and let us hear it, that we may do it?”
But the word is very close to you, in your mouth and in your heart, to do it.
See, I have set before you today life and good and death and evil, that I charge you today to love the Lord your God, to go in His ways and to keep His commands and His statutes and laws. . . . Life and death I set before you, the blessing and the curse, and you shall choose life. . . .
(Deuteronomy 30: 9-19).
Alter’s note to the above passage describes how revolutionary it was:
The Deuteronomist, having given God’s teaching a local place and habitation in a text available to all, proceeds to reject the older mythological notion of the secrets or wisdom of the gods.
It is the daring hero of the pagan epic who, unlike ordinary men, makes bold to climb the sky or cross the great sea to bring back the hidden treasures of the divine realm — as Gilgamesh crosses the sea in an effort to bring back the secret of immortality.
This mythological and heroic era, the Deuteronomist now proclaims, is at an end, for God’s word, inscribed in a book, has become the intimate property of every person.
It is hazardous to try to excerpt a Cynthia Ozick essay. Like a plot summary of a Shakespeare play, it conveys information but does not capture the experience of reading the original. This essay should be read in its entirety, as should, obviously, the book.