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Old Testament Poetry: The Translatable Structure

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Ruth apRoberts
Ruth apRoberts*
Affiliation:
University of California, Riverside
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Abstract

Translation is notoriously impossible, and yet people persist in doing it, perhaps nowhere so much as in the case of the Bible. And, while prose is generally more translatable than poetry, it is Old Testament poetry that survives the process with peculiar success, by reason of the peculiar poetic form of the original: a system of parallelism, or “rhyming” of ideas rather than sounds. The remarkable degree of overlap of form and content ensures a remarkable degree of accuracy, or transfer of meaning. The field is rich for structuralist studies, in that it offers an exemplary combinatoire, and the psalm structure is a model of totality, transformability, and self-regulation, an “instrument of coherence,” which may in turn constitute a subunit of a larger structure.

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Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 92 , Issue 5 , October 1977 , pp. 987 - 1004
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1977

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References

Notes

1 Gen. xi.6. All biblical references in this essay will be to the KJV unless otherwise noted.

2 (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1975), p. 244.

3 W.H. Auden, “Ode to Terminus.”

4 See, e.g., Thomas Fawcett, The Symbolic Language of Religion (London: SCM Press, 1970), esp. p. 273.

5 From the “Prospective” chapter of Sartor Resartus, Bk. i.

6 James Muilenburg, “Form Criticism and Beyond,” Journal of Biblical Literature, 88, Pt. I (1969), 1–18.

7 Cf.: “How beautiful are the feet of those that carry good tidings to Zion!” The logic is that even the mere feet (or sandals) are beautiful, but the figure works without the logical connective.

8 The Prison-House of Language (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1972), p. 127.

9 In Near Eastern Studies in Honor of William Foxwell Albright, ed. Hans Goedicke (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1971), p. 203.

10 With C. Franke Hyland, “Psalm 29: A Structural Analysis,” Harvard Theological Review, 66 (1973), 237.

11 Patterns in the Early Poetry of Israel, Studies in Ancient Oriental Civilization, No. 32 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1963), p. 97.

12 “On Freedom in Poetry,” in Naked Poetry, ed. Stephen Berg and Robert Mezey (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969), p. 124.

13 Matthew Arnold writes in 1883 of the translatable qualities of OT verse:

The effect of Hebrew poetry can be preserved and transferred in a foreign language, as the effect of other great poetry cannot. The effect of Homer, the effect of Dante, is and must be in great measure lost in translation, because their poetry is a poetry of metre, or of rhyme, or both; and the effect of these is not really transferable. A man may make a good English poem with the matter and thought of Homer and Dante, may even try to reproduce their metre, or to reproduce their rhyme; but the metre and the rhyme will be in truth his own, and the effect will be his, not the effect of Homer and Dante. Isaiah's, on the other hand, is a poetry, as is well known, of parallelism [my emphasis]; … the effect of this can be transferred to another language….

“Isaiah of Jerusalem,” Prose Works, ed. R.H. Sugar (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1974), x, 102. See also, in “Religion Given,” Arnold's explication of Job xxviii.28 on the basis of parallelism: “The fear of the Eternal' and To depart from evil' here mean, and are put to mean, and by the very laws of Hebrew composition which make the second phrase in a parallelism repeat the first in other words, they must mean, just the same thing” (vi, 193). The bibliography of the subject is not large. In English, the two important studies are George Buchanan Gray's The Forms of Hebrew Poetry, first published 1915, reprinted with a Prolegomenon by David Noel Freedman (New York: Ktav Publishing House, 1972), and Theodore H. Robinson's The Poetry of the Old Testament (London: Duckworth, 1947).

14 The following is condensed from Norman K. Gottwald's excellent article s.v. “Poetry, Hebrew,” in the Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible, ed. George A. Buttrick (New York: Abingdon, 1962), Vol. iii.

15 For help with the Hebrew, I want to thank David Rosenberg; any faults, however, are mine.

16 Eugene A. Nida, “Principles of Translation as Exemplified by Bible Translating,” On Translation, ed. Reuben A. Brower (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1959), pp. 11–31.

17 P. 19. Fishing figures do not have much play in the OT, but come to the fore in the NT.

18 This exegesis of Hosea xii.10 is fortuitous, really; the KJV “visions” and “similitudes” are both doubtful translations.

19 The Enjoyment of Scripture (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 192–93.

20 Quoted in A.C. Partridge, English Biblical Translation (London: André Deutsch, 1972), p. 37.

21 Le Livre de Job, traduit de l'hébreu, avec une étude sur l'âge et le caractère du poème, septième éd. (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1922). This book was well known to Arnold, and it was perhaps through it that he became familiar with the device of parallelism. Renan printed the parallel lines as such. He recognized the importance of parallelism for exegesis, defending an emendation with “sens conseillé par le parallélisme” (p. vi, n.). He writes:

La séparation des versets et des vers, qui est bien du fait de l'auteur, a été également maintenue. Le rhythme de la poésie hébraïque consistant uniquement dans la coupe symétrique des membres de la phrase, il m'a toujours semblé que la vraie manière de traduire les œuvres poétiques des Hébreux était de conserver ce parallélisme, que nos procédés de versification, fondés sur la rime, la quantité, le compte rigoureux des syllabes, défigurent entièrement. J'ai donc fait tous mes efforts pour qu'on sentît dans ma traduction quelque chose de la cadence sonore qui donne tant de charme au texte hébreu. Il est certain que la métrique de ces vieilles poésies consistant uniquement en une sorte de rime de pensées, toute traduction soignée devrait rendre cette rime aussi bien qui l'original, (pp. xi–xii)

22 Philip E. Lewis, “Merleau Ponty and the Phenomenology of Language,” Structuralism, ed. Jacques Ehrmann (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor-Doubleday, 1970), p. 17. This was originally a special issue of Yale French Studies (1966).

23 Jean Piaget, Le Structuralisme, Que Sais-je sér. No. 1311 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1974), p. 108.

24 Overture to Le Cru et le cuit, trans. J.H. McMahon, in Structuralism, p. 38.

25 This is not to say, of course, that the study of any of these things may not add to our understanding and appreciation of the poem. Here, the student of literature recognizes simply the principles of our good old New Criticism, but may be interested to note as well the relationship to interdisciplinary structuralist theory.

26 Piaget, p. 7. My translation.

27 New Literary History, 4 (1973), 331–56. This was also published in French, in Starobinski, Trois fureurs (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), pp. 73–126, a longer version of an essay previously published in Analyse structurale et exégèse biblique, ed. François Bovon (Neuchâtel, Switzerland: Delachaux et Niestlé, 1971), pp. 63–94.

28 It is probable that Luther, with the tendency he had to confuse himself with St. Paul, had more to do with shaping the nature of protestantism than has generally been thought, the power and influence of his translation being so strong as to be pervasive. Perhaps the most famous case of doctrine influencing translation, however, is the passage from Isaiah: “Behold, a virgin shall conceive …” (vii.14). The King James translators were so absolutely confident that the passage predicts Christ's birth of Mary that, although the Hebrew word means simply “young woman,” they wrote in all honesty “virgin.” In this case, there is no “rhyming” line to help in exegesis. (Heinz S. Bluhm has new evidence and arguments to demonstrate that Luther's influence on the KJV is much greater than has been thought. “‘Fyve Sundry Interpreters’: The Sources of the First Printed English Bible,” Huntington Library Quarterly, 39, 1976, 107–16.)

29 Lévi-Strauss, pp. 51–52.

30 A modest but valuable study in this challenging field is D.B. Fry's Some Effects of Music, the transcript of a lecture (Tunbridge Wells, Eng.: The Institute for Cultural Research, 1971). Fry is stronger on music and physics than on physiology, however. See also Lewis Thomas' “The Music of This Sphere,” The Lives of a Cell (New York: Viking, 1974), pp. 20–25.

31 Lévi-Strauss, p. 52.

32 See Robert E. Ornstein, The Psychology of Consciousness (New York: Viking, 1972).

33 Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, 3rd ed. (1853; rpt. London: Adam and Charles Black, 1956), pp. 42–43.

34 Quoted in J.C.A. Rathmell, Introduction to The Psalms of Sir Philip Sidney and the Countess of Pembroke (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1963), p. xxxi. It should be noted that all translations into meter, such as Sydney's, jeopardize the parallel structure.

35 Compare the correlations of structuralist “fonctions distributionelles,” in François Bovon's Introductory Essay to Analyse structurale et exégèse biblique, p. 19.