TR 67 B - Translation Studiestranslation.utdallas.edu/translation_reviews/TR67.pdf · of the early 20th-century Spanish poets, my favorite being Lorca, his ballads, which I found

Translation ReviewNumber Sixty-Seven • 2004

The University of Texas at Dallas

TRANSLATION REVIEWNo. 67, 2004

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Editorial: Reviewing Translations: A History To Be Written . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1Rainer Schulte

Interview with William O’Daly . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .2Martin Blackman

Making Do with Less: La Fontaine in English . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .11Robert S. Dupree

Variations on a Theme: Legge, Waley, and Pound Translate Ode VIII from the Chinese Shi Jing . . . . . . . .27 Robert E. Kibler

Interview with Thom Satterlee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .36John DuVal

Transliteration or Translation of Biblical Proper Names . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .41Jože Krašovec

En Attendant le Vote des Bêtes Sauvages, by Ahmadou Kourouma: A Comparison of Two English Translations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .58Judith Schaefer

BOOK REVIEW

The New Covenant. Commonly Called the New Testament. Vol. 1: The Four Gospels and Apocalypse. Newly Translated from the Greek and Informed by Semitic Sources,tr. by Willis Barnstone . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .72Reviewed by Thalia Pandiri

CONTRIBUTORS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .79

On October 6, 1996, The New York Times BookReview published a special issue celebrating its 100-

year anniversary with reprints of 76 reviews covering theyears from 1896 to 1991. The international scene of writ-ers was represented by seven authors: Fyodor Dos-toyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1921); SigmundFreud, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis (1920);Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way (1925); AdolfHitler, My Battle (1933); Franz Kafka, The Trial (1937);Albert Camus, The Plague (1948); and AleksandrSolzhenitsyn, Rebuilding Russia (1991).

Charles McGrath, then editor of the Book Review,points out that most of the reviews in this special issuehave been cut from their original lengths, and JohnGross, who was an editor of the Book Review in the1980s, retraces the history of The New York Times BookReview. Any reader who approaches these reviews wouldhave to assume that all of the books listed in this retro-spective were written by English-speaking authors. Thereis no indication anywhere that some of these books wereoriginally written in a foreign language. Not one of thetitles carries the name of a translator, and in only one ofthe reviews is the translator mentioned. Daniel PatrickMoynihan wrote the review of Rebuilding Russia (1991)by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and he compliments thetranslator, Alexis Klimoff, for his “wonderfully welltranslated” work. Beyond those three words of praise andthe mention of Solzhenitsyn’s translator, all otherreviews of international authors present a yawningabsence of translators.

In that respect, the practice of reviewing or notreviewing translations has not changed much during thelast two decades. Currently, most issues of The New YorkTimes Book Review seemed to have solved the problem:hardly any foreign work in translation finds its way intothe review. At a time when we have drastically failed tounderstand that a language is a way of interpreting theworld, it would be of great value to use reviews of for-eign literatures in translation, not only to introduce thewriter in each case, but also to raise our awareness ofhow other cultures have developed interpretive perspec-tives that are drastically different from our own. As I wasperusing the many reviews in the retrospective of BookReview, it occurred to me that it would be a valuable

scholarly activity to write a history of how internationalwriters have been reviewed in the United States in thevarious newspapers, magazines, and scholarly journals.Such a study could shed some light on how reviews mayhave furthered our understanding of the foreignness ofother cultures and whether such reviews could serve as ameaningful tool to enter into the refined thinking andperceptions of people from other countries.

As editor of Translation Review, I have learned thattranslators are reluctant to review translations of othertranslators. Many reasons can be quoted for that reluc-tance. Furthermore, the entire field of reviewing transla-tions continues to be a tabula rasa. The simple questionsrecur over and over again: Who is qualified to review atranslation, and what specific linguistic, semantic, cultur-al, and historical aspects should be dealt with in a mean-ingful review?

To the best of my knowledge, no comprehensiveanthology of reviews of translations has ever been envi-sioned as a publishable project. Such an anthology couldbe the starting point for the development of strategies toreview translations. Simultaneously with this assessment,it would be appropriate to start a study of the reviewsthat are published in many international newspapers andjournals in foreign countries, such as Frankfurter Allge-meine Zeitung, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Le Monde, Le mag-azine littéraire, to mention publications from only twocountries. I refer to both France and Germany becausethey publish the greatest number of books in translation.A critical investigation of how translations are reviewedin foreign newspapers and journals might provide uswith some guideposts toward a revitalization and expan-sion of reviewing translations from foreign languagesinto English.

Translation Review 1

EDITORIAL: REVIEWING TRANSLATIONS: A HISTORY TO BE WRITTEN

By Rainer Schulte

William O’Daly is a poet, translator, teacher, andeditor who, in addition to having recently complet-

ed a historical novel set in China, has rendered some ofthe finest English translations of the revered Chilean poetand Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda. In an effort thatspanned fifteen years, O’Daly was the first to translatesix of the great poet’s late and posthumous works: StillAnother Day, The Separate Rose, Winter Garden, TheSea and the Bells, The Yellow Heart, and The Book ofQuestions. He resides in the foothills of NorthernCalifornia with his wife and daughter.

Martin Blackman is a poet who became fascinated withliterary translation while he was an intern at CopperCanyon Press and completing his MFA in CreativeWriting from Antioch University Los Angeles. Throughhis experience at the Press, he met William O’Daly andencountered Copper Canyon’s Neruda series.

An abridged version of this interview appears online inthe Poems Aloud section of the Copper Canyon Pressweb site.

MB: How did your interest in poetry, and particularly inNeruda, develop?

WO’D: In my senior year of high school, I was takenwith Shakespeare’s sonnets and was particularly moved

by Walt Whitman’s“When Lilacs Last inthe CourtyardBloomed.” My moth-er bought me ananthology of poetrycalled The Joy ofWords, which I readcover to cover a fewtimes. But it wasn’tuntil the late springof 1970, when I wasa freshman at UCSanta Barbara, that Itruly took the plunge.The Vietnam Warand student protests

were raging, and I was in the midst of sea changes in mypolitical and social values, which included turning awayfrom the study of economics and toward poetry — thereading and writing of it. I was enthralled by the shorterpoems of Kenneth Rexroth, and one afternoon on myway to Economic Statistics class, I detoured into an audi-torium, from which came a most beautiful voice. As Iremember, the image was something about the sea givingthe sky its blue. Rexroth was sitting regally in a cornernear the stage, orchestrating a reading of four womenpoets. I never did make it to Statistics. A couple of weekslater, I encountered Neruda’s Twenty Love Poems and aSong of Despair in the UCSB bookstore. Reading it wasan eerie, wonderful homecoming — to a place I hadnever been. Rexroth’s work and those four women poets,as well as Neruda’s passionate poems, were galvanizingexperiences for me.

MB: Neruda had such a strong political aspect, when hewasn’t writing about love or the magic of life asexpressed in nature, and you were discovering him at justthe time when there was so much hope and strife inChile. His democratically elected friend, PresidentSalvador Allende, was instituting economic reformsagainst the wishes of the Chilean upper classes and theU.S. government. Meanwhile, Neruda was serving asambassador to France, at Allende’s behest, all the whilepining for his beloved Chile and wishing to witness first-hand the long-awaited social revolution. Was the politicalsituation what ultimately inspired you to translateNeruda?

WO’D: I didn’t start translating Neruda until a fewyears later, not long before the September 11, 1973, coupin Chile and his death twelve days later. Though I wasfollowing the political situation there, it had little ornothing to do with my decision to translate. I had takenat least one seminar from Rexroth and visited him a cou-ple of times, and he stressed that if a young man wantedto learn to write poems, he should translate as an integralpart of the practice and discipline of poetry.

MB: Well, you certainly responded to Rexroth’s sugges-tion.

2 Translation Review

INTERVIEW WITH WILLIAM O’DALY

By Martin Blackman

Photo by Kristine O’Daly

WO’D: I spoke some Spanish, so I started with severalof the early 20th-century Spanish poets, my favoritebeing Lorca, his ballads, which I found nearly impossibleto translate. When Neruda’s Residence on Earth cameout in Donald Walsh’s translation in 1973, I tackled thatbook, looking to improve on Walsh’s music, which Ifound a little flat in places. I also tried to improve on thewonderful job W.S. Merwin had done with Twenty LovePoems. Ah, hubris! My skill level at the time certainlywas not up to improving on either Walsh or Merwin. AndI was not intent on becoming a translator.MB: But you were deepening your knowledge of poetryand language, two languages in fact, and you were con-suming the masters. How did you discover the originalbooks that you translated?

WO’D: I found what became the first book of the seriesin 1976, in Modesto, California, where I was living. Twoor three times a week, I would drive the hundred milessouth to study with Philip Levine at Cal State Fresno.Levine spoke about translation in a vein similar toRexroth, about the practice of it. A very kind Spanishprofessor there, José A. Elgorriaga, was also a proponentof translation. Levine mentioned that he was working onthe Mexican poet Jaime Sabines, in collaboration withErnesto Trejo, a budding San Joaquin Valley poet. Oneafternoon I found myself in the Spanish-language sectionof the Stanislaus County Library, and I left with a bookby Neruda that I’d never heard of before, Aún. It was adifferent Neruda from the one I knew, less effusive, morecrystalline and spare, at times more delicate.

MB: It’s no wonder, considering the power of the work.The L.A. Times Book Review described it by saying,“Neruda’s lyricism wakes us up, even in the face ofdeath, to the connections we have with our land, innerand outer.”

WO’D: In 1983, after holding the manuscript twice fora total of three years, one New York publishing housedeclined to publish Aún, or Still Another Day, as I call it.Copper Canyon Press, who had been the second bidder,succeeded in acquiring the rights to publish it. SamHamill called me to ask about other Neruda titles I mightbe interested in translating after Still Another Day. I hadbegun entertaining the idea of trying La rosa separada,which later became The Separate Rose, and discoveredin libraries and catalogues four other titles out of thefourteen final books of Neruda’s, which include StillAnother Day.

MB: That must have been an exciting process, the senseof discovery and knowing you were the first to translatethose words into English. Did you go to Chile or IslaNegra as part of the endeavor?

WO’D: When I first began work on Aún, my intentionwasn’t to translate it for publication. Even as I becamemore involved in its rhythms and imagery and began tothink in terms of publishing the translation, I was awarethat Neruda was dead and that the dictator AugustoPinochet was in power. The coup was four or five yearsold, and Santiago was by all reports “stable,” but therewere reports of people still being tortured and killed.

MB: Thousands were hung or shot for having the“wrong” political alliances. I remember reading about thehorrible mass murder scene after that coup. It was in anathletic stadium, of all places.

WO’D: Most of that happened during and in the imme-diate aftermath of the coup, though people were stillbeing hunted down. You may remember that the Chileanopposition leader and former foreign minister OrlandoLetelier and his U.S. aide, Ronni Moffit, a civil rightsactivist, were killed by a car bomb in 1976, on EmbassyRow in Washington, D.C., of all places. That’s why Ididn’t spend much time pondering a trip to Chile. At thattime, I would have had no business being there, andwould have only endangered myself and particularlyanyone gracious enough to host me. I’ve had the greatpleasure of meeting or hosting Chilean poets and writerson their visits to the U.S., but I still haven’t been there. Iwant to go and spend a few months, or more.

MB: Now it is not only peaceful, but I understand somereal reconciliation has taken place. Some culturalexchange group should provide that trip for you now.You deserve as much.

After doing many of his Asian translations, Arthur Waleyexpressed no interest in going to Asia. He felt it woulddestroy his sense of those lands and ancient worlds hehad gleaned through their poets. He didn’t want to spoilthe experience of his imagination, his sense of historicallandscape. Do you have any similar inhibitions about vis-iting Chile?

WO’D: I’m not aware of feeling the way Waley did,and I’ve known for some time that the Chile of the late


sixties and the seventies is long gone. For Chile, overall,that’s probably a good thing. But I’m also pretty sure thatit’s not the same place it was in the early to mid-twenti-eth century, when it earned the epithet “Land of thePoets.” All the same, poetry appears to be very muchalive there, and I would love to visit Neruda’s old haunts,particularly Isla Negra, and also Tierra del Fuego, EasterIsland, the Maipo Valley; as you see, the itinerary iscoming together!

MB: How would you describe your “relationship” withthe poet?

WO’D: He puts up with me and never has a harsh wordto say. But, of course, he died a few years before I foundAún (Still Another Day), so my relationship with himexists in my head. I’ve heard that he was generous withhis translators whom he corresponded with and met,most notably Alastair Reid. He used to say, don’t justtranslate me, improve me. How genuine he was being isanyone’s guess, but on occasion a translator can interpretsuch a statement too literally. Mr. Reid isn’t one to makethat mistake, and I’ve always admired and am gratefulfor his Neruda work, the quality and scope of it. As atranslator, I respond to the original poem, to my experi-ence of that poem, using my senses, drawing on myimagination, my skills and as much knowledge of thepoet and his times as is available to me — that is, thebody of the poet’s work, his personal, cultural, social,and political milieu, and the traditions on which hedraws. No amount of information is too much, and anyshard might inform the translation of a poem or passage.My intent is to render the original poem as clearly as Ican, while coming as close as possible by staying out ofthe way. It’s a practice not unlike tai chi. In the literarysense, it’s a search for equivalents, close approximations,or at worst, effective substitutions, from the level of dic-tion, to the imagery, to the musical properties of the orig-inal. I’ve also thought of myself as a fellow musician,one who covers a particular recording composed by donPablo and on which he plays lead guitar.

MB: It must be disappointing in one way and satisfyingin another when you have to replace one culture’s collo-quialism or idiom with that of another. Can you give anexample of where a phrase common to Chileans orSpanish-speaking people just wouldn’t work in Englishand you had to do something so different from the origi-nal, but still capture the spirit and music of Neruda’sintention as best you could to bridge the cultural lan-

guage gap?

WO’D: Neruda can be difficult to translate, and often is,but the difficulty is rarely due to the presence of regionalcolloquialisms or highly idiomatic language. The lan-guage of his poetry is very much Castilian, the mothertongue of the Spanish-speaking literary world. Chile hasalways been the most European of South American coun-tries, and generally one finds far more colloquial lan-guage in Mexican or Cuban poets, for instance.

On the other hand, the first clause of the first line of thefirst book, Aún, gave me fits:

Hoy es el día más, el que traíauna desesperada claridad que murió.

In producing the first draft, that literal “crib” or “trot,” Irolled my eyes, stuck my tongue way into my cheek andwrote “Today is the day that is the mostest, ….” “Más” isafforded much flexibility, in terms of shades of meaningand syntax, in the language, and here Neruda wasexploiting that flexibility to the utmost, in a way thatsounds quite natural to the Spanish speakers I’ve askedabout it. After completing the first three or four fulldrafts of the book, I arrived at

Today is that day, the day that carrieda desperate light that since has died.

In the context of the book, today is a special day, the daythe poet will say his goodbyes, but today is like anyother day, and in some sense all days are today and todayis all days. This perspective comes to fruition when wefinally arrive at The Book of Questions, in which Nerudaclaims this perspective in no uncertain terms.

How many weeks are in a dayand how many years in a month?

or

Yesterday, yesterday I asked my eyes,when will we see each other again?

MB: What was it like to climb into Neruda’s conscious-ness?

WO’D: After I became serious about translating him, Ihad the feeling of participating in something much larger


than myself. It was absorbing, if not a bit intimidating. Iwas roughly 33 when Still Another Day came out.Neruda was 65 when he published Aún, his career as apublished poet was going on fifty years, he had been aChilean consul in Singapore, Burma, and Ceylon, amongother countries, had been forced into political exile fromChile, had traveled the world, and had been aspokesman, in his poetry and otherwise, for many of theChilean people, particularly the disadvantaged. Theycalled him poeta del pueblo, Poet of the People, andother affectionate terms. On the other hand, I was a kidfrom LA, had been fortunate enough to study with somewonderful poets and critics, had worked as a literarymagazine editor and a teacher, and had cofounded a liter-ary press. I spoke only for myself, had never experiencedthe scents of the southern Chilean winter, of the chestnuttrees or the araucarias of Tierra del Fuego, nor had I tast-ed the red wine of the Maipo Valley. But more signifi-cantly, Neruda wrote Aún as a farewell to the Chileanpeople. He had been diagnosed with cancer, and his finalfourteen books compose that farewell. The six that I’vetranslated deal roundly, but only occasionally in a directway, with preparing himself to die. They are courageousbooks, and I allowed myself to be drawn deep into thatconsciousness. As a young man, I found it encompassing,revelatory, and humbling.

MB: Were there particular books or poems in which youfelt more fully able to engage him than others fromamong the books you translated?

WO’D: It would be tricky for me to say which I felt ornow feel closest to. I chose those six books because Iwas able to engage each one, on its own terms, andthought that they were the finest of the final fourteenand, as a cycle or suite of books, worked well together tocircumscribe and reprise a huge amount of aesthetic, sty-listic, and thematic territory. In some cases, Neruda wasdoing things that he had wanted to do for some time orhad explored, to a limited degree, in other books.Knowing his life was winding down provided him withthe impetus, the authentic emotional, intellectual, andspiritual constellation required to fulfill those promises tohimself.

I suppose The Sea and the Bells was the most difficult.

MB: That’s interesting, because at least one prominentreview claimed it was the most accessible. Maybe that isa testimony to your fine work, but why do you think you

found it particularly difficult? Was the range of allusions,between personal feelings and vast landscapes andseascapes, what made it more challenging?

WO’D: It came to me unfinished in the sense thatNeruda had titled only a third of the poems before hedied. Who knows whether he would have further revisedthe poems, had he lived longer. I found myself wonder-ing, but another factor was that I translated the book dur-ing a period when life was difficult for me and changingrapidly. For much of the process I was broke, living in aninhospitable environment, and doing hard physical workto get by. That said, the book is one of the more popularin the series.

MB: Do you think that your own struggle, your adversi-ty, contributed to your success with it, perhaps becauseNeruda’s poems were the singularly outstanding artisticand intellectually stimulating element in your life at thetime?

WO’D: What you say about artistic and intellectualstimulation was true for that period, but I’m not at allsure that the struggles I was having at the time were allthat helpful. I think most would agree, personal strugglecreates the potential for empathy and can teach us aboutthe ways of the world, if we are willing and ready tolearn. They strengthen a person’s character. And charac-ter, Ezra Pound reminds us, has a direct bearing on thenature and the quality of a person’s poetry. I believethat’s true of one’s translations as well. It’s doubtful thatthe violent sounds and drunken screams coming throughthe walls of my room, the loud knocks on my door whileI was trying to work, or the fatigue I felt at night were ofmuch assistance then. My circumstances improved in themonths before I finished The Sea and the Bells, allowingme to concentrate better and to spend longer hours on thebook.

At least from a nuts-and-bolts perspective, The YellowHeart was the most intriguing to work on, for its pur-poseful hyperbole and off-the-wall imagery, humorousnarratives, and for the many levels the poems exist on.

MB: I read the “Suburbs” poem from The Yellow Heartover and over again on a day when I was seeking a workposition that required fitting into a narrow mold. When Iread it, in a moment between disappointment anddespair, it struck me so clearly, so deeply, it brought meto tears. I read it over and over again, because I felt


Neruda understood my feelings about avoiding thatwhich is soul-deadening. He did it with the utmost clarityand poetic language.

WO’D: I’m aware of no book like it, and one can saythat about The Book of Questions as well. That said, thegifted Australian poet Margie Cronin sent me an interest-ing and occasionally brilliant manuscript of poems thatshe composed in loose imitation and homage to TheBook of Questions and Neruda, and I’ve seen manypages of couplets written in the same vein by people whowere inspired by the book. Lawrence Ferlinghetti wrote agroup of questions that he included in his review ofNeruda’s questions; Loretta Livingston and Dancersincorporated excerpts in their production “BalancesToo”; and independent filmmaker Antero Alli based oneof his feature-length works on the book. Yet, in my expe-rience, Neruda’s questions are unsurpassed in their deli-cate ironies and compression, their limpidity, their utterlack of intrusive self-consciousness, their humor, andtheir ease. The poems take shape in the intuitive mindand in the heart, as the questions accumulate significanceand meaning that remain just beyond our grasp.

MB: Many people find The Book of Questions intrigu-ing. I see the poems in it as inferred aphorisms based onjuxtapositions designed to present a broad representationof what is beautiful in life. It possesses a consistent styleof nagging, unanswerable questions about existencethrough specific details that insist on us looking at life interms of its “bigness.” Why do we like this volume somuch?

WO’D: It may be because the book approaches the con-ditions of, for lack of a better term, the purest poetry.The poems are constellations of a worldly adult’s versionof childlike questions, endowed with both shrewdnessand wonder — a beguiling weave of rational and irra-tional elements that openly defies reduction or para-phrase by even the staunchest literary analyst, philolo-gist, psychologist, or deconstructionist. Instead, theysend us inward, searching, as they point inexorably to theouter world. They’re rooted in the personal, and some-times in literary allusion or in history, but all evoke asense of the koan, of mystery and intimacy.

MB: When you listen to recordings of Neruda readinghis poems, how would you characterize the musicality ofhis language?

WO’D: Neruda’s voice is often chant-like, in an under-stated way. One can hear a pensive melancholy or wist-fulness, perhaps in part as a product of the rainy skiesand the blend of Spanish and Mapuche languages heexperienced as he grew up in southern Chile. Then again,when he’s writing in a cataloguing or anaphoric style, asone finds in The Heights of Macchu Picchu and else-where in Canto General, his mythological constructionsor his anger at the exploitation of indigenous tribes andlater of Chilean workers by their own government andmultinational corporations create rolling rhythms thatbuild and build. He could be matter of fact, he could bedelicate or tender, his voice stepping lightly over thestones.

Actually, I know of no greater or more natural musician,in the canon of Spanish-language poetry, than Neruda.His own voice and the ways in which he articulates hispoems, the patterns of sound, integrate beautifully withthe softnesses and natural movements of the Spanish lan-guage. The brilliance of his deceptively simple music inthe Elemental Odes is often overlooked, and I don’tbelieve that it can be well translated, not into English orperhaps any other language. The lines often contain onlya few words and sometimes a single word, yet thosewords are usually multisyllabic, such that an interestingtension exists between the lines’ brevity and the soundsthey modulate or harness. When one translates the odesinto English, the equivalents are often only a single sylla-ble, maybe two, so that an inevitable oversimplificationoccurs and the loss of music is more profound thanusual. Yet the odes remain quite moving in the bestEnglish translations.

In The Sea and the Bells, the untitled original poem thatbegins “Esta campana rota / quiere sin embargo cantar”(“This broken bell / still wants to sing”) captures thesound of a bell tolling. I was able to recreate much ofthat tolling, as it builds through the poem. But this is notalways possible. Unfortunately, I know of no recordingsof Neruda reading any of the poems that I’ve translated,though I would be surprised if some don’t exist, some-where.

MB: It would be wonderful to find and hear them! Howcan a reader hear Neruda’s music when reading thewords?

WO’D: Reading the translations aloud is, by far, thebest way. Reading poetry is a skill we develop by read-


ing a lot of it aloud, closely observing the duration, therhythmical and melodic properties, of each line relativeto those around it and to the whole, paying attention tothe way the poem builds. The silences are just as impor-tant as the sounds the poem makes. Many poets say thatthey compose by reading the poem aloud, sometimesover and over, and some don’t call a poem finished untilthey read it publicly. In that spontaneous moment with-out “clothes,” the “sheet music” is least susceptible to theinner ear’s manipulation, to private obfuscations or illu-sions. That’s when the poem finds its wings or thudsback to earth. I certainly feel this way and have found itto be true in relation to my own work.

MB: Did you attempt to capture this music as you wentfrom one language to the other?

WO’D: Yes, I certainly did attempt to capture Neruda’smusic, per the tolling of bells or whatever sounds andresonances the original poems express. With the secondbook, I learned to read the originals into a tape recorderand play them back, so that I could hear them. I did thesame with my translations. The process consisted of find-ing an equivalent or corresponding music in English, onethat evokes a similar emotional set.

MB: Obviously, the readership thinks so. Your transla-tions of Neruda are the most popular series CopperCanyon Press has published, and it’s a distinction thathas existed for over a decade. But what level of satisfac-tion do you have with it? They say the artist’s work isnever done. Do you feel you’ve fully evolved a similar“emotional set” in English, or do you still wrestle withsome of it?

WO’D: Recently, while preparing the second editions ofthe last four books, I struggled here and there but woundup making only a few slight changes. At the moment, Ican’t remember what they were, aside from two typos.Overwhelmingly, where I still wanted to get closer, say,in order to bring across a slippery nuance, the larger costof making the change wasn’t worth it. Sometimes thecost would have been the loss of more significant quali-ties or meanings embodied in the original, and some-times the cost would have been more to the “high-energy(musical) construct,” to use Charles Olson’s term, that isthe poem in English.

MB: What is your take on Neruda’s perception of man’splace in nature and his mystical yearnings?

WO’D: For Neruda, nature is often what happens allaround us, what grows and flourishes apart from us,because we separate ourselves from it with our self-importance and delusions, rapacity and greed, arroganceand wrong-headed views of ourselves as being, by God’sdesign, the ultimate beneficiaries of all that nature has tooffer. In The Separate Rose, a book that takes place onEaster Island, he writes:

Antigua Rapa Nui, patria sin voz,perdónanos a nosotros los parlanchines del mundohemos venido de todas partes a escupir en tu lava,llegamos llenos de conflictos, de divergencias,

de sangre,de llanto y digestiones, de guerras y duraznos,en pequenas hilaras de inamistad, de sonrisashipócritas, reunidos por los dados del cielosobre la mesa de tu silencio.

Ancient Rapa Nui, motherland without a voice,forgive us, we ceaseless talkers of the worldcome from all corners and spit in your lava,we arrive full of conflicts, arguments, blood,weeping and indigestion, wars and peach treesin small rows of soured friendships, of hypocriticalsmiles, brought together by the sky’s diceupon the table of your silence.

Our mutability, when compared to stone or sky, is agiven, an essential part of what we are. But our separa-tion from nature is of our own doing, a result of neglect-ing responsibilities that come with being a consuming,manipulative force. Out of fear, we deny our part innature; we seek to conquer or convert the world aroundus, imposing our will and too typically fleeing into reli-gious faith as an escape rather than using it as a placefrom which to engage, with true humility, questions andmystery. When we act out of compassion or love, andseek nothing specific in return, or act in what I wouldcharacterize as the Zen Buddhist sense of doing nothing,we reclaim our integral place in the landscape.

I would not characterize Neruda as yearning so much forthe mystical, as understood in terms of an intuitiveunderstanding of God or ultimate reality. He was noRumi or William Blake, Evelyn Underhill or ThomasMerton; he did not attempt to explicitly explore his spiri-tuality. He sought social justice, compassion and love,


knowledge and sensual awareness, historical memory,and a conscious embrace of our contradictions, smallsuccesses and failures as elements of our humanity. Earlyon, he was influenced by his countryman VicenteHuidobro’s creacionismo movement, which advocatedthe creation of realities that were strictly poetic. Then itwas the surrealism of André Bréton, and later he turnedtoward the mechanisms of myth-making to write TheHeights of Macchu Picchu and other sections of CantoGeneral, rather than toward the academically acceptablemythologies of the Greek and Roman worlds. This lattertendency comes to full flower, I believe, in The SeparateRose.

MB: I want to ask about how a poem in translation feelsdifferent to you from the original. I would qualify that bysaying that I know scholars of literary translation havegone back and forth about this, but generally, the knowl-edgeable and experienced translators feel they’ve cap-tured some essence of the original meaning but have asense of flow in the target language that is poetic for thatlanguage. What is your take on that based on your expe-rience?

WO’D: A translator needs to get closer than capturingsome essence of the original meaning, or he is compos-ing something like a version, a la Stephen Berg’sexpressly labeled versions of Anna Akhmatova. And yes,it’s necessary to create a sense of flow in the target lan-guage that approximates the flow of the original and thatis poetry. If one doesn’t compose a viable poem in thetarget language, while recreating as closely as possiblethe experience of the original — of which denotative andconnotative meanings are a major part — what has he“brought across”? The words, punctuation, line breaks.Computers can do that for us, with the added advantageof occasionally hilarious results.

When I conceive of the nature of an original and a trans-lation, and the relationship between them, I sometimessee two circles overlapping in the manner of a MorrisGraves painting. Even if we need to view them as over-lapping more fully than Graves’ circles tend to, the origi-nal and the translation are inevitably two different, inde-pendent entities, which share a deeply intimate connec-tion, one that ultimately defies description or analysis:they are twins, of uncertain or dubious parentage. In hisMemoirs, Neruda says, “I don’t believe in originality…It is just one more fetish made up in our time… an electoral fraud.” But now we’re back to politics. …

MB: Did translating Neruda refine your Spanish, and doyou continue to translate?

WO’D: It certainly did. I heard Spanish spoken as a boywhile standing quietly in my grandparents’ kitchen, asthey were talking about something they didn’t want meto comprehend. Before that, I heard the language utteredby my father, crisp phrases intended for reckless driverson LA freeways. Naturally, those experiences sparkedmy interest in the language, so I studied it in school. ButNeruda’s vocabulary and phrasing differed markedlyfrom my grandparents’ and my father’s, and while mySpanish grammar improved some, my vocabularyexpanded greatly, in a more lyrical direction… I stilldon’t speak as well as I’d like, so I’m hoping that spend-ing time in Chile, and in Mexico, too, will change that.

The only substantive translating I’ve done since TheBook of Questions has been from the Chinese of theT’ang and Sung dynasties, of a few poems and fragmentsof poems for a historical novel that the Chinese writerHan-ping Chin and I coauthored and recently completed.Han-ping and I collaborated on those translations. I thor-oughly enjoyed the process of rendering from theChinese. Han-ping provided the literal “crib,” and I tookit from there, asking follow-up questions, often aboutcultural connotations and secondary meanings. In thecase of plum blossoms, though, there appear to be asmany connotations, depending on context and era, as theInuit languages have words for snow.

MB: I know you were a published poet before youbegan translating Neruda. Did you continue to writepoems while translating?

WO’D: Yes, I did, but finding the time, and more so thecreative, psychic, intellectual, and emotional space, tofully work on my own poems and the translations proveda challenge at times.

MB: How did your translation work affect your ownpoetry?

WO’D: Overall, it was excellent for the quality mypoetry. I gained greater facility and range during theprocess, a larger perspective on the world, and it sharp-ened my eye and ear. For a few years there, however,getting well into Neruda’s process of dealing with hisimpending death, in his poems, had odd, insidious


effects, not always so helpful in doing my own work. Tosome degree, internally, in my creative life, I wasenmeshed in a life well beyond my years and directexperience, the life of someone in a position that I hopednot to find myself in until I reached 100, and not then ifit could be helped. To circumvent the problem, and incollusion with other factors, I began to overthink andoverwrite my poetry. I pulled out of it when I finally sawwhat was happening. I stopped writing for a while, thenreturned after working consciously, and even in mydreams, to use Neruda’s influence to help free me fromhim. The project had become a practice unto itself.

Now that the historical novel is done, I’m back for thefirst time in a long while to working primarily andalmost exclusively on my own poems. No collaborationsat present.

MB: You mentioned using Neruda’s influence “even inyour dreams.” Could you recall a dream to explain thatdynamic of your soul brother or soul father in moredetail?

WO’D: The word “use” probably implies more volitionthan I can rightfully claim, but one dream has remainedparticularly vivid. Just before I began work on The Seaand the Bells, I dreamt that I was lying in bed, facing theopen closet, when from among the hanging clothesstepped a boy with dark, slicked-down hair, a white but-ton-down shirt, and black woolen trousers. He reachedout to hand me a glass of water, bright and clear, and Iextended my hand to take it. The boy’s face wasNeruda’s; then the face morphed into mine as a boy, andbegan to alternate slowly between them. I don’t recalltouching the glass of water, just both of us extending ourhands and being there. I’ve come to see that one thingthe glass represents is not Neruda’s work or even our“collaboration,” if you will, but el poeta chileano givingme the gift of my own work, my voice. I could live up tothe gift first by accepting it with a ready heart, then bydoing whatever was needed to keep my mind and spiritworthy of the work, that is, the practice of the work.

MB: What is your sense of the importance of Neruda toChileans and to Spanish speakers around the world?

WO’D: My sense of it is that he is still el poeta delpueblo, and although less so than a couple of decadesago, his poems are memorized and sung. Young suitorsstill give their beloveds or each other copies of Twenty

Love Poems, and he is still a major figure in Chile andthroughout the Spanish-speaking world. He’s still thefather figure that elder and younger Chilean poets honorand must overcome if they are to be accepted on theirown terms, in their own light.

When I first went to work at Microsoft’s InternationalGroup, two Italian interns came to my office one day andasked if I were the William O’Daly who translatedNeruda. I was shocked. I said that I was, and they juststared for a few moments, then asked why I was workingthere and where was my yacht? Neruda has sold morebooks than any other 20th-century Spanish-languagepoet, and I believe that he is the most translated modernpoet in the world.

MB: And for English speakers, how significant hasNeruda’s poetry been? What role does it play?

WO’D: It’s been significant in many ways, from beingone of the great poetries of love, longing, and the naturalworld, to being an influence on a few generations ofEnglish-speaking poets, particularly U.S. poets in the1970s and 1980s and an inspiration and a truthful refugefor norteamericanos who are aghast and ashamed at ourgovernment’s policies toward Latin America, historically,particularly toward Chile. And much in between. I don’tsee his influence in the most current North Americanpoetry, not like I used to, but I do believe that the verticalpersonal pronoun (“I”) that pervades our poetry coulduse yet another infusion of the scope and inclusiveness,outwardly and inwardly, that one finds in Neruda.

MB: I am sure you are right about that, with all thesolipsistic meanderings that one sees so often now pass-ing for poetry.

You could have written a translation without printing theoriginal Spanish, but there is something very specialabout bilingual editions. Perhaps some people read justthe English or Spanish, but I can’t look at these bilingualeditions and not get into the originals. The bilingual edi-tions also help me appreciate the effort of the literarytranslator. But they also encourage cross-cultural under-standing in a world dangerously short on such under-standing. How do you see the bilingual editions servingthe reading public?

WO’D: First, let me point out that a translator’s purposeis to make accessible poetry composed in a foreign lan-


guage, and by extension his publisher’s mission is tomake it available. I know of no better way to accomplishthose ends than by providing, whenever possible, bilin-gual editions. The effect they have on people who readthem, on those who to some degree engage both lan-guages, cannot be easily known except on an individualbasis, if then. Still, I have heard testimonials from manyreaders who say that having the Spanish on the facingpage sheds light on both languages and on the “experi-ence of the poem” as it lives and breathes in each,together and separately. Living with a poem composed indifferent languages also teaches us something about thenature of poetry itself. So, yes, I would say that bilingualeditions inevitably support cross-cultural understandingand would suggest that such understanding usuallyresults in attitudes of greater tolerance and more vibrantexchange — which helps to balance our tendency towardprovincialism and self-absorption. When we learn some-thing genuine about another people or culture, we’regiven an opportunity to gain perspective on ourselves.The clearer and truer our knowledge of ourselves, thebetter prepared we are, intellectually and emotionally, toreach out and contribute something positive to the world,to our families and friends. To extend that glass of purestwater….

BibliographyO’Daly, William, translator. The Yellow Heart, by PabloNeruda. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press,1990. Introduction; bilingual. Revised second edition,2002. Original title: El corazón amarillo.

O’Daly, William, translator. The Sea and the Bells, byPablo Neruda. Port Townsend, WA: Copper CanyonPress, 1988. Introduction; bilingual. Revised second edi-tion, 2002. Original title: El mar y las campanas.

O’Daly, William, translator. Winter Garden, by PabloNeruda. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press,1986. Introduction; bilingual. Revised second edition,2002. Original title: El jardín de invierno.

O’Daly, William, translator. The Book of Questions, byPablo Neruda. Port Townsend, WA: Copper CanyonPress, 1991. Introduction; bilingual. Revised second edi-tion, 2001. Original title: El libro de las preguntas.

O’Daly, William, translator. The Separate Rose, by PabloNeruda. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press,1985. Introduction; bilingual. Original title: La rosa sep-arada.

O’Daly, William, translator. Still Another Day, by PabloNeruda. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press,1984. Introduction; bilingual. Original title: Aún.


I

Translating La Fontaine must be addictive. Many yearsago, while teaching in France, at a colleague’s request Iworked up a version of one of the fables to serve as amodel for his class. The first led to more, and beforelong I had completed a little more than one third of thewhole collection in twelve books. I soon discovered thatI was far from alone. Before I could interest a publisherin what I had embarked upon, the late Norman Specter’scomplete fables came out in a posthumously publishedbilingual edition, and in the same year, NormanShapiro’s first volume of selections appeared. In thiscrowded field, already occupied by the versions ofMarianne Moore, Francis Duke, and James Michie,among others, I had little chance of interesting a com-mercial publisher, so I halted my project. Nevertheless,the exercise taught me a great deal about verse-to-versetranslation, an activity I have indulged in since myundergraduate days. It can be a great pleasure or a greattrial. Practiced for its own sake, poetic translation offersthe entertainment of a sophisticated and challengingword game. Though reminiscent of a crossword puzzle, atranslation exercise is different at one key point: there isno guarantee that a word or phrase exists to fit the blankspaces.

Over the years, I had evolved a set of ad hoc princi-ples for this kind of craft, and the attempt to render alarge number of poems by the same author gave them asort of critical mass. The first is self-evident: verse-to-verse translation implies replicating the metrical andrhyming patterns of the source, or at least their nearequivalents. It should result in a poem that renders notonly the meaning of the original but also as much as pos-sible of its style and idiom. Furthermore, the end productshould be a poem in its own right, capable of standingindependently of the source, yet without attempting toconceal their relationship. Formal patterns, even morethan verbal fidelity, are essential components of thisimplied indebtedness.

In the case of a writer like La Fontaine, one canargue that the style is the man in a more than usualsense, because he presents himself as a translator in along tradition of translators. Indeed, one might note that

the fable tradition is one of incessant translation andrecasting: the oldest surviving examples come fromBabylonia in the sixth century BC, and they must them-selves have been preceded by ancient prototypes. The so-called Aesopian fables are themselves a series of deriva-tions and imitations, preserved in collections from thefourth century on and usually written in prose rather thanverse. Roman imitators, principal among them Phaedrus,were key to their transmission to the West; and it is inLatin that they begin to appear predominantly in verse. Itis also the Latin tradition that makes of the fable afavorite school text, perhaps inevitably so given theirdidactic character. In addition to these sources, there isan oriental strain that goes back to India and China andwas transmitted through Arabic sources to the MiddleAges and the Renaissance. This vast international tradi-tion is what La Fontaine refers to as Aesop, although hisprincipal debt is to Phaedrus and to Phaedrus’ sixteenth-century translators. Like Shakespeare, La Fontaine sel-dom invents fresh material; his contribution resides almostentirely in what he makes of what he has inherited.

To be original in such an ancient literary form, onemust develop a distinctive style. This is what makes LaFontaine’s versions stand out. It is for this that he hasbecome renowned as the most noteworthy fabulist inEuropean literature, a reputation that reaches beyondeven his ranking among the great French classical writersof the seventeenth century. Corneille, Racine, Boileau —the English-speaking world knows them mostly by repu-tation. But it is familiar with La Fontaine because hemanages to penetrate linguistic, historical, and culturalbarriers. The Latin fabulists sharpened the satirical toneof the fable; La Fontaine added to it urbanity and a cer-tain philosophical touch. It is wit, above all, that charac-terizes his style. Not far behind, however, is his use ofverse; he is an obvious master of French metrics.

His distinction as a metricist is, in fact, an insepara-ble aspect of his achievement, because it is the meter thatgives the wit its focus. Meter, in the hands of a skillfulwriter, concentrates rather than dilates, pulls words into aconvergence and, through rhythm, gives their meaningextra dimensions, affective or ironic. Meter always leadslanguage somewhere that it doesn’t especially want togo, but properly used, makes of this tension between the


MAKING DO WITH LESS: LA FONTAINE IN ENGLISH

By Robert S. Dupree

natural rhythm of the phrase and the imposed rhythm ofverse a source of extraverbal complexity. That is the ele-ment one must seek to preserve in translating; it is, ofcourse, the most difficult to render successfully. In myopinion, a proper version of La Fontaine requires a strictadherence to metrics. The most brilliant attempt at recre-ating La Fontaine’s fables in another language will fail toreproduce his peculiar virtues as a writer if it ignores thisprinciple. The result may be excellent in its own right, avaluable contribution to the ongoing tradition of thefable, but it will not give us La Fontaine’s true wit toadvantage dressed.

The most prominent feature of La Fontaine’s verse ishis use of lines of variable length. In all other respects,he follows the strict rules of metrics such as they hadevolved by the second half of the seventeenth century.The fable was far less esteemed than the more presti-gious genres of epic and tragedy. Fabulists, therefore,could enjoy some leeway in performance and make useof certain devices inherited from the by now discredited“baroque” poetry of the earlier half of the century. Whatsaved the fable from being neglected entirely was themoral lesson it was supposed to inculcate. This senten-tiousness does not appeal much to readers any longer,and it is more often imaginative catalyst than didacticgoal for fabulists of any era, whatever they may claim tobe doing. But because the fable was a less serious genrethan, say, Racine’s tragedy or even Boileau’s formalverse satire, La Fontaine had an opportunity to innovate.He managed to use the simple device of line variation ina way that made a classical style possible for a minor lit-erary genre in which the high language of epic and tragicart was deemed out of place. How did he contrive to doso?

The language of French classicism is direct andclear, marked by an elegant simplicity. No extraneouselements are allowed, and in a writer like Jean Racine,the vocabulary itself shrinks to a kind of verbal minimal-ism. The key to La Fontaine’s success is variable verselength. It allows him to avoid the kind of padding that isthe first temptation for every poet seeking to fill out aline. When this poet has said all he needs to say, hestops. The line ends there. The result is economy, speed,naturalness, and clarity. Nevertheless, this freedom to letthe verse be shaped by the meaning is not the only bene-fit of variation. The length of the line can also swell orshrink without warning; the rhyming pattern, confined tocouplets in the more serious genres, can, in the samemanner, be varied to avoid appearing forced. It is thistension between the strict rules of French classical verse

and the apparent waywardness of the lyrical ode thatgives La Fontaine’s verse its playful seriousness and pro-vides a fertile ground for his wit. Unlike the couplets ofthe classical alexandrine, his varied line lengths andrhyming patterns work in counterpoint to his phrasing,now acting to isolate and emphasize a statement, now tonuance it, now to give it an ironic twist, now to make itpause midway through enjambment. To my way of think-ing, the greatest error in translating La Fontaine is toneglect his rigorous freedom, a paradoxical combinationof strict adherence to the rules of French versificationand a naturalness of phrase that give scope for his wit.Archaisms for the sake of rhyme, unidiomatic or old-fashioned idioms used to fill out a rhythm, too obviousan attempt to be clever or “poetic” — all are fatal to aclose approximation of his style.

Versification in French and EnglishA translator must recognize from the start that Frenchand English are characterized by quite different rhythms.Furthermore, these differences have an impact on theirrespective metrical systems. French is less staccato thanEnglish, and French verse tends to move in a more fluidfashion. French syllables, pronounced in groupingsformed by liaison (the smooth blending of the end of oneword with the beginning of the next) are also pronouncedmore evenly and distinctly than their English equivalents.For that reason, French metric is governed strictly by thenumber of syllables in the line, because there is none ofthe slurring or weakening of syllables that one encoun-ters in the stress-governed pronunciation of English, inwhich syllable-counting, though sometimes attempted bypoets such as Marianne Moore, is not readily perceptibleto the ear.

English and French are both marked by a large num-ber of monosyllables, but their effects on rhythm arevery different in the two languages. One of the mostadmired lines in all of French literature (from Racine’sPhèdre) is made up entirely of monosyllables:

Le jour n’est pas plus pur que le fond de mon coeur.(The day is not more pure than the depths of my

heart)

I have rendered this line word-for-word in English, butthe translation, while faithful, has none of the appeal ofthe original. That is perhaps because almost none of thevowels in my English version are repeated, whereas inFrench the phrase is modulated by assonance and by the


rising and sinking pattern of the vowel sequence, whichmimics the meaning. (The middle of the tongue rises inthe course of movement from “ou” to “u” in the first halfof the line and then lowers progressively from the nasal“on” to the deeper “oeu” of the last word in the secondhalf, echoing the progression from the elevation of sun-light to the hidden depths of the heart.) Of course, com-parable effects might be obtained in English with a lessbrutal one-for-one rendition, but there remains an impor-tant difference in rhythm between the two lines.

Using the same example, let us look at the way aclassical French hexameter or “alexandrine” verse isdivided by its caesura. There is an obligatory main pauseafter the sixth syllable, splitting the line precisely in two,and each hemistich or half-line is further divided by asecondary pause:

Le jour | n’est pas plus pur || que le fond | de mon coeur.

French sentences are pronounced in a series of risingcontours; each phrase that makes up a clause moveshigher in pitch until the climax of the sentence is reached— the key word that completes its meaning — and thenthe pitch plunges in the final phrase. The standardalexandrine consists of four stresses. Thus, the stressesfall on “jour,” “pur,” “fond,” and “coeur.” Each of thesewords is marked by a pitch higher than that of its preced-ing syllables, except for the last, which is lower than allthe rest. Within each group, there is a smooth rhythmthat leads to a phrasal climax, and succeeding phrasesseem to lead evenly to the most emphatic word in thesentence before the last phrase drops to signal that thestatement has reached completion. The English sentence,however, consists of a series of falling rather than risingpitches, the result of a tendency to place the stress on thefirst syllable of a word rather than, as French does, onthe last.

My English version of Racine’s line is a hexameteras well, and one can sense right away that in English,which has more frequently placed stresses, a twelve-syl-lable line with a central pause tends to be heard as twosuccessive trimeters. For that reason, the hexameter isusually avoided by all but a small number of poets,because it tends to break in half. Sir Philip Sidney’s ini-tial sonnet in his “Astrophil and Stella” sequence suc-ceeds in avoiding this effect by constantly varying thecaesura so that it seldom falls in the middle of the line:

Loving in truth and fain in verse my love to show,That the dear she might take some pity on my pain... .

Incidentally, my limping word-for-word rendering ofRacine’s verse tends not to end up in halves, as it wouldwere its rhythms uniform, but in an awkward pentameter:

The day | is not | more pure | than the depths | of myheart.

That is, one hears three iambs followed by two anapestsas a total of five stresses, and the whole line as a total offive rather than six feet.

In the French alexandrine, the pauses within the half-lines do not divide their respective sections equally. Inmy Racinian example, the first hemistich is split in a 2/4ratio, the second in a 3/3 ratio. All the rhythmic varietyof the alexandrine resides in these half-lines, althoughwhen a whole sentence stretches over several verses orcouplets, then the melodic contours of the language offerfurther, larger-scale variation. Without these two possibil-ities, classical French verse would soon turn monoto-nous, but the opportunity for variation is severelyrestricted even so.

The standard verse length in French is the hexameter,with four stresses; that in English is the pentameter, withfive stresses. The consequence is that the French line isalways equally divided, whereas the English line isalways unequally divided, by its caesura. Because it hasan uneven number of stresses, the English line can neversound equally split in two, even if the main pause shouldfall after the fifth syllable. The greater number of stressesin the English iambic pentameter may have something todo with our treating it as equivalent in weight and digni-ty to the alexandrine in French, but it is worth noting thatboth Italian and Spanish tend to use an eleven-syllableline with a stress on the tenth syllable as their standards,thus conforming more to the English pattern. Italian andSpanish, both of which give each syllable full weight, asin French, are nevertheless closer to English in stress pat-terns. French has a peculiar rhythm that accounts for itslonger line, and each language has its own very differentintonation, so that the means for achieving variety is alsodifferent in each verse system.

Whereas French poets work with the hemistich asunit, English poets work in terms of the foot. Variation inEnglish is achieved not only by varying the placement ofthe caesura but also, on a smaller scale, by dropping anunstressed syllable in the initial iambic foot, adding anunstressed syllable to the beginning of an iambic foot, orinverting the order of stressed and unstressed syllables.As a result, the so-called iambic pentameter line can varyfrom as few as nine to as many as twelve (or possibly


more) syllables. Standard English verse is like an accor-dion. To vary line length in French is to vary the numberof syllables; to do so in English is to vary the number ofstresses. Still, one must acknowledge that syllable-count-ing and stress-counting play central roles in both lan-guages. The real problem that arises in rendering Frenchalexandrines into English pentameter resides in the sim-ple fact that the standard French line divides exactly inhalf, whereas the English line does not.

The consequence for a translator of La Fontaine isthat variations of line length have different effects in thetwo languages. Because twelve syllables of French (leav-ing aside for a moment questions of stress and the accor-dion-like English line) are perceived as being equivalentto ten syllables of English, one must always be preparedto lose two syllables per line when translating. Therefore,a French decasyllabic becomes the equivalent of anEnglish tetrameter, and French octosyllable becomesEnglish trimeter. The English translator has to make dowith fewer syllables, a problem when a version in anoth-er language often requires more words than the originalto render the same meaning. When one turns to the num-ber of stresses per line, the situation is reversed. Here, atleast, is compensation for the loss of two syllables,because one gains an additional stress for each line ofEnglish. At the same time, a new problem arises. What iseven in French becomes odd in English. The four stress-es of the alexandrine are one less than the English pen-tameter’s five. The French decasyllabic line, which tendsto contain three stresses, contrasts with the Englishtetrameter, which has four, and so on. One is alwaysmoving from a balanced to an unbalanced system andvice versa. Perhaps enough has been said to indicate thatthe translator who wishes to be consistent in handling LaFontaine’s characteristic varying line-lengths will have toforgo certain features in the original and seek to findother ways of replicating the relationship of meter andmeaning.

The Prevalence of RhymesEqually if not more problematic is the question of rhyme.Anyone who has ever tried to do a verse translation of aPetrarchan sonnet knows how difficult it can be to findtwo sets of four rhyming words for the octave. Italianand French abound in rhymes; by comparison, English isimpoverished. In French, this very abundance has beenthe occasion for yet another form of restraint: the classi-cal alternation of masculine and feminine rhymes. Thereis no equivalent at all for this system in English, nor

could there be without imposing impossible restrictionson the rhyme-starved poet. A word ending in mute “e” isconsidered feminine (even if it is grammatically mascu-line). Otherwise, it is masculine. At one time in the histo-ry of the French language, when this letter was actuallypronounced, the difference between them was audible. Amasculine rhyme was one that ended in a stressed sylla-ble, a feminine rhyme one that ended in a stressed fol-lowed by an unstressed syllable. Whether as succeedingcouplets or as pairs of interlaced rhymes, these two typesmust alternate. Nor is this the only rhyming conventionthat distinguishes French practice. A word ending in “z”or “s” or “x” can rhyme only with another that termi-nates with a letter from the same group. Although thereis no rule that prescribes their sequence in the mannerrequired of masculine and feminine rhymes, they too canbe either masculine or feminine and must alternate in thesame way, although, thankfully, plural masculine rhymesare not required to alternate exclusively with plural femi-nine rhymes. To seek to replicate this structure in Englishwould be absurd, and it can be serenely ignored by thetranslator.

Wit and HumorFinally, there is the question of that most volatile of ele-ments, wit. Some jokes translate, some do not. Some donot even travel far from their birthplace, even thoughremaining in the same language. The translator wants hisLa Fontaine to sound as witty in English as in French,but what to do about wit that is too language-specific tobe conveyed in other terms? Here, there can be no gener-al solution, but suffice it to say that if La Fontaine is tokeep his wit intact in English, it should be as aFrenchman. One should be careful about modernizing ornaturalizing when dealing with phenomena that are dou-bly remote both historically and culturally. If the fox inthe fable is said to be a Gascon or a Norman, it is betternot to try and make him into a Texan or a Scot. If theoriginal requires a footnote, then the translation will too.Anachronisms in translation tend to be jarring, evenwhen they seem appropriate; in the end, the goal issomehow to capture the tenor or tone of the original, torender humor when it is present but not to turn it intoquaintness or cleverness for its own sake, just as oneshould avoid padding out a line or creating an awkwardphrase for the sake of preserving a rhyme.

These, then, were the guiding principles that I feltshould govern my efforts at translating the fables. I soondiscovered that I was not able to follow them in every


case, but they did prove helpful in providing some con-sistency to my attempts. In seeking appropriate Englishequivalents, one has to define the conventions of trans-port: what can be carried over and what cannot? What isreasonable and convincing and what is not? In the caseof La Fontaine’s variable lines, some unanticipated ques-tions soon arose. Does the French poet use a longer orshorter line to regulate the articulation of his phrasing, ordoes it serve to break the monotony of equal segmentsby establishing a separate rhythm, one independent ofpauses mandated by meaning that acts as counterweightor in counterpoint to the movement of the sentence?Simply adhering to the same ratios of syllable or stresscounts as the original’s from line to line, the moststraightforward way of reproducing these variations, willnot ensure that they have the same effect in English asthey had in French. With each new line, often one isdealing not only with a new hand of cards but with a dif-ferent deck.

The Original TextBroad generalizations such as these tend to be tedious or,worse, confusing without specific instances to illustratethem. I shall turn to two popular fables that reveal thekinds of problems one encounters in verse translationand that have been rendered into English by varioushands. The products of poets whose work has been high-ly praised, these examples are most worthy of study, andmy aim is less to rate them than to discover how andwhy they succeed or fail. Then I shall present my ownattempts, not as competing versions but as the occasionto recount some of the problems I encountered in tryingto turn La Fontaine into English. First, let us turn to theoriginal French version of “La Cigale et la Fourmi” (Ihave provided a literal translation in prose to establishthe basic meaning of the text):

La Cigale, ayant chantéTout 1’été,Se trouva fort depourvueQuand la bise fut venue:Pas un seul petit morceauDe mouche ou de vermisseau.Elle alla crier famineChez la Fourmi sa voisine,La priant de lui prêterQuelque grain pour subsisterJusqu’à la saison nouvelle.

“Je vous paierai, lui dit-elle,Avant 1’oût, foi d’animal, intérêt et principal.”La Fourmi n’est pas prêteuse;C’est là son moindre défaut.“Que faisiez-vous au temps chaud?“Dit-elle à cette emprunteuse.— “Nuit et jour à tout venantJe chantais, ne vous deplaise.”“Vous chantiez? j ’en suis fort aise.Eh bien! dansez maintenant.”

[The Cicada, having sung all summer, found herself quitedestitute when the north wind had arrived: not a singlelittle piece of fly or worm. She went to warn of starva-tion to her neighbor the Ant, begging her to lend her a bitof grain to live on until the new season. “I will pay you,”she told her, “before August [i.e., harvest-time], animal’shonor, interest and principal.” The Ant does not believein lending; that is her least fault. “What were you doingduring the warm time?” she said to this borrower. “Nightand day to every comer I was singing, if you do notmind.” “You were singing? I’m so delighted. Well, then,dance now!”]

As my prose pony reveals, a great deal of the fable’scharm is lost without the meter.

Before examining the various English versions, Iwould like to point out several features of the originalthat offer potential problems for the translator. First, themeter, unusual even for this poet, consists of lines ofseven syllables (except for verse two, which has onlythree). These are vers impairs, that is, verses with anuneven number of syllables, considered irregular inFrench prosody. Not quite octosyllabic, yet more thanhexasyllabic lines, they produce a peculiar effect becauseof the shifting caesura, which falls most frequently afterthe third syllable, sometimes after the fourth, more rarelyafter the second. The second verse is simply a truncatedversion of the normal line, but it suggests, as a result ofits brevity, that the summer does not last long or that it issoon cut short. Here, the variation in length serves aclear purpose that is easy to reproduce. Why did the poetchoose to cast this fable in such a short and odd sus-tained verse line? Did he intend to suggest, by reducingthe octosyllable even further by a syllable, something ofthe minute dimensions of his protagonists? Is the unevenposition of the caesura meant to mirror the unequal posi-tions of the two insects in relation to their preparation forwinter? All one can say for sure is that this, the first of


the fables, announces itself as very different in mannerfrom the dignified balance and length of the classicalalexandrine.

This difference is also marked by the change fromrhyming couplets to enclosed rhymes in the last eightlines and, of course, the amputated second verse. Whenthe fables are published individually or in a selection, themeaning of these two disruptions is obscured. The open-ing dedication to the Crown Prince is in alexandrines andimitates the beginning of the Aeneid in mock-heroicfashion. This first of all the fables, with its unusual meterand its two irregularities, is a sign of the technique to bedeployed more daringly in the fables to come. The mix-ture in the dedicatory poem of seriousness toward thePrince and irony toward the subject matter of the fablesis given its formal equivalent in this initial poem.

Although the unfortunate insect in this fable isoften called a grasshopper or even a locust or cricket, theGreek prototype identifies her as a cicada, as does LaFontaine. Is there a difference? Probably not a significantone, but in the interest of fidelity, one should respect thepoet’s original designation, in my opinion. Cicadas donot look anything like grasshoppers, much less crickets,though they are close to locusts. A vermisseau is a smallworm or vermicule, but the latter word is much too unfa-miliar for English speakers to be a reasonable option.Cicadas do not eat flies, worms, or grains of wheat, butno one would confuse an animal fable with entomology.None of these matters pose any particular problems inEnglish. La bise is the cold north wind; it is a commonenough word in French, so any word or phrase that con-veys the basic idea is satisfactory. L’oût (more properly,août), August, is the month of harvest; since the ant hasasked to borrow a bit of grain, that would be the appro-priate time before which to pay it back with interest.

The trickiest phrase in the fable is doubtless foid’animal, “on my honor as an animal,” and it is a signifi-cant element in the meaning of the poem, as we shallsee. The humor behind it resides in the notion of trust-worthiness as evidenced by one’s status, especially as amember of the upper class. “Gentleman’s honor,” wewould say. The problem is not in translating the phrasebut in preserving its parodic humor. The words prêteuseand emprunteuse, adjectives describing one who lends orborrows readily, have no equivalent in English, and thefact that the first can also mean “generous” seems toinvoke a sense of “generous to a fault,” given the nextline, which points out that the ant doubtless has faults butovergenerosity is not one of them. Other than these small

matters, the poem offers no very great challenges; it hasbeen translated often, as a piece of its widespread famil-iarity deserves to be.

The poem itself is no simple reproduction of anancient moral tale. It contains the elements of a novel orshort story in short compass: the scene and time of actionare established in its opening lines. Cicada’s and Ant’scharacters are established in subtle fashion through theirdialogue, and the narrator uses both direct quotation andfree indirect discourse to convey their characteristicmodes of speech. The Cicada, as befits a singer, speaksin a voice prone to dramatic effects: she proclaims hercoming tragedy, appeals to her integrity, and speaks likea down-and-out diva who has seen better times and willbe back on her feet in time to reimburse her creditor. Sheknows when to look for the harvest and how to reckonthe cost of a loan. She prides herself on her openness andgenerosity, ready to share her gift with all.

The Ant is ironic, skeptical, and self-confident, withno patience for freeloaders. She is severe, unforgiving,and seemingly unconcerned about her lack of generosity.Her final words are marked by sardonic cruelty.Although one might argue that nature is red in tooth andclaw, that cicadas do not outlive the winter anyway,whether or not they are well fed, this is clearly thehuman world, where a gentleman’s word is supposed tobe his honor. The practices of borrowing and lending,sympathy and sharing, are positive means of social cohe-siveness. The Ant views lending as a sign of weakness;the Cicada as a neighborly duty toward a temporarilydispossessed fellow creature. After all, the Ant stands toprofit from this loan once the bad times are over. Aninsect like herself, the Cicada assures her neighbor thatshe has the best of intentions; cooperation benefits bothparties. Unfortunately, the Ant knows a bad deal whenshe sees it. A penny saved is a penny not loaned.

Yet despite the tradition that sees the Ant as anadmirable, prudent provider for her own future, in con-trast to the profligate and thoughtless Cicada, the tone ofthe fable is ambivalent. The detached, occasionallyamused voice of the narrator cannot conceal a certainanxiety. From the poet’s point of view, the Cicada is asmuch a hapless victim as a poor planner. After all,cicadas and poets are both singers, and both offer the giftof their talents to society in hopes of gaining not only ahearing but patronage and support as well. La Fontainehimself was fully aware of the precariousness of theartist’s existence and the callousness of the insensitivepatron. The poet’s gift to the world is seemingly free of


any commercial taint, but all gifts presuppose somethingin return, at the least some means of sustenance, someform of payment to the piper so that he can continue pip-ing. The curt and dismissive Ant is emblematic of allthose who would deny any real value to the aesthetic;because Cicada’s activity strikes her as unproductive andimpractical, she sees no reason to subsidize, even for oneseason, such a worthless endeavor.

The key phrase in the fable, then, is “foi d’animal,”the conventional bond that maintains society throughmutual trust. You can have confidence in me because wehold to the same values and belong to the same class,whose behavior is prescribed and predictable. TheCicada belongs to a world of beings who recognize oneanother through signs or signals. The Ant experienceswhatever solidarity she knows through common labor,participation in a tightly efficient and regimented organi-zation that punishes slackers by casting them into theouter cold and darkness. The Cicada is a displaced,would-be aristocrat whose attempt to appeal to a sense ofhonor is met by a cold world that has caught her offguard. She is doubly exiled, from nature and from herfellows, by a hostile environment and an unresponsiveaudience. It is not nature but the domestic realm that isthe center of values in the fable. Both Ant and Cicada arefemales in the poem, both by dint of their grammaticalgender and their personalities. Even upper-class womenwere mainly domestic managers during the seventeenthcentury. Some few were allowed to play roles outsidethis domain, but by and large, the woman who enter-tained or, worse, made a living by acting or singing wasoften regarded as a fallen creature. The Ant knows herplace; it is as custodian of the household. The Cicada, inher view, is a woman of the streets who offers herself toall comers and remains totally at the mercy of others.

Where should our sympathies lie? La Fontaine iscareful not to dictate them to us; if there is a moral tothis fable, it is not the traditional one. The Ant’s cautiousdomesticity (“economy” is Greek for “proper order ofthe household”) keeps her from ever indulging in such aquestionable activity as the lending of money for interest.To her the Cicada’s offer of repayment is an insult ratherthan a cry of desperation. She may be frugal, but she isno usurer. That is the least of her faults. The Cicada has atouching faith in the charity of others, in their capacityfor understanding and forgiveness. She deserves somecompensation for her song, which has given pleasure toso many. Yet she proposes a transaction that depends onthe expectation of gain rather than sympathy for thedowntrodden. The fable offers shifting points of view that

cannot be easily resolved into a definitive perspective.

II

Some Recent Versions: A Brief AnthologyLa Fontaine’s manner is simple and direct, despite theambiguities of his fable. The seven-syllable line imposesa considerable economy on his language, as well as acertain speed of pace and delivery. By allowing so littlespace for maneuvering from line to line, the meter under-lines the tension between fullness and emptiness thatstructures the poem. If the Cicada is so irresponsible,how can her speech be sincere? If the Ant is so down-to-earth and practical, how can she be so sarcastic? Toneand style are everything in making this fable interesting.Let us compare the various attempts to capture them inEnglish.

The oldest example I would like to offer is fromMarianne Moore’s 1954 translation of the completefables:

Until fall, a grasshopperChose to chirr;With starvation as foeWhen northeasters would blow,And not even a gnat’s residueOr caterpillar’s to chew,She chirred a recurrent chantOf want beside an ant,Begging it to rescue herWith some seeds it could spareTill the following year’s fell.“By August you shall have them all,Interest and principal.”Share one’s seeds? Now what is worseFor any ant to do?Ours asked, “When fair, what brought you through?”— “I sang for those who might pass by chance — Night and day. Please do not be repelled.”— “Sang? A delight when someone has excelled.A singer! Excellent. Now dance.”

As much as I admire Moore’s poetry, I am at a loss tofigure out what her strategy is in this fable. The meterdoes not seem to follow her standard practice of syllable-counting, which might at least have been appropriate fora poem translated from the French. There does not seemto be any identifiable motivation for the variations in


length, and the choice of words, to say nothing of a ten-dency toward verbosity, is often bizarre. The result doesnot strike me as anything like the original at all, and thetone, inconsistent and somewhat awkward, is so farremoved from La Fontaine’s that a word-for-word proserendering retains more of it than this version does. Hertranslation strikes me as neither good La Fontaine norgood Marianne Moore.

In the rhymed versions that came after Moore’s,one is aware of a certain inevitable duplication, the con-sequence of a poverty of choice among English rhymes.This sameness is particularly striking in the openinglines. Francis Duke’s, for instance, uses an openingrhyme that seems to fall naturally into place and there-fore is adopted by almost all his successors:

Locust, having sung her songAll summer long,Saw her larder running lowAs the bise began to blow.Finding not the slightest smidgeLeft of wormlet or of midge,To her neighbor Ant she criedOf starvation, and appliedFor a loan that should consistJust of grist, to subsistTill the springtime still ahead.“Come the crop I’ll pay,” she said,“On my word as animal,Interest and principal.”Not the lending type is Ant,No fault mars her less than that.“In the hot what were you at?”Shot she at the applicant.“Night and day, at every chance,I sang songs; is that so bad?”“Sang songs, eh? I am so glad!Well, then, now’s your time to dance.”

Duke, like almost everyone else, uses English tetrameteras the equivalent of the seven-syllable lines of the origi-nal; but it is trochaic rather than iambic in rhythm, andthat allows him to keep almost every verse to seven syl-lables in English, thus matching the French very closelyindeed. However, the second verse has, of necessity, foursyllables for La Fontaine’s three. A serious lapse — or soit seems to me — is in verse ten, which in its internalrhyming and consonantal echoes (-st) is doubtless meant

to suggest the grittiness of the situation but in effectstrikes me as awkward and a bit overdone. This verse hasonly six syllables, and I wonder if the rather heavycaesura in the middle of the line is not the result of amisprint. The choice of “smidge” and “midge” in versesfive and six is an ingenious touch, though I find “bise” inverse four a bit odd: why use the French word when thisis supposed to be an English translation? Cigale is ren-dered here — uniquely, I should add — as “locust,” andin a note, the translator justifies his choice in metricalterms: its trochaic rhythm “fits snugly into the lightly-dancing meter,” as he points out. He also notes, quiterightly, that the French word is a common one, while theEnglish “cicada” sounds perhaps a bit more recherché toan American ear.

Richard Wilbur, a poet who learned some of hisown craft from Moore and is one of America’s outstand-ing translators, has also produced a much more elegantpoem than hers:

Grasshopper, having sung her songAll summer long,Was sadly unprovided-forWhen the cold winds began to roar:Not one least bite of grub or flyhad she remembered to put by.Therefore she hastened to descantOn famine, to her neighbor Ant,Begging the loan of a few grainsOf wheat to ease her hunger-painsUntil the winter should be gone.“You shall be paid,” said she, “uponMy honor as an animal,Both interest and principal.”The Ant was not disposed to lend;That liberal vice was not for her.“What did you do all summer, friend?”She asked the would-be borrower.“So please your worship,” answered she,“I sang and sang both night and day.”“You sang? Indeed, that pleases me.Then dance the winter-time away.”

Wilbur’s poem is in iambic tetrameter; it departs from therhyme scheme of the original slightly in lines 15–18 andparaphrases the original phrasing rather broadly at certainpoints. I have my doubts about the use of “friend” in line17. Even if the word, which is not suggested in the text, is


taken here as ironic, the Ant addresses the Cicada formal-ly as “vous” throughout the French, and it seems slightlyout of key to me as a result, though not fatally so. Wilburtranslates “vermisseau” as “grub,” a rather good equiva-lent, though one concealing a possible pun (in its slangmeaning of “food”); certainly this kind of enrichment isnot at all out of place, but tonally the word belongs to alevel of diction at odds with that of the poem as a wholeand could appear slightly awkward. If the pun was intend-ed, it is, nevertheless, amusing. Wilbur also takes an inter-esting tack in rendering the tricky phrase in line 16 (“sonmoindre defaut”) as “that liberal vice,” which catches itsparadox with a clever oxymoron that has a slight politicalshading. However, he loses the period of loan payback —before August — somewhere between lines 12 and 14.The somewhat poetic “descant/ On famine” in lines 7–8introduces an enjambment (another is in lines 12–13) thatis not very characteristic of La Fontaine but helps keep themeter from too much rhythmic regularity. I’m not sure,however, about “descant” as a rendering of crier. It seemsa little too elegant to be an apt translation of the more stri-dent French word, but it does continue the song imageryfrom the opening lines.

Wilbur’s version, originally a contribution to a bes-tiary, was first collected in a 1976 volume of his poetry.James Michie’s, published in his 1979 selection from thefables, adopts in part the free-form strategy that was thebasis for Marianne Moore a quarter-century earlier, land-ing his adaptation somewhere between the more metri-cally regular poems of Duke and Wilbur, on the onehand, and that of Moore on the other. Again, I find thistactic a bit peculiar, but I suppose that it may be justifiedif one bears in mind that an equivalent of La Fontaine’smetrical freedom in the seventeenth century requiresrather more drastic departures from the norm in thetwentieth.

The cicada, having chirped her songAll summer long,Found herself bitterly deprivedWhen the north wind arrived — Not a mouthful of worm or fly.Whereupon in her wantShe rushed round to her neighbour the antAnd begged her to supplySome crumbs on loan to keep body and soul togetherTill next spring. ‘On my word as an animalI swear,’ she said, ‘to repayWith interest before the harvest ends.’

Of the ant’s few faults the minimalIs that she never lends.‘What were you doing during the hot weather?’She asked the importunate insect.‘With all respect,I was singing night and dayFor the pleasure of anyone whom chanceSent my way.’‘Singing, did you say?I’m delighted to hear it.Now you can dance!’

Michie keeps La Fontaine’s cicada instead of making hera grasshopper, and his translation hews fairly close to thewords of the original, more closely in fact than Wilburand far more closely than Moore. However, unlikeWilbur, he chooses to vary the line lengths despite theregularity of the French source, as though reconceivingthis text to make it match the technique of some of theothers. Michie also departs from the rhyme scheme atseveral places, treating it more freely than does LaFontaine in this particular fable. It might be said that thetranslator has chosen to adapt his model’s characteristictactics elsewhere to a fable that barely makes use ofthem. As I mentioned above, this first fable seems to hintat the greater departures to follow, but it does so sparing-ly. The meter itself falls somewhere between iambicrhythms and free verse. Even so, Michie’s version is notunlike La Fontaine’s work in general, even if not veryrepresentative of this fable in particular. However, Iregret the reduction of “intérêt et principal” to “withinterest,” which strikes me as less witty, and “importu-nate insect” for “cette emprunteuse” represents a readingbetween the lines that misses the opposition betweenborrower and lender.

Norman Spector managed to finish his translationof all the fables before his death in 1984, and they werepublished, in a single volume with facing French text,four years later.

Cicada, having sung her songAll summer long,Found herself without a crumbWhen winter winds did come.Not a scrap was there to findOf fly or earthworm, any kind.Hungry, she ran off to cryTo neighbor Ant, and specify:


Asking for a loan of grist,A seed or two so she’d subsistJust until the coming spring.She said, “I’ll pay you everythingBefore fall, my word as animal,Interest and principal.”Well, no hasty lender is the Ant;It’s her finest virtue by a lot.“And what did you do when it was hot?”She then asked this mendicant.“To all comers, night and day,I sang, I hope you don’t mind.”“You sang? Why my joy is unconfined.Now dance the winter away.”

Among Specter’s virtues is his attempt to be both literaland metrically faithful to the original. As a poet, howev-er, he is somewhat deficient. The meter seems unsure atplaces. For no particular reason, the tetrameter shrinks totrimeter at line four and limps at line 20, shrinking onceagain to trimeter in the concluding verse. There is obvi-ous padding at places (“did come,” “of fly or earthworm,any kind”) and the somewhat complex wit of “son moin-dre défaut” is lost in “It’s her finest virtue by a lot.”

In the same year that Specter’s posthumous volumewas published, Norman Shapiro offered his own versionof fifty of the fables, among them his rendition of “LaCigale et la Fourmi”:

The cricket, having sung her songAll summer long,Found — when the winter winds blew free —Her cupboard bare as bare could be;Nothing to greet her hungering eye:No merest crumb of worm or fly.She went next door to cry her plightTo neighbor ant, hoping she mightTake pity on her, and befriend her,Eke out a bit of grain to lend her,And see her through next spring: “What say you?On insect’s honor, I’ll repay youWell before fall. With interest, too!”Our ant — no willing lender she!Least of her faults! replied: “I see!Tell me, my friend, what did you doWhile it was warm?” “Well ... Night and day,I sang my song for all to hear.”

“You sang, you say? How nice, my dear!Now go and dance your life away!”

Shapiro’s insect is now a cricket, an odd transformationthat I find neither a virtue nor a fault. Unlike Spector, hehas a sure command of meter and also chooses thetetrameter line as the equivalent of La Fontaine’s seven-syllable vers impairs. It may seem impudent of me toquestion translations that have received such awards andpraise, including that of Richard Wilbur himself, butthere are some aspects of this version that bother me.Though the French cicada speaks of principal and inter-est, there is little evidence in the original that she has acupboard nor that she expects the ant to “Take pity onher, and befriend her,” interpretations or, rather, interpo-lations that belong to the translator. “On insect’s honor”and “Least of all her faults” are good solutions for theslight problem spots discussed earlier, and “With interest,too!” keeps the humor of the original. Again, for somereason, the cicada has become “my friend” in line 16. Onthe whole, despite my quibbles, this is one of the mostsuccessful of all the published versions.

Christopher Wood also did a selected fables for theOxford World Classics series, published in 1995.

Cicada sang her song all summer long,

but found her fortunes failin Autumn’s gale.

No smallest nip nor nub;no midge; no grub!

She sang the song of the poorto the Ant next door,begging to be suppliedwith sundry crumbs to tideher over until Spring.“I’ll repay everythingby August; true animal!interest and principal.”

The Ant (her least defect) unbending(with ants, there’s never any lending)said: “What did you doall summer through?”

“Night and day, I sang the sameif I may say, to all who came.”


“You sang, you say?That makes my day.Now, dance away.”

Wood’s version is quite different from those of his pre-cursors. Most notably, he tends to use much shorter lines(although verses 15–16 and 19–20 are tetrameter) andvaries their length even more frequently than Michie. Healso divides the whole into five different stanzas, eachcorresponding to a transition in the logical stages of thepoem. I find the phrasing in lines 15–16 a bit confusing— what does “least defect” refer to? — and the exten-sion to all ants of what was considered a particular quali-ty of this individual one might be questioned. Still, thetranslation is marked by some witty phrases that success-fully preserve the tone and humor of the original.Formally, however, the poem has been recast in a waythat eliminates its subtle restraint and economy of means.

An Unpublished VersionThe time has come for me to unveil my own effort.Before doing so, however, I must first describe the cir-cumstances that shaped my attempts. I began my ownproject in 1987 without referring to any previous ver-sions, not even Marianne Moore’s, which I had neverread. My reasons were twofold: first, I was concernedthat I might unconsciously echo lines or strategies fromthe other versions and so decided to avoid them; second,since I was in France, I did not have ready access tothem anyway. Part of the way through working on BookOne, I suddenly realized that I had been metricallyinconsistent. Having worked out a scheme of equiva-lences such as was described earlier, I realized that “TheCicada and the Ant” had to be in trimeter rather than intetrameter, because I was using English tetrameter totranslate French decasyllabic lines. Even at that, to beutterly consistent, I would have had to create a line basedon two and a half stresses. How does one obtain a halfstress? After some reflection I convinced myself thatthere was no palpable way in English to register the dif-ference between an eight-syllable and a seven-syllableline in French. The trimeter would have to serve doubleduty as a representation of both. Since the first fable isunique in using this meter, it seemed pointless to do oth-erwise, especially since I could match vers impairs inFrench with an odd number of stresses in the English.However, like everyone else, I had already adoptedtetrameter for my version. Now I was faced with theprospect of trying to eliminate one foot from each line.Could it be done at all while still maintaining some

fidelity to the original? Here is the result:

Having let song pour from her all summer,Cicada felt deprivedWhen cold north winds arrived:Not one tiny biteOf fly or worm in sight.She called on Ant nearbyTo heed her famished cry,Begging some loan of gristOn which she might subsistTill days turned warm once more.“My bond as bug,” she swore,“By August I’ll pay in fullInterest and principal.”Ant’s no great creditor;That’s her least flaw, it’s true.“Last summer, what did you do?”She asked this borrower.“I sang — don’t take it ill —To all comers, day and night.”“You sang! What a delight!Well, then, now dance your fill.”

Far from suffering from the reduction, my earlier versionwas considerably improved by the economy forced onme by the shortened meter. The translation gained inspeed, directness, and clarity. There was no place for anypadding when only seven syllables at most were avail-able in a given line. Determined to keep as close as pos-sible to the literal meaning and to add or subtract as littleas I could from the original text, while writing in a natu-ral idiom, I spent days on my revision. The text, whichseemed easy to translate into tetrameter, becamefiendishly resistant when pared down to fit the shorterlines. When I had finished, I turned at last to examine theother translations, in which I was not surprised to findanticipations of several of my rhyming attempts. Becausethe choices are usually very restricted, translators arebound to converge on the same sets of words, even ifunaware that others have tried them previously.

I am in no position to pass on the quality of myown work, but I can point out some of the features of itthat strike me as satisfactory, along with others that Imight wish to change if any alternatives should occur tome in the future. The song/long rhyme is virtuallyinevitable as a solution for the first two lines, but though


I used it in my original tetrameter version, and it hasbeen adopted for the majority of the other versions, Ifound it difficult to use if I were to follow my rules ofmetrical equivalence. In one try, I invented a compoundadverb, “summerlong,” by analogy with “daylong,” inorder keep the second line down to only three syllables,like the French (two would have been even better). WhatI wanted there was a precise match for “tout l’été,” thatis, “all summer,” which, given its feminine ending, couldbe considered as one foot and two syllables if one count-ed only as far as the tonic accent. I then tried “Cicada,having sung her/ song all summer” but dropped itbecause “sung her” and “summer” were half-rhymes atbest and, in any case, “song” added another stress andsyllable to line 2. My final attempt — “from her/ sum-mer” — may appear less than satisfactory, but in ordi-nary pronunciation it is a true two-syllable rhyme, so Ihoped that it would sound acceptable.

I wanted to keep the name of the insect in the initialposition; but the constraints of the rhyme, along withonly three stresses for the first line and merely one forthe second, forced me to substitute a more periodic solu-tion, opening with a participial phrase instead. I was ableto salvage some elements from the tetrameter version,among them “my bond as bug” for “foi d’animal,” aphrase that I hoped conveyed some of the humor of theoriginal phrase that struck me as muted even in “animal’shonor” or other similar renditions. Finally, I added “yourfill” to the last line in an attempt to clarify what the Antis saying:, which is, in effect, “If you’re hungry and cold,you can dance to distract your stomach and warm youup.” (In one draft I had written, “Now it’s time todance,” which is perhaps more literally exact.) I hopedthat the economy, incisiveness, and energy of the originalwere somehow evident in my revised attempts.Obviously, any success or lack of it in comparison withthe other translator’s efforts is not mine to judge.

Another SpecimenAlmost as familiar as this opening fable is the even moreeconomical piece from Book Three, “Le Renard et lesRaisins,” or “The Fox and the Grapes.” The original is asfollows:

Certain Renard gascon, d’autres disent normand,Mourant presque de faim, vit au haut d’une treilleDes Raisins mûrs apparemment,Et courverts d’une peau vermeille.Le galand en eût fait volontiers un repas;

Mais comme il n’y pouvait atteindre:“Ils sont trop verts, dit-il, et bons pour les goujats.”Fit-il mieux que de se plaindre?

[Some Gascon fox (others say Norman), almost starvingto death, saw at the top of a trellis some grapes, evident-ly ripe and covered with purple skins. The rascal wouldhave willing made a meal of them; but since he could notreach them, he said, “They’re too green, good only forboors.” Would he have done better if he’d complained?]

Gascons were said to be characterized by boasting,Normans by prudence. The Fox seems to be exercisingboth tendencies at once, hence the uncertainty of “oth-ers” about his nature. The poet calls him a “galand,” thatis, a rogue, rascal, or crafty fellow. Most recent editionsuse this older spelling in the text to differentiate the wordfrom “galant,” a courteous gentleman, a well-bred lover,a gallant. La Fontaine uses the adjective ironically toqualify the fox in other places, just as “sly” is oftenattached to the same animal in English. Both spellingsderive from Middle French “galer,” to enjoy, to rejoice,but its homonym, meaning “to scratch” (English “gall”),may have given rise to the more pejorative shading. Asimilar noun in Middle French, “gallier,” meaning ajoker or ne’er-do-well, can be traced to the same origin.Apparently this range of meanings is operative in thepoem — the fox is a bon vivant in aspirations but a cun-ning trickster in practice. The same ambiguity that makeshim at once a Gascon and a Norman makes him a“galant” in both senses.

Foxes, as all readers of the Bible know, are attract-ed to grapes. This one, however, is concerned with morethan his hunger. Like a self-advertising Gascon, he tendsto overstate his virtues, but like a prudent Norman, hedoes not care to invest any more energy than necessaryto get what he wants. One of the best known in theAesopian tradition, the fable has given rise to the phrase“sour grapes” in English, but La Fontaine gives it a newtwist. The fox wants above all not to be identified withthe “goujats” of the world, that is, the lowliest and leastcultivated of the low. A goujat was the servant of a mili-tary man and, by extension, gross in manners and person,a boor. He would rather go hungry than look like a fool.As a trickster, the Fox does have some self-respect; he isat least superior in some sense to his victims. From thepoint of view of the speaker, the fox has to use his witsto overcome his natural disadvantages and a reputationfor knavery that evidently precedes him. Can we believe


or trust him? There is little about him that strikes one asadmirable. He has some ambition but does not seem tobe very intent on following it through. Nevertheless, thelast line of the poem suggests that he is right to accepthis limitations, even if he has to resort to willing self-deception to do so.

Though it is clear that these particular grapes havereached perfection, it is also given that they are notmeant for the likes of foxes. They are the best because,high on the trellis, they receive the most moisture andsun. They are out of reach in two senses: the fox is toolow in social rank to deserve them, and he is not agileenough to scale the vine. To desire them would be to loseface, to admit to himself that he was one of the rabblehe, as a trickster, holds in disdain. His rationalizationmay be transparent, but it is also an index to his awk-ward position between the highest and lowest elementsof society. The narrator, aware of the fox’s slippery char-acter, suggests that learning not to desire what one can-not, in the nature of things, ever expect to possess is thebeginning of wisdom. He does not judge the fox directly.Though the fox would like to be a gallant — spirited,brave, dashing, and courageous in the face of defeat —he is really a gall, one of life’s irritants. Yet in one sense,he is gallant, at least in his own terms. He knows how toadmit defeat when to be foolhardy would gain him nothing.

There is a neat complementarity between this fableand that of the Cicada. Both seem to point toward thekind of dilemma faced by aristocrats whose power hasbeen eroded and by poets who enjoy the company andfavor of the court but know they will never be among thesocially great. Even so, the poet has one advantage thateludes the Fox. Instead of having to engage in a gestureof deliberate self-deception as an alternative to frustratedcomplaint, he can write a fable of ambiguous tenor. Hecan reside poetically between the extremes of Cicada andAnt, upper and lower classes, galant and goujat. Like theAnt and the Fox, he must go unfed on many a day, buthe has learned how to make the best of his uncertain sit-uation. If he sings for the pleasure of others, like the Ant,he also deceives through his “lying fables” like the Fox.The fables are the lie that mankind tells itself in order toarrive at a higher truth. It is better to know one’s place inthe scheme of the universe than to deny one’s essentialnature. By depicting men’s actions in terms of animals,the poet can demonstrate how to achieve the self-renun-ciation of the Fox without having to practice deliberateself-deception. One deception — the elevation of fiction-al animals to human status — drives out another, thenotion that man can ever truly defeat his own needs by

rising above his humanity. Through fictions we learn toknow ourselves.

A Brief Anthology ContinuedWith the exception of Richard Wilbur, all the translatorshave also published versions of this second example.Marianne Moore’s “Fox” is, I think, more successfulthan was her “Grasshopper,” but she still elaboratesunnecessarily.

A fox of Gascon, though some say of Norman descent,When starved till faint gazed up at a trellis to which

grapes were tied —Matured till they glowed with a purplish tintAs though there were gems inside.Now grapes were what our adventurer on strained

haunches chanced to crave,

But because he could not reach the vineHe said, “These grapes are sour; I’ll leave them for some

knave.”Better, I think, than an embittered whine.

Why, one wonders, “As though there were gems inside”?Foxes do not care much for gems. Why inform us thatthe “grapes were tied” to the trellis, except for the sakeof rhyme? The detail “on strained haunches” is certainlymore concrete and animal-like than anything in LaFontaine, but even though “our adventurer” is a neatsolution for the problem of rendering “le galand,” theline as a whole extends with editorial comment(“chanced to crave”) what was more effectively succinctin the original. “Embittered whine” is an apt renderingfor “se plaindre,” even if a bit overdetermined.

Francis Duke’s version is closer to the French, evento the point of rendering the alexandrines by Englishhexameters, but the metric is not altogether consistent,and once again the effect is to dilate what should becompact.

A Gascon — or some say a Norman — Fox, near deadOf hunger, came upon a grapevine in the sunThat on a trellis overheadBore grapes of warm vermillion.The Goodman might have found a banquet very pleasant,But he couldn’t stretch that high,And so he said: “Those grapes are sour, fit food for a

peasant.”Better than to howl, say I.


“Goodman” is an interesting translation for “galand,” butit sounds a bit too middle-class for either “rascal” or“gentleman.” It also suggests an archaic tone that is notpresent in La Fontaine’s very contemporary idiom — atleast in this instance. “Peasant” for “goujat’” is a pass-able translation but not an entirely accurate one. Whatmakes the servant of a soldier so uncouth is precisely hisinability to stay long enough in one place to develop asense of what is good to eat and what is not. A paysanwould certainly dine more knowingly than a goujat. Isuppose that foxes do “howl” when they complain, butthe word seems a bit much when applied to humans. Imust admit that the word at least reminds us that the Foxis a fox.

Michie is more metrically consistent in his transla-tion of this fable than in the other, but he makes noattempt to follow the rather subtle alternation of twelve-syllable and eight-syllable lines in the original, though hedoes suggest it once. He renders all but two verses asiambic pentameter, concluding with a line of trimeter. Asa consequence, he ends up with ten lines as opposed toLa Fontaine’s eight.

A starving fox — a Gascon, Normans claim,But Gascons say a Norman — saw a clusterOf luscious-looking grapes of purplish lusterDangling above him on a trellis-frame.He would have dearly liked them for his lunch,But when he tried and failed to reach the bunch:“Ah well, it’s more than likely they’re not sweet —Good only for green fools to eat!”Wasn’t he wise to say they were unripeRather than whine and gripe?

“Green fools” is an original way to translate “goujats,”and the doublet “whine and gripe” does manage to cap-ture the two meanings of “se plaindre.”

Spector remains even closer to the French thanMichie or Duke (to say nothing of Moore), but eventhough he attempts to reproduce the line lengths of theoriginal, his uncertain metric skills make hash of LaFontaine’s precision:

A certain Gascon Fox, a Norman one others say,Famished, saw on a trellis, up high to his chagrin,Grapes, clearly ripe that day,And all covered with a purple skin.The rogue would have had a meal for the gods,But, having tried to reach them in vain,

“They’re too green,” he said, “and just suitable forclods.”

Didn’t he do better than to complain?

I find “clods” for “goujats” interesting for its oppositionto “gods” (not in the original, of course), establishingtwo extreme polarities, but the tone of it does not seemquite right to me. Furthermore, La Fontaine indicates thatthe grapes would be very good indeed to eat, but he isnot inclined to make them into a meal for the Olympians.Turning to Shapiro, we find at last a metrical stabilitythat matches the original.

Starving, a fox from Gascony ... Some sayHe was a Norman ... Anyway,He spies a bunch of grapes high on a vine,With skin the shade of deep red wine,Ripe for the tastiest of dining,But out of reach, hard though he perseveres.“Bah! Fit for boors! Still green!” he sneers.

Wasn’t that better than to stand there whining?

The addition of “Anyway” is, I think, a good touch(though not very much like La Fontaine’s brand of wit),since it gives the opening lines that humor which theexplanation (in a footnote) of “Gascon” and “Norman”tends to dissipate. On the negative side, I would stillhave liked just a bit more verbal economy to match thatof the French.

Finally, Wood offers something just a bit different,though similar in some respects to his “Cigale”:

A Gascon Fox (though others claimit was from Normandy he came)was almost dead from hunger. Highabove him on a pergola, his eyewas taken by some grapes which, ruby-red,appeared quite ripe. He would have loved to trythem, but he couldn’t reach them. Saidthe Fox, “They are too green, althoughundiscriminating folk might like a go.”

— Somewhat better than a cry of woe?

The enjambment dominates so many lines here that itestablishes the norm; one might say that this versionreads like rhymed William Carlos Williams, which is


perhaps an admirable display of virtuosity in modempoetry but seems to me out of place in a translation thatis as close to a word-for-word rendering as any we haveseen so far. I wonder about the next-to-last verse, howev-er: “undiscriminating folk” is tonally remote from “gou-jats,” and “might like a go” is hardly equivalent to “bonspour.”

Another Unpublished ExampleThe same criteria that governed my decisions, for betteror for worse, in “La Cigale” were in play as I came to“Le Renard et les Raisins.” But whereas the first offeredconsiderable challenges, the second fell into place almostspontaneously. For whatever reason, the right Englishwords and rhyming pairs seemed to be at hand from thestart. After only one or two changes to a rapidly com-posed draft, I was able to fashion a version that I am stillreluctant to alter sixteen years later. Perhaps that isbecause this fable is both shorter and less demandingmetrically than the first.

A Gascon fox — a Norman, others say —Starving, saw high upon a trellis vineSome grapes in ripe displayWith skins incarnadine.The rascal would have liked them for his mealWere they easier to get.“Too green,” he said, “not fit for the genteel.”Would he’ve done better to fret?

I did not attempt to give English equivalents for“Gascon” or “Norman” (e.g., “Texan” or “Scottish,”among other possibilities). Some historical and culturalspecificities need to be maintained, but the target lan-guage need not require all the resources of its culturalassociations to allow for intelligibility. This is, after all, aFrench fox, and to their credit, all of the translatorsrespected that fact. If the original needs a footnote, thenthe translation probably will as well, unless the translatoris unusually lucky.

I felt satisfied with this version because it seemedto capture what I thought I experienced in La Fontaine:directness, succinctness, sly wit, careful craftsmanship.For the most part, I don’t think that my efforts requiremuch comment. The adjective “apparemment” shouldnot be translated as “apparently” but as “visibly” or“manifestly.” To avoid any hint that they only looked butwere not ripe, I wanted to make clear that they weremature without any doubt. The skins are vermeil, “ver-

million-red.” Since their lusciousness is the very point, Iwanted to make that especially evident and close theslightly unusual “incarnadine” because it struck me, withits Shakespearean associations, as offering just the rightelevation of tone to make the assertion of their excel-lence convincing. These are really good grapes.

The other phrase that requires some comment is thefox’s one-line speech about the grapes. None of the pos-sible translations of “goujats” sounded exactly right tome, so I adopted an old translator’s trick, which is to ren-der something by choosing the negative of its opposite.After all, the emphasis here is on the way the fox wouldlike to think of himself. I felt — perhaps mistakenly —that the word “genteel” strikes just the right tone for afox like this one, not to the manor born but aware of howthe upper class bear themselves. It also allowed me tosuggest — I fear too subtly — the shadings of meaningin “galand,” which are otherwise lost in “rascal.” I canimagine an objection arising that this is not a literaltranslation, and I must agree. However, it satisfies mebecause it has that ring of not quite being what oneaspires to be and in that sense is faithful to the original.

I trust that I have not seemed unnecessarily nega-tive in evaluating translations that have, deservedly inmy opinion, won praise, awards, and book prizes fromthe literary world at large. I have doubtless been blind tomany of their merits and judged according to my ownpreconceptions as an interested party in this enterprise.Certainly, I revel in the fact that La Fontaine has beenkept alive for the modem reading public by so many dis-tinguished poetic reincarnations of his original fables.After all, even the versions I find least successful, thoseof Marianne Moore, are the products of a very fine poetand worth reading in relation to her own poetry with itsfrequent appeal to the animal world as an image of ourown. The criteria each translator sought to satisfy are notnecessarily mine, but that does not make them invalid inmy eyes, simply different. It is all right to transform LaFontaine into a twentieth-century poet if that is the effectone is aiming for. Because one is sure to lose something— often quite a lot — of the original in trying to captureit in another language, it is often necessary to compen-sate for that loss by bringing new dimensions to the text.An interesting translation can indeed reveal aspects ofthe original that were not evident, and since La Fontainewrote in a French that was, for him and his readers, thor-oughly contemporary, it is not unreasonable to updateand reshape the sensibility embodied in his writings.Indeed, new translations of the classics are almost oblig-atory for each new generation of readers. Yet there are


limits, and I, like everyone who engages in theseattempts, want to have it both ways. I want my LaFontaine to sound like us without losing his own person-ality, historical and Gallic. Perhaps nothing can bring uscloser to the original than a multitude of perspectives,each revealing something that the others missed and all,in the aggregate, participating in the reality of the textthey attempt to render intelligible.

BibliographyDuke, Francis, trans. The Best Fables of La Fontaine.Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1965.

Michie, James, trans. La Fontaine: Selected Fables. NewYork: Viking Press, 1979.

Moore, Marianne, trans. The Fables of La Fontaine. NewYork: Viking Press, 1954.

Shapiro, Norman, trans. Fifty Fables of La Fontaine.Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1997.

Spector, Norman, trans. The Complete Fables of Jean dela Fontaine. Evanston: Northwestern University Press,1988.

Wilbur, Richard. “The Grasshopper and the Ant,” in Newand Collected Poems. New York: Harcourt BraceJovanovich, 1988, p. 85.

Wood, Christopher, trans. Selected fables: Jean de LaFontaine. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.


After Every WarTwentieth-Century Women PoetsTranslations from the German by

Eavan BolandHere the renowned Irish poet EavanBoland presents her translations of the work of nine German-speakingwomen poets who lived in Europein the decades before and afterWorld War II. Some are Jewish,some are not, but each experiencedthe horror and devastation of thewar. In their poems they providepersonal glimpses into its effects,focusing on the small and seeminglycommonplace occasions in their lives.Facing Pages: Nicholas Jenkins, series editorCloth $19.95 ISBN 0-691-11745-4 Due November

Knowing the EastPaul Claudel

Translated by James Lawler

Paul Claudel served as a diplo-mat to both China and Japan. Hehad a lifelong fascination withboth countries and their cultures.Knowing the East, a collection ofprose poems, was first publishedin France in 1907. It is availablenow in an artful new translationby poet and scholar JamesLawler, who provides notes onthe 61 poems along with a briefbiography of Claudel.Lockert Library of Poetry in TranslationPaper $17.95 ISBN 0-691-11902-3 Cloth $35.00 ISBN 0-691-11868-X Due October

Poetry from Princeton

800-777-4726 • READ EXCERPTS ONLINEWWW.PUP.PRINCETON.EDU•PRINCETON

University Press

The Chinese Shi Jing, or Book of Odes is composed ofthree hundred five odes assembled during the Chou

Dynasty (1122–1255 BC) from songs sung by the vari-ous peoples who lived in the land of the Chou and in itsseveral tributary states. The songs are all very old, and asArthur Waley notes, together compose the ancient “folk-songs, songs of nobility, ritual hymns, and ballads on sig-nificant events” of ancient China.1 Most of them concernlife as lived during the Chou dynasty. The oldest ritualhymns, referred to as the ya, may date from as early asthe eleventh century BC, whereas the anthology as awhole, including the feng, or folksongs, and sung, orodes sung at sacred rites, probably reached their presentanthologized form sometime around 600 BC.2 Interest inthe odes has been continual through time, both fromthose who saw them as part of their own cultural heritageand those others who would translate that heritage intotheir own words for their own people.

The Odes were purportedly first anthologized around600 BC by Chen, the music master of the Chou court. Inthe fifth century BC, Confucius was said to have expur-gated the anthology, trimming the vast collection of 3000songs down to its present number of 305.3 As such, theOdes form the backbone of Confucian philosophical andmoral instruction and have long served as a part ofChinese attempts to define human excellence by meansof past behaviors and traditions. Thus, in the Analects,Confucius expresses elation because his star pupil, Tz’u,4

has recognized the value of happiness and social propri-ety. Now, Confucius says, he “can begin to talk about theOdes”5 with Tz’u, because such recognition suggests thatTz’u is in possession of the intellectual and social maturi-ty requisite to studying the Odes — and “the man whohas not studied the Odes,” Confucius notes elsewhere,“is like one who stands with his face right against thewall.”6

Not surprisingly, a work so closely associated withcultural traditions and moral instruction developed bothantagonists and defenders over time. The T’sin Dynasty(255–206 BC), for example, sought to erase the Odes,along with virtually all of the other classical books ofChina, in a bid to make China undergo a new beginning.7

To do this, they had a state-mandated mass burning of allthe old books in 213 BC.8 Yet, so beloved were the Odes

that many scholars had memorized them.9 The only wayfor the T’sin to eliminate the Odes was to eliminate thescholars — something the dynasty was perfectly willingto do, for many reasons. But as fate and the Chinese peo-ple would have it, the dynasty itself was snuffed outinstead. With the rise of the Han Dynasty (206–25 AD)out of the ashes of the T’sin, four complete versions ofthe Odes soon surfaced. One of these, called the Text ofMaou, was presented at the Han court in 129 BC and hasserved as the text preferred by Chinese scholars to thisday.10 Maou’s text organizes the various odes accordingto lessons learned from the states, minor and major odes,odes of the temple and altar, and the sacrificial odes.11

The durability of the Maou text is partly the result ofscholars having passed on their belief in it as the besttext and partly because those same scholars havepainstakingly kept records of their work with it from thetime of its presentation at the Han court to this day.12

Despite this line of scholarly transmission, however,even Chinese scholars have a difficult time understand-ing and translating the Odes as found in Maou — or inany text. Many words have undergone radical ortho-graphic and usage changes, and no one today knows pre-cisely how the ancient and classical Chinese pronouncedwords. The Chinese four-tone system, for example, wasnot introduced until the fifth or sixth century AD. Earlierpronunciation depended on either a three-tone system,for which there is some evidence, or simply resultedfrom phrasing modulations ranging from slow to rapid,high to low, repressed to expressive.13 Further difficultiesarise because Maou’s text was reconstructed as a resultof memory and recitation. Given the sound similarity ofso many Chinese characters, it was perhaps inevitable“that the same sounds, when taken down by differentwriters, should in many cases be represented by differentcharacters.”14

Be that as it may, beginning with what many schol-ars refer to as the Jesuit priest Lacharme’s “undigestible”translation of the Odes into the Latin Liber Carminum in1733,15 westerners have diligently sought to increase theirunderstanding of ancient China by means of translatingthe Odes. These translators have often groped tenuouslyand carefully toward the Chinese past, drawing upon pre-vious translations in such a way as to create a textual line


VARIATIONS ON A THEME: LEGGE, WALEY, AND POUND TRANSLATE ODE VIII FROM THE CHINESE SHI JING

By Robert E. Kibler

of transmission from China to 18th-century Europe andfrom then to the western world of the present day. Thenames of those who have in some fashion succeeded intranslating the Odes come up time and again in discus-sions of things Chinese: Lacharme (trans. 1733, pub-lished 1830) and Covreur (1896) — both French;Karlgren the Swede (1950), Legge (1861), and Waley(1937) — the Brits; and the American, Pound (1954).16

There are of course several others, but of these whom Ihave mentioned, three will serve as particularly goodpoints of comparison and contrast in their rendering ofthe Odes into English: James Legge, the missionary;Arthur Waley, the scholar; and Ezra Pound, the poet.Working with the texts of their predecessors, all threecame to the Odes with different intentions and abilities,and as we shall see, those intentions and abilities havevery much controlled the character and quality of theirtranslations.

Of the three, Legge is the earliest to have translatedthe Odes and the most learned one of the three to do so.He is also the only one to have visited or lived in China.Legge was a Scotsman, born in Aberdeenshire in 1815.In youth, he excelled at Latin and won the most presti-gious First Bursary scholarship to King’s College Oxfordin 1831 and the Huttonian prize for the University’s mostbrilliant student four years later.17 He was also, however,a Presbyterian dissenter, who, like his father, supportedthe Independent Church, so although the Latin Chair atKing’s College seemed his sure destiny, he instead joinedthe London Missionary Society in 1836, married, and setsail with his new wife for Malacca and then on to HongKong.18 Believing that preaching was best left to theChinese, Legge and his fellow missionaries spent theirtime teaching at the China Mission, learning Chinese,and translating it for publication.19 Through many years,he translated virtually all of the Chinese classics andincluded original Chinese texts and immensely learnednotes with those translations. By the time he died in1897, it was said of Legge by another great Sinologist,Herbert A. Giles, that he had made “the greatest contri-bution ever … to the study of Chinese, and will beremembered and studied ages after.”20 His work is plainand straightforward, and although somewhat dated instyle, it remains part of the canon of essential texts forthose with a serious interest in Chinese.21

Waley and Pound were contemporaries who knewand worked with one another, although Waley was clear-ly more the scholar and less the poet, and Pound was justthe opposite. Each man was born in the 1880s andreceived an exemplary education. After graduation in the

Classics from Cambridge, Waley took a job working forLawrence Binyon in the Oriental subdepartment at theBritish Museum in 1913.22 Just before Waley’s arrivalthere, Mary Fenollosa, widow of art historian ErnestFenollosa, had asked Binyon, then Keeper of the muse-um’s Eastern Art Collection, for help in turning her latehusband’s massive collection of notes and manuscriptsinto a finished product. Although Waley had no directhand in this project — which was to result in the 1912publication of Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art — hewas nevertheless working for Binyon in the Oriental sub-department, so as Jonathan Spence suggests, Waley mostassuredly “breathed in a good deal” of the “sinifiedworking air.”23 He immediately began learning bothChinese and Japanese in his spare time.24

Pound was also living as a dashing young Americanpoet in London about the same time as Waley and hadlikewise developed an interest in things Chinese.25 Asfate would have it, Mary Fenollosa read some of Pound’spoems in the “Contemporania” section of the April 1913version of Poetry Magazine,26 and impressed, sought outthe young poet as the one who, she believed, could bestcontinue her late husband’s translations from the Chineseand Japanese. She was “distrustful of academic experts”and wanted her husband’s intellectual legacy to go tosomeone unconventional.27 Those of Fenollosa’s notesand manuscripts that did not go to Binyon and his staff atthe Museum went to Pound in 1913.28

At least in part, then, Fenollosa seems to have beenthe inspiration for both Waley and Pound to undertaketranslation projects from the Chinese, and the fact thatthey were both associates of Binyon’s caused them tolunch together at the Vienna Café 29 and consult oneanother regularly — although it appears that Pound wasprimarily in need of consulting Waley, and not the otherway round.30 Nevertheless, Pound produced the first vol-ume based in their joint interest in translation, publishingCathay in 1915 from his work with the Fenollosa materi-als. A few weeks after Cathay’s publication, Waleystopped by Pound’s flat to have a look at Fenollosa’slegacy to Pound,31 and both Cathay and the Fenollosamaterial were to have an identifiable influence on hisfirst work in Chinese translation, A Hundred and SeventyChinese Poems, appearing in 1917. To be sure, a rivalryseems to have developed between the two as timepassed, but both remained productive and durable trans-lators all of their working days,32 and both eventuallyundertook translations of the Odes in the later middlephase of their long careers. Waley’s edition came out in1937, and Pound’s in 1954. Both editions show the influ-


ence of Legge’s earlier work.Of Waley’s skills as a translator of Chinese, Jonathan

Spence wrote that there are many Westerners whoseknowledge of Chinese is superior to Waley’s, but theyare not poets. At the same time, there are many betterpoets than Waley, but they do not know Chinese sowell.33 An advertisement for his first volume of Chinesetranslations, A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems(1919), in a 1919 edition of the Dial, further asserted thathis work “should be for our generation, at least, the stan-dard anthology.”34 To Pound’s skills as a poet, his variouspoems will attest. He was also the shaper of a new poeticmovement, a master of meter and of sound in many lan-guages, and in some fashion, as T.S. Eliot noted in 1918,the “inventor of Chinese poetry in our time.”35 As a trans-lator of Chinese, however, it must be said that he neveractually knew the language. Nor could he so much aslook up Chinese characters in a dictionary.36 Yet he hadcommitted to memory many of the basic Chinese radi-cals and believed that he had an intuitive and artisticunderstanding of Chinese that allowed him to actuallysee the meanings within the scripted characters.37 Thisbelief in an ability to intuitively read the characters hassome foundational merit in the Chinese. At least in theold Chinese scripts, for example, the radical for a horse

looks like a horse, the one for a man like a man.The vast majority of Chinese radicals, however, long agobecame abstract unrecognizable versions of the thingsthey signified, and indeed, many more Chinese charac-ters developed as phonetic components of significationrather than as ideographic descriptions of things them-selves.38 Of the three translators, then, Pound was themost dependent on the translation work of others.

To compare the work of our three translators, I havechosen a simple ode from among the oldest in the anthol-ogy. It appears as Ode VIII in Legge and Pound’s ver-sions, and as Waley’s Ode #99. Dembo and Lai Mingnote that it is one of the kuo feng folksongs or airs of the15 states.39 The ode appears in the first Chou Nan sectionof the Shi Jing, written in the earliest days of the Choudynasty. As such, it is a “genuine” ode, illustrative of a“moral purity.” Later odes sometimes allude to a corruptstate, wherein those in possession of moral purity oftenend in despair.40 And indeed, this link to morality is con-sistent with at least one longstanding story associatedwith the Odes. It has been written that the kuo feng weregathered from the various 15 states for presentation tothe Chou emperor so that he could check the mores andtemper of his subjects.41 They were also thought to have

the power whereby superiors transformed their inferiors,and inferiors in turn satirized their superiors.42 Althoughsuch a dual role suggests the political character of someof the kuo feng, Ode VIII seems to be from that group ofsimple lyrics referred to by Confucian scholars as fu, ornarrative, composed of images meaning nothing beyondtheir appearance.43

Ode VIII is a fertility poem, celebrating the gatheringof wild plantain, or ribgrass, from the meadows. AsWaley and Legge note, when women were going to havebabies, they ate plantain because it was believed thatdoing so would ease their delivery. Likewise, the planthas a long and global history as a curative and medicinalherb. It was called the “plant of healing” by theHighlanders of Scotland and was known as one of thenine sacred herbs among the Saxons. Pliny thought it acure for hydrophobia.44 It is a dark green, slender plantthat grows very tall and throws its angular and furrowedflower stalks in long spikes high up in the air. Accordingto the ode, women gathered plantain by filling theiraprons with the seeds and then tucking their full apronsinto their girdles.

Like so many odes of the kuo feng type, Ode VIIIexpresses impersonal sentiments and events common toall. There is no attempt in them at any individuality ofexpression.45 Structurally, the ode is written in three stan-zas of four lines each — the most standard pattern forChinese poetry until the time of the seventh century ADT’ang poets46 — and contains only a few characters thatrepeat in chanting pattern. Many of those characters alsoshare some of the same radicals. Consequently, not onlydo sonic repetitions dominate in the ode, so too do eye-rhymes — words that look, at least in part, the same.These repetitions are evident in the following charts:

(next page)



(1871)

On the left-hand side of the chart, reading from topto bottom, Legge, Waley, and Pound’s versions of OdeVIII appear. Legge’s version also contains the Chinesecharacters of the ode, to be read right to left, top to bot-tom. The three stanzas are marked at their beginning

points with the Chinese numbers for 1 , 2 , and 3

, positioned above a small-sized version of the charac-

ter for “stanza.” In the ode, save for the character tsai “to gather,” two complete characters make up eachChinese word, so that stanzas 2 and 3 on the chart, whichfor the most part have four characters running top to bot-tom, nevertheless present two words arranged verticallyin each column, two Chinese characters to the word.Scanning the Chinese characters from right to left, thenreading two characters to the word, top to bottom, thenumber of repeating eye-rhymes becomes obvious.Indeed, every stanza contains two lines whose first, sec-ond, and third words repeat. Even the fourth word ofeach line repeats the bottom character. Only the top char-acter of every fourth line varies.

On the top of the right hand side of the chart is apronunciation guide for the Chinese characters, renderedleft to right instead of in the Chinese right to left patternand broken down to the level of each word. Seen in itssonic form, the ode clearly substantiates to the ear theheavy emphasis on repetition asserted by its visual formbefore the eye. Indeed, in sound as in form, only the firsthalf of the fourth word in every line contains a variation.Below this pronunciation guide and on the same side ofthe chart is a horizontal breakdown of each repeatingword contained in Ode VIII, along with its definition anda confirmation of its pronunciation. Although a closerlook at the radicals composing these words will figurelater in our analysis of the three translations, the singularChinese character tsai, meaning “to gather,” is brokendown in the chart to its two radicals, illustrating the wayin which some Chinese characters signify visually. Theupper radical of tsai, for example, typically represents ananimal claw or nail and combines with the lower radicalfor wood or lumber to suggest the act of gathering. The“claw” figuratively gathers “the wood” in a way sugges-tive of a wild or uncultivated sort of action. And indeed,plantain grew wild in the meadows and wastelands, sothe gatherers were not working next to their huts orhouses. Other visual cues to meaning appear in the odeand, as we shall see, are especially dramatic in the vary-ing fourth characters, which are set horizontally at thebottom of the word chart along with their own defini-tions and pronunciations.

Seen collectively, then, the assembly of charts sug-gests some fundamental qualities of Ode VIII that serveas pivotal challenges to our three translators’ variousinterpretations. Each translator is roughly able to deliverthe information contained in the ode, but at the sametime, each in his own way perforce contends with itsrhythmic character and with the key words and phrasesthat essentially deliver that rhythm to our understanding.Each, for example, must account in some sensible wayfor the waves of repeating eye-rhymes, compounded bythe repeating waves of sound occurring in each stanza.These incessant waves of repetitions suggest an absorb-ing — even hypnotic — communal action. So, too, eachtranslator has to contend with the other action words thatprovide the alteration of sight and sound patterns occur-ring at the end of each stanza — words that modify theoverall sight and sound of the ode in much the same waythat the gathering, plucking, rubbing, and tucking thattakes place in its imagined fields and fens shifts the char-acter of the work done.

Turning to Legge’s handling of the ode, it becomesimmediately clear that he seeks to capture some sense ofits communal rhythm. His translation contains a collec-tive “we” in each line and continues to gather and gather,pluck, rub, and tuck from beginning to end, often settingthese action words in stock phrases appearing in thesame location of each stanza, thereby creating an Englishversion of the eye-rhymes evident in the original. His useof an adverbial “now” also conveys some sense of imme-diacy and life as expressed in the original through its

varying fourth-line spirit-of-action word zhi meaning“to go or arrive.” Moreover, Legge chooses his verbswell, suggestive of the way in which some Chinese char-acters visualize the action they symbolize. He uses thephrase “pluck the ears,” for example, as the Englishequivalent of a Chinese character that shows just that

action: shows an abstract radical form of a personwhose hand is stretched out toward and plucking at what

visually appears to be a field of corn , or at leastfour sheafy bundles. Likewise, the same character usedfor plucking shows up again in the Chinese ideogram

meaning “to rub” or “stroke” . Yet overall, Legge’s work lacks vim, and the ode

very much wants it. His “now” tells us that we are toimagine a present action, for example, but does so bytelling us of the present rather than by showing it. Healso neglects the fun that is pervasive in the ode. Indeed,in his footnotes to the ode, Legge suggests that the


ideogram for pou yen, , is essentially untranslatablegobbledygook and so unjustly writes off the third charac-ter of every stanza, or 25% of the ode. (Legge XX). Yetpou yen is composed of a variety of elements that collec-tively suggest that it means something like “to lightlyexpress,” or to express with a sort of effervescence. Thelower character of the ideogram shows a mouth withwords coming out of it — — and is the Chineseradical meaning “to speak” or “to express.” Above it is awonderful assemblage of radicals that together convey a

sense of mirth. Taken as the sum of its parts, water,

plus small, plus “barely,” plus “grass”expresses a mood as light, fluent, and subtle as is thewhispering wind over water and grass. Perhaps the disci-plined Presbyterian minister just could not bring himselfto accept the idea of a light mood associated with work.

Waley also seeks to convey the communal and rhyth-mic nature of the ode’s action through repetition of wordand phrase. “Thick grows the plantain,” for example, isfollowed by another stock phrase, “Here we go” or“hold” or “have.” In these ways, not only is the commu-nal nature of the ode’s action conveyed, but that action isalso confirmed by a nod to the eye rhymes of the origi-nal, because each stock phrase appears in the same placewithin each stanza, creating a mass decking of visualsimilarity. Such stock phrases also capture the sense ofimmediacy of action relayed in the original through such

phrases as “gather and gather” and both tsai zhi ,

“gathering now,” and you zhi , “here we are now.” Yetat the same time, if Legge’s version appears to be a fairlyliteral one, albeit bereft of the all-important and spirited

pou yen , Waley’s appears to be a fairly literal versionof the ode that turns spirit into the rote phrasing of thepedant.

Waley repeats Legge’s attempts to recreate the com-munal rhythm of the original by translating line by line,in keeping with the ancient Chinese pattern of three stan-zas of four lines each. He also follows Legge’s attempt tokeep the eye and sound rhymes found in the originalalive in his translation. In these ways, Waley is apparent-ly a good student of the ode. Nevertheless, he makessmall changes to the ode in what must be a poeticattempt to awaken it in some fashion. It is in theseattempts to awaken the ode, however, that Waley’spedantry shows, for he instead depletes the verbal lifeand spirit of the ode through his emphasis on adverbs,static intransitive verbs, and superfluous detail. “Thick

grows the plantain,” for example, empties the energyfrom the original through its substitution of the stillimage of thick-standing plants for the votive act of gath-ering birthing seeds from those plants. His replacementof action verbs such as Legge’s “pluck” and “rub” and“place” with “here we hold,” and “here we are,” and“here we have” further depletes the ode’s energy byagain making intransitive what was clearly meant in theoriginal to be full of rhythmic movement. What is more,additions such as when his gatherers have seeds“between the fingers,” or elsewhere, “handfuls” of seeds,again curtail movement in the ode because a focus onwhat is small and specific misses the essentially largeand general sweep of a work intent on expressing com-munal rather than individual action.

Pound the poet makes some interesting changes tothe ode. Unlike Legge the missionary and Waley thescholar, Pound strays from the traditional four-line pat-tern for each of the three stanzas of the original andinstead delivers two per stanza. This seems a good strate-gy for generating a more upbeat tempo than either Leggeor Waley achieves in his translations, and Pound clearlyseeks to embed a sense of effervescent life into his ver-sion. Indeed, even his attempt to convey the communalrhythms of the original is imbued with musical efferves-cence. Instead of the freighted repetitions of Legge andWaley’s stock phrases, Pound’s “pluck, pluck, pluck” fol-lowed by “pluck, pick, pluck, then pluck again” serves asa swift variation on an insistent rhythm. The immediateresult is a lightening of mood, while at the same timePound’s nod to the sonic and eye-rhymes of the originalconvey the necessary sense of communal action. A light-ened mood is further established through the use of theinterjection “Oh” to presumably deliver some of what in

the Chinese comes across through pou yen andthrough all of the spirit of immediacy embodied in everyfourth line of the original through the various compoundsincluding zhi .

What is more, Pound shows a sensibility to the odethat is less in evidence in either Legge or Waley’s ver-sions. Whether it comes from his poetic intuition at workor from his reading of Legge and Waley’s footnotes, onlyPound’s “Here be seeds for sturdy men” conveys anysense of the purpose behind the women gathering plan-tain. Yet this information is essential to the modern,postindustrial reader, and it is not altogether an intrusionon the poem to have inserted it. In sum, then, Pound’sversion brings the communal rhythm, the effervescentspirit, and the essential purpose of the original to life


through his translation in a way superior to what Leggeand Waley produce. His ode lives in a way that theirs donot, and from what we have seen of the ode throughcharting and explication, it very much wants to live.Indeed, had Pound sought further warrant for a spiritedinterpretation of the ode, he might have seen the Chinese

character for “luck” situated amid the Chinese com-pound for those girdles into which women were tuckingseeds.

Yet for all of its life, Pound’s version has problems.It is perhaps a little too irreverent. The heavy rhythms ofthe original produce in sound, text, and sense an essentialmajesty of motion that is lost in all of Pound’s endrhymes and assorted pickings and pluckings. In his bidfor more spirit and fun, Pound may have gone too fartoward turning an ode embodying the ritualized commu-nal activity of women gathering medicinal birthing seedsinto very little more than a ditty, complete with whatamounts to a cryptic cornpone maxim in the final stanza:“Pluck the leaf and fill the flap/Skirts were made to hidethe lap.” This final line fails to deliver the original’sbasic information, while being at the same time, a littletoo silly. At least Legge and Waley retain the dignity ofthe ode in translation, and no matter what their transla-tion crimes, clearly transfer the ode’s narrative sense tous.

All of which is to perhaps confirm what BurtonWatson suggests is the problem of interpretive variationsencountered by every reader of translations47 and of whatAchilles Fang asserts is the necessity for all translators ofthe Odes “to take courage in their hands,” because“translators are interpreters among other things.”48 Inshort, this brief comparison and contrast of Legge,Waley, and Pound interpretations of Ode VIII suggestsnot only the ways in which each translator succeeds andthe ways in which each falls short but also the sort ofproblems all of them had to grapple with in theirattempts to render the poetic expression of one world toanother. It is a problem seemingly without beginnings orends, and as such, exists as part of the perpetual meansby which each of us tries to gain a greater understandingof one another, separated as we are by time, circum-stance, sensibility, and space. In conclusion, then, itseems that there is really only one solution to the transla-tion problem faced by Legge, Waley, Pound, and count-less others through time. One must grab the bull by thehorns, hunker down in a chair with a series of othertranslations, pray to the various muses perhaps, and offeryet another version. Here is mine:

Gathering gathering plantain,Oh yes, we gather it right now,Gathering, gathering, yes now,So that we have it for birthing time.

We gather and we gather, yes!Plucking and picking from the stems.Oh we gather and we gather!Rubbing out seeds with nimble touch.

Gathering and gathering plantain,Placing the seeds in lucky skirts.Oh, gathering and gathering,Tucking our skirts in lucky belts

(2004)

I believe that I have solved several of the problemsthat Legge, Waley, and Pound failed to overcome in theirvarious translations of Ode VIII, and at the same time,have suggested what needs to be done by those who dis-agree with any or all of us. If you happen to be one ofthose intrepid folk, then I hope that at this point, youknow what to do. Good luck!

Author’s NoteSpecial thanks to Eileen Young, late of the TaiwaneseSymphony Orchestra, and now a student of mine atMinot State University, for her help in tracking down andparsing all of the Chinese characters cited in this essay.In addition, all characters are identified from the revisedAmerican Edition of Matthew’s Chinese EnglishDictionary, republished by the Harvard University Pressin 2000.

Notes1Lai Ming, A History of Chinese Literature (New York:John Day Co., 1964) p. 27. Lai Ming notes that therewere three different categories of odes from ancienttimes: the feng, or folksongs or wind songs, which con-stituted 160 of the roughly 300 odes; ya, or verses sungat court, of which there are 105 odes; and sung, or versesof songs sung at rituals. Furthermore, according to L.S.Dembo, in his The Confucian Odes of Ezra Pound: ACritical Appraisal (Berkeley: University CaliforniaPress, 1963), p. 10–14, Confucius arranged the odes inkeeping with the natural order of the universe, so beganwith the interrelationships of men and women, culminat-ing in the family. The feng songs were of this type, andthe earliest of these are referred to as Chou Nan, or songsof the Chou. They are often considered “genuine” or


“pure” because they are simple lyrics, or fu, that tell thestory of people and work. In this sense, they embody a“moral purity” lost in other narrative types of odes,which use metaphorical (pi) or allusive (hsing) styles toconvey complex meaning. 2Arthur Waley, The Book of Songs: The Ancient ChineseClassic of Poetry (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1937)p. xiii. Waley notes that most of the odes probablyreached their present anthologized form circa 600 BC.3James Legge. The She King (Taipei: SMC Pub, [1871]1991) p. 3. This is probably not true — several literaryand philosophical works produced before the time ofConfucius quote so predominantly from the 305 songsthat it is difficult to think that 2800 rarely quoted odesexisted alongside of these 305.4Lai Ming, page 28. Lai Ming notes that Tz’u is the sonof Confucius.5Wing-Tsit Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy(Princeton: Princeton UP, 1969) p. 22.6James Legge, Confucius, from the “Analects” (NewYork: Dover Press, [1893] 1971) p. 323.7Wing-Tsit Chan, Sourcebook, p. 251. Wing-Tsit Channotes that the Ch’in Dynasty (221–206 BC) promoted theLegalist School of Chinese philosophy, and although itsviolence and ruthlessness have guaranteed that there hasnever been another Legalist School in nearly two thou-sand years, the Legalists nevertheless had a positive side.They were the only Chinese philosophers who tookcharge of the state and were “consistently and vigorouslyanti-ancient … . [The Legalists] looked to the presentrather than the past, and to changing circumstances ratherthan to any prescribed condition.”8James Legge, She King, p. 8.9L.S. Dembo, The Confucion Odes of Ezra Pound: ACritical Appraisal (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1963) p. 38. Dembo suggests that “virtually anyeducated Chinese” could recite an ode “at a moment’snotice.”10Legge, She King, p. 11.11Burton Watson, Early Chinese Literature (New York:Columbia UP, 1962) p. 203. Watson notes that after theCh’in’s famous burning of the books, three revived ver-sions of the Odes eventually received official recognitionof the early Han, but that all three of these, which existonly in fragments today, were replaced by the fourth so-called Mao text. The Mao text continues to be the stan-dard version of the Odes.12Legge, She King, p. 12.13Legge, She King, p. 10114Legge, She King, p. 12

15Legge, She King, p. v. Legge notes that M. Callery cor-rectly characterized Lacharme’s translation as “la pro-duction la plus indigeste et la plus ennuyeuse dont lasinologie ait a rougir.”16Pere Lacharme, Liber Carminum, 1733 (published1830).

Couvreur’s Cheu King, 1896.Legge’s The She King or Book of Poetry, 1861.Bernard Karlgren, Glosses on the Kuo Feng Odes,

1942.Arthur Waley’s Odes, 1937.Ezra Pound’s She-ching, 1954.

17James Legge, The Chinese Classics, Volume I (Taipei:SMC Publishing, [1893] 1991) p. 318Legge, The Chinese Classics, p. 7.19Legge, The Confucian Analects, The Great Learning,The Doctrine of the Mean (Taipei, SMC Pub, 1893) p. 7.Legge was assigned to the Anglo-Chinese College locat-ed at Malacca in 1839 but in 1843 moved the mission toHong Kong in order to be closer to the mainland.20Legge, The Chinese Classics, p. 2121Mary Paterson Cheadle, Ezra Pound’s ConfucianTranslations (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,1997) p. 47.22Jonathan Spence, Chinese Roundabout: Essays inHistory and Culture (New York: Norton Pub, 1992) p.331.23Spence, Roundabout, 331.24Zhaoming Qian, Orientalism and Modernism: TheLegacy of China in Pound and Williams (Durham: DukeUP, 1995) p. 131.25Zhaoming Qian, Orientalism, pp. 9–14. Zhaoming Qiannotes that Pound was “getting orient from all quarters”from roughly 1909 onward, when he and his bride-to-be,Dorothy Shakespear, attended Lawrence Binyon’s March1909 lecture on “Oriental and European Art,” at theBritish Museum. Binyon was Assistant Keeper in chargeof the museum’s Far Eastern paintings and color prints.26Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley: UniversityCalifornia Press, 1971) p. 197.27Humphrey Carpenter, A Serious Character: The Life ofEzra Pound (New York: Dell Pub, 1990) p. 220. 28Carpenter, p. 268.29Zhaoming Qian, Orientalism, p. 131.30Carpenter, p. 269. Carpenter notes that Waley’s linguis-tic skill far exceeded Pound’s, and in the introduction tohis 1916 translations of Japanese Noh dramas, Poundthanked Waley for his orthographic help. Nevertheless,Waley too had taught himself Japanese and Chinese inhis spare time while working for Binyon at the British


Museum. 31Zhaoming Qian, Orientalism, p. 131.32Carpenter, pp. 269–70. Carpenter notes that Waley wasprivately contemptuous of Pound’s understanding of theChinese language, and for his part, when Daniel Coreymentioned Waley’s name to him, Pound let out a “fusil-lade of expletives.”33Spence, Roundabout, p. 330.34Zhaoming Qian, Orientalism, p. 130.35Carpenter, p. 270.36Carpenter, p. 270.37Dembo, page 2. Dembo notes that Pound believed inusing intuition and a certain empathetic state of mind inorder to create a cultural synthesis through translation.38Dembo, p. 24. Dembo notes that literally thousands ofChinese characters are constructed of phonological, notpictorial, elements. Readers of Chinese through timewould also have seen even the pictorial elements of thelanguage in the abstract, so often would have no visualidea of what word they were beholding in Chinese char-

acters. 39Dembo, p. 7; Lai Ming, p. 27.40Dembo, Odes, p. 62.41Watson, p. 202.42Dembo, Odes, p. 10.43Dembo, Odes, p. 14.44Waley, p. 91. Legge, p. 15, further notes that the plantin question is probably the common English ribgrass andthat the Chinese still consider it to be helpful in “difficultlabours.”45Dembo, Odes, p. 36.46Legge, She King, p. 102.47Watson, p. 205.48Dembo, p. x


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DuVal: You decided somewhere in your career, workingfor your MFA in translation at the University ofArkansas, that you would work on translations of poemsby Henrik Nordbrandt, and you decided that you werenot going to do just a selection from various collectionsof Nordbrandt but rather a single book. And what wasthat single book?

Satterlee: The title of the book in Danish is Ormene vedhimlens port. The English title is The Worms at Heaven’sGate, which is actually a title of a Wallace Stevenspoem. Henrik Nordbrandt is a big Wallace Stevens fan.The reason I decided to translate an entire book was inpart because I had already translated a selection from dif-ferent books for my Master’s thesis. But I also felt thatwith this particular book, I shouldn’t skip poems.Ormene is a collection of elegies to Nordbrandt’s girl-friend, who died suddenly at a young age. As a whole,the book moves along a certain trajectory of grief, and Iwanted to include that arc. To translate the book other-wise would have been like picking and choosing cantosin The Inferno or translating only some of the sonnets inthe Sonnets to Orpheus. To use the language I learned inthe Translation Workshop in Fayetteville, I wanted to befaithful to my author. I was convinced that the poemsworked together to describe a whole experience. And —I think this is interesting — as a translator, you don’thave the opportunity to compensate wholeness with partof a book in the way that you might, say, in an individualpoem, compensate for a poetic feature by including it ata later point than the original poet did.

Now, having said that, I have to admit that when it final-ly came to publishing a book of translations, I decided toselect some of the best individual poems from Ormeneand include them with poems from several ofNordbrandt’s other collections. I still think that the bestexperience of Ormene is through reading every poem inthe order that Nordbrandt arranged them, but I wantedthe book to have room for other work of his, too.

D: How many poems did you include from the differentbooks?

S: The Hangman’s Lament, which Green Integer pub-lished in October, 2003, has Nordbrandt poems from, Ithink, six different books, 50 to 60 pages of translation.The book is bilingual, with an introduction that I wrote.However, a major portion of Henrik Nordbrandt’s poetryhad already been translated by Alexander Taylor, thedirector of Curbstone Press. I continued where Taylorleft off, because he had shifted his focus to LatinAmerican literature. I started translating Nordbrandt inabout 1992. I just went though the books and found thepoems that I thought would work the best in English,many of those for my Master’s thesis at SUNYBrockport.

D: Did you come to Nordbrandt on your own, or was itthrough the translations by Alexander Taylor?

S: Well, I think the first Nordbrandt poem I saw was intranslation — it was by Alexander Taylor. I was in mysecond year of a two-year Master’s in English/CreativeWriting at Brockport. I wasn’t sure whether I was goingto do a collection of my own poems. It was at that timethat I became interested in translation, so I got a collec-tion of contemporary Danish poetry, and it happened tohave some Nordbrandt poems. His just jumped off thepage.

D: Were you reading them in Danish?

S: No, I was reading them in English. I read them inEnglish first, because this was not a bilingual edition.


INTERVIEW WITH THOM SATTERLEE

By John DuVal

John DuVal (l) and Thom Satterlee

D: It jumped off the page in translations.

S: Yes, in the translations.

D: And were they all by Alexander Taylor or was thereanybody else?

S: Well, on some of them, Nordbrandt had collaboratedwith him.

D: So, the English words of the other translator inspiredyou to such an extent that you wanted to do your owntranslations!

S: That’s right. So, I then found some of his books inDanish that hadn’t been translated. That was in around1993 and 1994.

D: Now, how much Danish have you had?

S: Not that much. Well, I had some formal Danish. I wasin Denmark for a year as an exchange student in highschool and then in college to meet my foreign languagerequirement. I took a class at the University of Buffalo.

D: How did you proceed from here?

S: For my Master’s thesis, I went through all the vol-umes that Nordbrandt had published, and he publishes alot; he is very prolific poet. I took the poems that I want-ed to translate and incorporated those into the thesis.When I was at Fayetteville to study for the MFA, justbefore I started working on my thesis, Worms atHeaven’s Gate, I had a chance to spend part of a summerin Copenhagen. The book had just come out when I wasin Copenhagen, and so I spent several nights with aDanish poet who helped me in translating it. His name isAsger Schnack. He also helped Alexander Taylor — infact, it was Alexander who suggested that I look upAsger. For two or three nights, we met at his home andwent over these poems. Some of the poems baffled bothof us. I remember Asger shaking his head and saying, “Idon’t know, this is what it says, but I don’t know — Ihave no idea.” I can’t tell you how helpful that admissionwas! It told me that there are points in the poems that areunclear to native speakers too — even a native speakerwho is himself an accomplished poet. Because the nativespeaker had difficulties with the text, I decided to leavewhat was unclear in Danish also unclear in English,rather than kind of stamping down my own meaning for

the poem.

D: How many poems by Nordbrandt have you translated?

S: I translated about 60 for my thesis, and I have trans-lated probably another 100 to 150 beyond that, some ofthem after The Hangman’s Lament came out. This pastChristmas, I was in Denmark and found myself translat-ing some new Henrik Nordbrandt poems. I had gonethere to celebrate Christmas with the host family I stayedwith twenty years ago, but then I found a new collectionof Nordbrandt’s and couldn’t help myself. So, duringpart of my visit I sat at the dining room table with myformer host mother and we went through my translations.She’s not a poet, as Asger Schnack is, but she speaks arefined, subtle Danish. Her friends say that she speaks“the Queen’s Danish.” The most helpful part of ourexchange came at moments when I thought Nordbrandtwas expressing himself in an unusual way, and my hostmother was able to tell me that in fact he was using acommon phrase. Then she could fill in the context.Without her help I’m sure I would have misrepresentedthe poem. But I wouldn’t have misrepresented it on pur-pose: I wouldn’t have known that I didn’t know what Ididn’t know. It’s a sign that I’m maturing as a translator,I think, this fact that I’m less likely to trust myself. As apractice, I show my translations to a native speaker ofDanish. I have to because of my language status: non-native. I’ve learned to doubt any translation that I doentirely on my own. Maybe the best non-native transla-tors are born (or born-again) skeptics. They’ve learnednot to leave their own work unquestioned.

D: Have you done any writing outside of your translationwork?

S: I enjoy working on translations, on poems, on stories,and even on academic writing. Before I began in theMFA program, you started me on my first article towrite: “A Case for Smilla,” about the translation of PeterHøeg’s novel Smilla’s Sense of Snow.

D: For Translation Review.

S: For Translation Review. And I like that kind of writ-ing, too. So, I have all these different kinds of writingthat I enjoy doing, and I’m beginning to learn that there’sa limited amount of time to do them. And there’s theadded difficulty of moving from one to the other. Donald


Hall has a little book called Life Work in which he talksabout his regular day of work. He’ll start with poems,then go to a book review, then he has a essay on base-ball, then a children’s book, and essays, and he’s movingbetween these genres — all in the course of one day —as soon as he gets tired of one, when he says the poetryjuices are running low, then he just moves to the next. Ithought that was a great idea and tried it for a while, butI found that it’s almost as though you move from yourpoetry mind to your fiction mind and your fiction mindinto your essay mind and I find it hard to make that tran-sition all within the same day.

D: Have you ever met Nordbrandt?

S: Never.

D: Have you written to him?

S: Yes.

D: Has he written back?

S: Yes, but only a kind of business letter granting hispermission to submit poems to journals, that’s about it. Iknow him mostly through interviews that he’s given. ButI think I’d like to meet him, I don’t know.

D: What do you mean I think?

S: I don’t know how much of this I would put in theinterview, but I’ve heard that he’s rather difficult to dealwith. So, I haven’t pushed really hard to meet him,although I wouldn’t mind it. Maybe if I pull togetheranother book of translations of his poems, we could meetand discuss revisions. I could imagine meeting him inthat kind of a context, but I’d be a real bore if he wantedto go out for swinging nightlife in Copenhagen.

D: Or Istanbul.

S: Yes, he lives in Turkey.

D: He’s five years younger than I am.

S: How did you figure that? D: He was born in ’45. I wanted to ask you whetherbeing a translator has helped you as a poet or whetherbeing a poet has helped you as a translator. You’ve prob-ably thought about this a lot; I’m not the first person to

ask this question of poet to translator.

S: Right. I’m pretty sure that being a poet has helped meas a translator. I wouldn’t be satisfied with a translatedpoem that is faithful to the meaning but not to the poeticaspects of a poem, so I had that going for me as a trans-lator. I think that being a translator has helped me as apoet, because in translation, you read so closely, and Ithink that Nordbrandt is a great poet, and so I’ve had akind of apprenticeship as I’ve worked through eachpoem. I’ve seen the choices that he made in his poems,and that’s given me the opportunity to work closely withsomeone who is mature in his writing. When I write myown poems, I can tell the difference between the maturepoet I’m translating and the maturing poet that I am.Sometimes it’s definitely there in how much deeper hisvision is in his poems, how much more he has seen, howmuch more he is doing technically, so I can push myselfmore in my own poetry. I don’t know whether that wouldhappen at the same level if I were reading contemporaryAmerican poetry, or even contemporary world poetry.Somehow, the translation brings me so much closer to apoem, somewhat like the experience of memorizing apoem or typing out someone else’s poem — it’s a differ-ent experience than reading, thinking about, or writing anessay about the poem. I think that being a translatorcauses me to be a better reader and a better student ofNordbrandt’s poems.

D: Do you think that maybe this gives you confidencewhen you’re writing Nordbrandt’s thoughts, that maybeyou can write your own thoughts in English? Is that apossibility? Maybe not.

S: I don’t know, confidence has been important. When Icame to the program at Arkansas, I still wanted some-thing to happen that would make me more confident inmyself as a writer and a translator. I can remember at thetime referring to it as a significant nod of approval fromsomewhere or someone.

D: What kind of poetry do you write?

S: Until a few years ago, almost all of my poetry was inopen form. As an undergraduate and graduate student, Iwrote mostly lyrics, personal lyrics, and a tendencytoward narrative. I was always having to fight against mypoems being too chatty-sounding.

D: Well, Nordbrandt’s sort of a chatty poet, isn’t he?


S: Yes, I wonder whether we have the same affinity.Now I’m writing … different little projects, I’m startingto see my poems as projects that I want to work on,groups of poems, sequences of poems, rather than unre-lated poems. For the last four years, I have been workingon poems set in and around 1380, having to do looselywith the life of John Wyclif. It’s an interesting period,and I’m enjoying writing the poems because there’s thePeasant’s Revolt, there’s all this stuff with the churchcalling John Wyclif a heretic, there’s the translation ofthe Bible. A little bit before that, there’s the Black Death— the plague — so, I’ve been fascinated by that periodin history and have been playing around with poems inboth traditional and invented forms. Sometimes I eventry to see how much I can get away with in using MiddleEnglish in poems.

D: Wyclif’s Middle English, or are you making up yourown through all of this?

S: Making up my own, but drawing from the samevocabulary that he would have used, that Chaucer wouldhave used.

D: That Ezra Pound might have used.

S: Right; in fact, that’s where I got the idea. There weresome Pound translations, I remember we talked aboutthis term patina in a workshop, and I remember thinking,“oh, that’s interesting how he’s just sprinkling a few ofthese old-fashioned or archaic words into his transla-tion,” and I thought, well, in my poems, I might try thatand see how much I can get away with. Let me seewhere I can place those words so that they’re easiest fora reader to catch (even a reader who is not familiar withMiddle English).

D: You mean to understand?

S: To understand, yes.

D: Without being annoyed.

S: Exactly, I don’t want to write frustrating poems thatwon’t be read. But that’s one project. I’ve been writingpoems about my childhood hero, the Brazilian soccerplayer Pelé. I’ve written about a dozen or more of those.So, I’m moving, I think, toward seeing my own poetry inlarger projects.

D: Are you quoting from Wyclif or from the WyclifBible?

S: Sometimes, in a couple of them, I have Wyclif’s ser-mons and some other Wyclif material that is in theMiddle English — a lot of what he wrote was in Latin,and then it’s translated into modern English. I use that,too. And I’ll often use epigraphs from Wyclif’s biogra-phers or critics. I’m also trying to find sources, some ofthe people who wrote against Wyclif, to get that side of ittoo.

Besides the poems, I’m hoping to write some prose. Onthe shelf behind my desk in my office, I have a largestack of papers that I want to work into an article. Since Ileft the MFA program, I’ve taught largely freshman com-position classes, and I’ve tried to use some — it’s nottranslation theory, it’s sort of translation orientation, inthe way that I’ve structured those classes to have transla-tion as a theme in the classes. And I’ve done it in four orfive different ways at the University of Miami and nowat Taylor University, and I’ve kept student work fromthat, and I want to write an article in which I talk prettypractically about what went on in those classes and whatcame out of those classes, because, I think it was 1982 orso, there’s a Translation Review issue in which DennisKratz says it’s important, if we’re going to encourage aninterest in translation in schools, that we have some con-crete orientation of what one can do in class. He has awhole article about one semester he did in using transla-tion, but I don’t think anyone else has contributed thatkind of practical material.

D: What do you teach at Taylor University?

S: At the moment, I’m teaching one section of freshmancomposition and a section of poetry writing and a sectionof fiction writing. I think to serve my students well, Ishould be practicing all of those kinds of writing, and Idon’t see it as a burden at all. I see it as great. I’m goingto try writing fiction and see how that goes and learnwhat I can.

D: You talked about someday writing a novella aboutYeats and Pound and Frost when they were all in Londonat the same time.

S: Oh yes, thanks for reminding me of that. I haven’tthought about that in a couple of years at least. Thatwould be a fun project. I remember when I was looking


into that Frost quote, “poetry is what gets lost in transla-tion” and I was finding myself learning about Frost biog-raphy and Pound … I started to have this theory of myown, actually I think it’s from something you said, thatmaybe Frost had one drink too many at a party and hesaid that.

D: And for our listening audience, he said the big sen-tence.

S: So, I can imagine writing a novella or at least a shortstory that tries to answer the place and the time whenFrost first said those words and have fun with usingthose historical figures, bringing Pound and Frost togeth-er on the page. They didn’t get along really well, so Ihave my conflict, their egos.

D: Important ingredients in fiction. Was that article ofyours about Frost written for Delos? I think that is one ofthe great articles written about translation. You just pur-sue it, and you pursue it, and pursue it — this fascinatingquestion of did Frost really say that not altogether com-plimentary thing about translation? And you think hedid?

S: I think that he did, but we may never know exactlyhow he worded it. In the article, I argued that it wasimportant to know how he worded it and that the mean-ing is obscured when we have Frost quoted by differentpeople in five or six different ways.

D: You think five or six different versions?

S: Right, although they’re pretty similar. I listed them inthe article.

D: But it’s always the same interpretation. In the article,did you trace back to Pound having said something pret-ty much the same, only with a positive feeling, andDante, right? Dante’s wasn’t so positive, though, I don’tthink.

S: Yes, and several other people. No, Dante’s was a littleless positive, and I traced it back I think … I think itgoes as far back as …

D: Adam.


THE LOVERS OF ALGERIAAnouar Benmalek

“I was swept along by the beautifully constructedstory of Anna and Nasreddine, whose love survivesa half century of war and terror in post-colonialAlgeria. Benmalek is a master of the poetics of separation, capable of evoking a single heartbreak-ing scene —the slaughter of an elephant by animpoverished traveling circus—or the pain andlonging of a thirty-year absence. He has given us aPlague for the 1990s, not as allegory but as tragicrealism.” —ALICE KAPLAN

Winner of the prestigious French Rachid Prize, TheLovers of Algeria is an unflinchingly candid storyabout a country where terrorism and governmentcorruption is commonplace. As two lovers, beatenby time and memory, circle each other in Algeria,Benmalek shows with heart-wrenching detail thatlove can endure even the most inhuman conditions.

Translated from the French by Joanna Kilmartin

A Lannan Translation Series Selection

www.graywolfpress.org

Even the earliest translators of the Bible believed thatequivalents had to be found for all the words that

appeared in the original text. Notable exceptions havebeen proper names as well as Hebrew common nouns forwhich no adequate translations could be found (Amen,ephod, Gehenna, Hallelujah, manna, Pesah, Sabbath,etc.). From the beginning, Bible translators decided totransliterate almost all proper names, only occasionallytranslating them according to their etymological meaningor cultural determinants. For very special reasons, themain Hebrew name for God yhwh (Yahweh) was replacedby the general designation Lord. The method of earlytranslators became an unwritten law for translators oflater versions of the Bible.

There has not, however, been consistency in translit-erating rather than translating proper names in earlier orlater translations of the Bible. A given name may betransliterated in one translation unit, but translated else-where, following no recognizable underlying rule or sys-tem. The forms of biblical names in various versions ofBible translations throughout history mirror more or lessthe personal preferences of the translators in renderingproper names or their reliance on preceding versions.

Biblical proper names are transliterated according tothe relevant rules of target languages and cultural tradi-tions. In general, the transliteration technique is phonetic,depending on the translators’ knowledge of the originallanguage and their use of the basic text (Vorlage). Trans-lators did not apply transliteration techniques consistent-ly in the sense of using modern scientific transliterationrules. Differences between the structure of the originallanguage and various forms of proper names in the origi-nal or in previous translations explain why the forms ofbiblical names are consistent only in cases when a partic-ular letter of the alphabet does not allow several possibil-ities; in cases of more than one possibility, the transliter-ation forms can vary. Several names have different formsof the same transliteration.1

This presentation discusses some well-knownappellatives, designations, and names, which are ren-dered both in transliteration and translation forms: theTetragrammaton yhwh (Yahweh) (Gen 2:4; 3:1; etc),meaning the personal name of the God of Israel; designa-tions of the netherworld Abaddon (Job 26:6; 28:22;

31:12; Ps 88:12; Prov 15:11; 27:20; Rev 9:11) and Sheol(Gen 37:35; Ps 6:5; Job 26:6; Prov 15:11; 27:20; etc);designations of giants Nephilim (Gen 6:4; Num 13:33)and Rephaim (Gen 14:5; 15:20; etc.); designations ornames of the monstrous beings Behemoth (Job 40:15)and Leviathan (Isa 27:1; Pss 74:14; 104:26; Job 3:8;40:25); the symbolic names of Hosea’s children in Hosea1: Jezreel (Hos 1:4), (Lo-) Ruhama (Hos 1:6) and (Lo-)Ammi (Hos 1:9); the name of Isaiah’s second son Maher-shalal-hash-baz (Isa 8:1, 3), having a striking symbolicmeaning in the context of Isaiah’s pronouncement of thedestruction of Damascus and Samaria; names of peoplesPhilistines (Gen 10:14; Ex 13:17; etc.) and Goiim (Gen14:1, 9); lands Aram-naharaim (Gen 24:10) and Paddan-aram (Gen 25:20); toponyms Moreh (Gen 12:6; Deut11:30; Judg 7:1) and Moriah (Gen 22:2; 2 Chr 3:1); thecave Machpelah (Gen 23:9, 17, 19; 25:9; 49:30; 50:13);and the plain Shephelah (Deut 1:7; Josh 9:1; 10:40; 11:2,16 ; 12:8; 15:33; Judg 1:9; etc.). In addition to theseexamples of alternative methods of rendering names, theway of transliterating the mountain Harmagedon (Rev16:16), mentioned as the place of the last divine judg-ment, is noteworthy. Nearly ninety anthroponyms andtoponyms, which are etymologically explained in theBible itself, will be treated in a separate section.

Substitutes for the Divine Personal Name yhwh or ItsTransliteration

In the Hebrew Bible, the specific personal name forthe God of Israel is given by the four consonants, the“Tetragrammaton” yhwh, appearing 6007 times. It isalmost certain that the name was originally pronouncedYahweh. In some early period of Judaism, the Tetragram-maton yhwh came to be regarded as too sacred to be pro-nounced. The long-established practice when reading theHebrew Scriptures in the synagogue was to read theword ’ædōnāy, “Lord,” for this symbol. The Masoretesadded vowel sounds to the consonantal Hebrew text andattached to yhwh vowel signs indicating that the Hebrewword ’ædōnāy, “Lord,” or ’ělōhîm, “God,” should beread in its place.

A survey of Bible translations throughout the cen-turies reveals that translators have always been in search


TRANSLITERATION OR TRANSLATION OFBIBLICAL PROPER NAMES

By Jože Krašovec

of the best solutions for rendering the Tetragrammatonyhwh. On the one hand, they were bound to the Jewishtradition of extraordinary reverence for this DivineName, and on the other hand they were obliged to over-come a limited range of possibilities when yhwh appearsin construct expressions of divine names and appella-tives. The basic dilemma has been: should the Name betransliterated or replaced by another word? A similardilemma is whether names with a supposed etymologicalmeaning and unusual simple or compound names with amarked symbolic meaning in relation to created beingsshould be transliterated or translated. The translators ofLXX used the Greek word Kýrios, “Lord,” and transla-tors of VL and Vg used the Latin word Dominus. “Lord,”for the Name. In the late medieval period, the form thatcame to be used was Jehovah, which is a combination ofthe consonants of the Divine Name and the vowelsattached to it by the Masoretes for the substitute Adonai.

The Jewish tradition of avoiding saying the Tetra-grammaton yhwh out loud and the translation method ofthe ancient Greek and Latin translators strongly influ-enced later Christian translators of the Bible. While thename Yahweh was in all centuries used primarily in gen-eral religious and theological literature, Bible translationsnormally replaced the name Yahweh with the word Lord,in combination with other divine names and appellatives,sometimes with the word God, very often written andprinted in capital letters LORD/GOD. This is true formost Renaissance and recent standard versions. All themore striking are some versions rendering the DivineName in various transliterated forms: Jehovah (ASV,DBY), Jehova (ELO), Yahvé (FBJ), Jehová (R60), Jeho-vah (RVA), Éternel (DRB), Eterno (LND).

Substitutes or Transliteration in Construct Expres-sions of Divine Names and Appellatives

The Hebrew Bible contains a number of constructexpressions, which are compounds of double propernames or designations of God, sometimes extended withadditional appellatives.The established practice of replac-ing the Tetragrammaton yhwh with the word Lord or Godand other circumstances have obliged translators tosearch for such construct expressions, which more or lesschange the wording of the original.

First to be mentioned is the phrase ’ædōnāy yhwhøəbā’ôt (Isa 3:15; 10:23, 24; 22:12; etc.). The word’ædōnāy is the most common Hebrew designation of theLord; the Tetragrammaton yhwh is normally replaced bythe word LORD/Lord; the word in plural, øəbā’ôt, is usu-

ally rendered by the word “hosts,” and sometimes it istransliterated. The way the whole phrase is rendered andits orthography clearly reveal the degree of originality oftranslators or of their reliance on other versions: yəā’ělōhîm øəbā’ôt “LORD God of hosts” (TgIsa); Kýriossabaoth (LXX); Kýrios ho Theòs tôn dynámeōn (MGK);Dominus Deus exercituum (Vg); Lord, euen the Lord ofhoasts (Isa 3:15), the Lord God of hostes (Isa 10:24), theLord God of hosts (Isa 22:12) (GNV); the Lord GOD ofhosts (KJV, NKJ, RSV, NRS); the Lord, Jehovah of hosts(ASV, DBY); the Lord Yahweh Sabaoth (NJB); the Lord,the LORD Almighty (NIB, NIV, NLT); der H(E)errHERR Zebaoth (LUB, LUO, LUT); der Herr, ER derUmscharte (BUR); Gott, der Herr der Heere (EIN); leSeigneur(,) le (D)dieu des armées (BLS); le Seigneur,l’Éternel des armées (DRB, LSG, NEG); le Seigneur, leDieu de l’univers (BFC); Yahvé Sabaot (FBJ); leSeigneur Yahvé Sabaot (FBJ); le Seigneur DIEU, le tout-puissant (TOB); il Signore, il Signor degli eserciti (DIO);il Signore, l’Eterno degli eserciti (LND); il Signore, ilSIGNORE degli eserciti (NRV); el Señor, Jehová de losejércitos (R60); el Señor Jehovah de los Ejércitos (RVA);el Señor, DIOS de los ejércitos (LBA); o Senhor DEUSdos Exércitos (ACF, BRP); o SENHOR, o Deus dosExércitos (ARC); o Senhor, o SENHOR dos Exércitos(ARA); Pán, Hospodin zástupů (BKR); Pan, BógZastępów (BTP); Herra, Herra Sebaot (FIN); Uram,Seregeknek Ura (HUN); etc. Some of these renderingswere accepted by other later versions. DAL adopted fromLUB the combination of translation and transliteration:Gospud GOSPUD Zebaoth, whereas later Slovenian ver-sions preferred translation of all the words: Gospód Bógvojsknih trûm (JAP); Godpod Bog vojskinih trum(WOL); Gospod, Bog nad vojskami (SSP).

Another type of compound names for God is con-struct expressions, ’ēl ’ělōhê yiśrā’ēl (Gen 33:20) andhā’ādōn yhwh ’ělōhê yiśrā’ēl (Ex 34:23). The expressionin Gen 33:20 concludes the narrative about Abraham’sitinerary to Shechem. There he bought “the plot of landon which he had pitched his tent. There he erected analtar and called it El-Elohe-Israel (wayyiqrā’ lô ’ēl ’ělōhêyiśrā’ēl).” As a name the expression could be interpretedas “El is the God of Israel,” or “El, the God of Israel.”TgO avoids giving a divine name to the altar and rendersthe sentence: “He erected an altar there, and worshippedon it before God, the God of Israel.” Other Targums havea similar paraphrase, shifting the attention to Abraham’sworshipping before God, the God of Israel. TgN alsopartly changes the construct divine name: yyy ’lh’ dyśr’l“Yahweh, God of Israel.” In LXX, giving a divine name


to the altar is avoided by disregarding the pronoun lô andby omitting one of two words for God. The Greek ren-dering is kaì epekalésato tòn Theòn Israél, “and he calledon the God of Israel.” Vg has the rendering: Et erecto ibialtari invocabit super illud Fortissimum Deum Israhel.Among the Renaissance translations, GNV and LUB fol-low the Vg. GNV renders the divine name given to thealtar by: … and called it, The mightie God of Israel;LUB has: … und rieff an den Namen des starcken GottesIsrael. LUB’s rendering is followed by DAL: … inu jeklizal na ime tiga mozhniga Israeloviga Boga. BKR hasthe rendering: Bůh silný, Bůh Izraelský. It is obvious thatLuther was influenced by other passages having the col-location: “he invoked (called) the name of the LORD”(Gen 4:26; 12:8; 13:4; 21:33; 26:25). The majority ofother Renaissance and later translations transliterate theentire construct name: Elelohe-Israel (KJV); Elelohe-israel (RSV); El Elohe Israel (NIV); etc. Some of themtransliterate only the first word for God: El, the God ofIsrael (BBE, NAB); El, Dieu d’Israël (FBJ, TOB); El,Izraelov Bog (SSP); etc. Those who translate the nameentirely and properly have the form: Gott, der GottIsraels (ELO, ELB, EIN); Deus, o Deus de Israel (ACF,BRP, ARC, ARA); Boga, Boga Izraela (BTP); etc. Theversion BUR has the form: Gottheit Gott Ji∫sraels.

Renderings of the expression hā’ādōn yhwh ’ělōhêyiśrā’ēl (Ex 34:23) manifest more variations: ribbôn‘olmā’ yəyā ’ělāhā’ dəyiśrā’el, “the Master of the Uni-verse, the Lord God of Israel” (TgO; cf. TgPsJ); TgN hasadded in the middle the Tetragrammaton; Kýrios toûTheoû Israēl (LXX); Kýrios, Kýrios toû Theoû toû Israēl(MGK); Dominus Dei Israhel (Vg); the Lord IehouahGod of Israel (GNV); the Lord GOD, the God of Israel(KJV); the Lord Jehovah, the God of Israel (DBY, ASV);the LORD God, the God of Israel (RSV, NRS); the Sov-ereign LORD, the God of Israel (NIV, NIB, NLT, TNK);Lord Yahweh, God of Israel (NJB); der Herrscher, derHERR und Gott Israels (LUB, LUO); der Herrscher, derHERR, der Gott Israels (LUT, SCH); dem Herrn IHMdem Gott JiÍsraels (BUR); der Herr, der Gott Israels(EIN); der Herr HERR, der Gott Israels (ELB); leSeigneur tout-puissant, le Dieu d’Israël (BLS); leSeigneur, l’Éternel, (le) Dieu d’Israël (DRB, LSG,NEG); le Seigneur Yahvé, Dieu d’Israël (FBJ); le Maître,le SEIGNEUR, Dieu d’Israël (TOB); Il Signore, l’EternoSignore Iddio d’Israel (DIO); il Signore, l’Eterno, il DIOd’Israele (LND); il Signore, DIO, che è il Dio d’Israele(NRV); il Signore, Dio d’Israele (IEP); el SeñoreadorJehová, Dios de Israel (SRV); el Jehová el Señor, Diosde Israel (R60); el Jehová, el Señor, Dios de Israel

(R95); el DIOS; el Señor, Dios de Israel (LBA); o Sen-hor DEUS, o Deus de Israel (ACF, BRP); o SenhorJEOVÁ, Deus de Israel (ARC); Panovnik Hospodin, BohIzraelský (BKR); Pan, Bog Iraela (BTP); GOSPUD, inuBog Israelski (DAL), vsigamogozhhni Gospód IsraelskiBog (JAP); vsegamogočni Gospod Bog Izraelov (WOL);Gospod Bog, Izraelov Bog (SSP); etc. Other versions invarious languages follow this or other patterns.

Of interest too is the construct expression combiningthe Divine Name yhwh in two variants: yāh yhwh (Isa12:2; 26:4) and yāh yāh (Isa 38:11). The slight differencein form is the reason for considerable differences in ren-dering the first and the second variants. The form attest-ed in Isa 12:2 and 26:4 is rendered as follows: changedinto the single LORD (TgIsa); Kýrios (LXX); Kýrios hoTheós (MGK); Dominus Deus (Vg); Lord God (GNV);LORD JEHOVAH (KJV); Jah, Jehovah (DBY); Jehovah,even Jehovah (ASV); YAH, the LORD (NKJ); LORDGOD (RSV, NRS, ESV, NLT); the LORD, the LORD(NIV); Yahweh (NJB); Yah the LORD (TNK); Gott derHERR (LUB, LUO, LUT); Jah, Jehova (ELO); oh ER,ER (BUR at 12:2); Er, oh ER (BUR at 26:4); Jah, derHERR (ELB); der HERR, der HERR (SCH); Seigneur(BLS at 12:2); le Seigneur notre Dieu (BLS at 26:4);Jah, Jéhovah (DRB); l’Éternel, l’Éternel (LSG, NEG);Yahvé (FBJ); le SEIGNEUR (TOB); il Signore Iddio(DIO); l’Eterno, si, l’Eterno (LND); il SIGNORE, ilSIGNORE (NRV); JAH Jehová (SRV, R60); Jah, Jehová(R95); Jehovah (RVA); el SEÑOR DIOS (LBA); oSENHOR DEUS (ACF, BRP); o SENHOR Deus (ARA);o SENHOR JEOVÁ (ARC); Bůh Hospodin (BKR);Hospodin, jen Hospodin (CEP); GOSPUD Bug (DAL);Gospód (Bog) (JAP); Gospod (Bog) (WOL); GOSPODBOG (SSP); etc.

The expression yāh yāh (Isa 38:11) is often rendereddifferently in translations: a single LORD (TgIsa); hoTheós (LXX); ho Kýrios, ho Kýrios (MGK); DominusDominus (Vg); the Lord, euen the Lord (GNV); theLORD, even the LORD (KJV); Jah, Jah (DBY); Jeho-vah, even Jehovah (ASV); the LORD, even the LORD(JPS); YAH, The LORD (NKJ); the LORD (RSV, NRS);the LORD, the LORD (NAS, NIV, NIB); Yahweh (NJB);LORD GOD (NLT); Yah, Yah (TNK); der Herr, ja, derHerr (LUB, LUO); der HERR (LUT); Jehova, Jehova(ELO); oh Ihn, Ihn oh (BUR); Jah, Jah (ELB); derHERR, der HERR (SCH); le Seigneur mon Dieu (BLS);Jah, Jah (DRB); l’Éternel, L’Éternel (LSG, NEG); Yahvé(FBJ); le SEIGNEUR (TOB); il Signore, il Signore(DIO); l’Eterno, si, l’Eterno (LND); il SIGNORE, ilSIGNORE (NRV); á JAH, á JAH (SRV); a Jah, a Jah


(R95); al SEÑOR, al SEÑOR (LBA); Jehova (RVA); aoSENOHOR, o SENHOR (ACF, BRP); ao SENHOR(ARC); o SENHOR (ARA); Hospodin, Hospodin (BKR,CEP); GOSPUD, ja GOSPUD (DAL); Gospód Bog(JAP); Gospod Bog (WOL); GOSPOD BOG (SSP); etc.

Transliteration or Translation of Terms Denoting theUnderworld

There are two Hebrew designations for the realm ofthe dead, which are transliterated in some versions asproper names for the location of a place from whichthere is no return and translated in some others as gener-al terms: ’æbaddôn and šə’ôl. It is clear that the firstword derives from the verb ’ābad, “to destroy,” butattempts to unravel the derivation and etymologies of thesecond word have not yet been successful. The connec-tion of both words with the realm of the dead is corrobo-rated by the parallelism in the sequence Sheol // Abaddon(Job 26:6; Prov 15:11; 27:20). In Prov 15:11 we find, forinstance, the statement: “Sheol and Abaddon lie openbefore the LORD, how much more human hearts!” Ver-sions in different languages clearly show how translatorsunderstood the meaning of both designations and thefunction of parallelism, which is the basic form ofHebrew poetry. In TgProv, both words are retained, butin LXX and MGK, both words are translated: hádes kaìapōleia, “hell and destruction”; Vg has translation of thesame type: infernus et perditio. Almost all the Renais-sance translators decided for the translation option, butsome preferred transliteration: hell and destruction(GNV, KJV); Helle und Verderbnis (LUB); l’inferno, e’lluogo della perditione (DIO); peklo i zatracení (BKR);pakal inu pogublenje (DAL); etc. Some later versions areconsistent in the translation or transliteration of both des-ignations, others combine translation of one and translit-eration of the other: Sheol and Abaddon (ASV, RSV,NRS, NAS, TNK, ESV); Hell and Destruction (NKJ);hell and destruction (DRA, WEB, LXE, RWB); Sheoland destruction (DBY); the nether-world and Destruc-tion (JPS); the underworld and destruction (BBE); thenether world and the abyss (NAB); Sheol and Perdition(NJB); the depths of Death and Destruction (NLT);Death and Destruction (NIB); Hölle und Abgrund(LUO); Unterwelt und Abgrund (LUT); Scheol undAbgrund (ELO, ELB); Gruftheit und Verlorenheit(BUR); Totenreich und Abgrund (SCH); Totenreich undUnterwelt (EIN); L’enfer et la perdition (BLS); le shéolet l’abîme (DRB); le séjour des morts et l’abime (LSG,NEG); le Séjour des morts et l’Abime (TOB); Shéol et

Perdition (FBJ); Sceol e Abaddon (LND); lo Sceol eAbaddon (LND); il soggiorno dei morti e l’abisso(NRV); inferi e abisso (IEP); Pèkèl, inu pogublénje(JAP); pekel in pogubljenje (WOL); podzemlje in brezno(SSP); etc.

This survey of renderings focuses on the rendering ofProv 15:11; a comparative study of all passages wouldstill enlarge the list considerably, because many versionsdo not translate the same word consistently from theoriginal. Two reasons for inconsistency could be a delib-erate decision by translators to create variation, or a lackof control. Inconsistency is a normal phenomenon intranslations that are collective works.

The name Abaddon is a subject of special interest inRev 9:11, a passage describing the nature of the ruler ofpernicious locusts: “They have as king over them theangel of the bottomless pit; his name in Hebrew is Abad-don, and in Greek he is called Apollyon.” The grammati-cal form of the name in Hebrew and in Greek is differentbecause the meaning attached to naming the mountain inthe languages is different. The Hebrew form ’æbaddôn isa verbal noun based on the root ’ābad, “to destroy,” andtherefore meaning “destruction,” and in the context des-ignating specifically the place of damnation. The Greekform apollýōn, on the other hand, is a participle meaning“destroyer,” thus functioning as a gloss of the scripturalwriter describing the destroying nature of the angel.Nearly all versions throughout history transliterate thename of the angel as it is given in Hebrew and Greek.The only exception so far known using translation is theItalian version IEP: “Avevano come re l’angelo del-l’Abisso, il cui nome in ebraico si chiama Distruzione ein Greco Sterminatore.”

In the book of Revelation, the name of the angeldestroyer is explicitly exposed in Hebrew and in Greek.It therefore seems natural that the name in the two placesshould not be translated but rather kept in its originalforms. The freedom of translators is much more limitedhere than in places of the Hebrew Bible where the namesor designations Abaddon and Sheol seem to have a moregeneral meaning.

The Giants Nephilim and Rephaim

In Gen 6:4, the writer reports: “The Nephilim(hannəpilîm) were on the earth in those days – and alsoafterward – when the sons of God went in to the daugh-ters of humans, who bore children to them. These werethe heroes (haggibbōrîm) that were of old, warriors ofrenown.” The Aramaic tradition of interpretation is not


unified: TgO and TgN render both terms in question bythe same word, gibbārayyā’(h), “the mighty ones, giants,warriors,” whereas TgPsJ relates the word hannəpilîm tothe verb nāpal, “to fall,” and takes it to refer to angelswho fell from heaven. Following the tradition of namingindividuals who are not named in the Bible, TgPsJ iden-tifies the fallen angels as Shamhazai and Azael, whowere among the leaders of the fallen angels (cf. 1 Enoch6:3, 7; 8:1; 9:6, 7; 10:8, 11; see also b. Yoma 67b). LXXtranslates the term hannəpilîm by gígantes, the word alsoused in Num 13:33 for the same designation and in Gen6:4 for the designation haggibbōrîm. Aq rendershannəpilîm by the passive participle epipíptontes, “thefallen ones,” and haggibbōrîm by the adjective dynatoí,“the mighty ones.” Sym uses for both designations ofhuge creatures the same term, hoi bíaioi, “the violentones.” LXX obviously influenced later translations. Vgtranslates the first term by gigantes and the second oneby potentes. Among later versions, they often translatedboth terms, but a considerable number transliterate thefirst term.

The Hebrew plural form rəpā’îm, derived from theverb rāpā’ / rāpāh, “to heal, to release,” designates in theHebrew Bible two categories of beings and a valley: thedead in the underworld; a group or nation of giants orwarriors; the valley of Rephaim. The designation of thedead is attested both in the Ras Shamra, Phoenician, andOld Testament texts. Especially illustrative for this mean-ing is Ps 88:11, where the psalmist asks God:

Do you work wonders for the dead (ləmētîm)?Do the shades (’im-rəpā’îm) rise up to praise you?

This translation (cf. NRS, DBY, JPS, RSV, BBE,TNK, ELO, EIN, etc.) reflects modern exegesis based onthe poetic structure of the passage and on the compara-tive evidence. How far has the Jewish-Christian transla-tion tradition played a role? The paraphrase of TgPs ren-ders the synonymous words by mêtayyā’, “the dead,” //gûšmayya’, “the bodies.” LXX creates parallelism: toîsnekroîs // ē iatroí, “to the dead // or shall physicians”; Vgfollows LXX and renders the parallel words by mortuis //aut medici. Many later versions have the parallelism ofthe same word: the dead // the dead (GNV, KJV, NKJ,NIV, NLT, R60, R95, ACF, ARC, DAL, etc.). LUBrepeats the meaning of the first term: unter den Todten //werden die Verstorbene (cf. LUT); some others have: thedead // physicians (DRA, LXE); des morts // lesmédecins (BLS). We also find the parallelism the dead //

the departed spirits (NAU). BUR introduce the paral-lelism an den Toten // Gespenster.

The same parallelism between the two synonymsoccurs in Isa 26:14 (cf. v. 19):

The dead (mētîm) do not live;shades (rəpā’îm) do not rise …

The translation tradition is quite similar: TgIsa intro-duces the parallelism mētîn, “the dead” // gəbārēhôn“their mighty ones”; LXX keeps the parallelism nekroí //iatroí (cf. LXE), but Vg has morientes // gigantes (cf.DRA). Other later versions did not follow either LXX orVg; the parallelism in use is about the same as at Ps88:11. The Vg rendering reflects the second meaning ofthe word rəpā’îm, attested at Gen 14:5; 15:20; Deut 2:10,20; 3:11, 13; Josh 2:4; 13:12; 17:15). At Gen 14:5-6, thenarrator reports about the pre-Israelite peoples of Pales-tine: “In the fourteenth year Chedorlaomer and the kingswho were with him came and subdued the Raphaim inAshteroth-karnaim, the Zusim in Ham, the Emim inShaveh-kiriathaim, and the Horites in the hill country ofSeir as far as El-paran on the edge of the wilderness.”According to Deut 2:11, the Emim, as tall as the Anakim,had once lived in Moab: “Like the Anakim, they are usu-ally reckoned as Rephaim, though the Moabites call themEmim.” According to Deut 2:20, the Ammonites calledthe Rephaim by the name Zamzumim. The book ofJoshua refers to a tradition that Og, king of Bashan, was“one of the last of the Rephaim, who lived at Ashtarothand at Edrei” (12:4; cf. Deut 3:11; Josh 13:12).

Israelite popular tradition, ascribing gigantic statureto the Rephaim, is strongly reflected in early Bible trans-lations. Aramaic tradition is consistent in translating theterm rəpā’îm by gibbārayyā’, “the mighty ones, giants,warriors,” at all places. LXX and Vg, on the other hand,are not consistent. In LXX, there is translation bygígantes at Gen 14:5; Josh 12:4; 13:12 and transliterationby Raphaïn at Gen 15:20; Deut 2:11, 20; 3:11, 13. Vg,on the other hand, has translation by gigantes at Deut2:11, 20; 3:11, 13 and transliteration by Rafaim at Gen14:5; 15:20; Josh 12:4; 13:12; 17:15. There is a similarinconsistency in later translations: at Gen 14:5, the greatmajority have transliteration of the term rəpā’îm. Only afew versions have translation: the giants (LXE); dieRi(e)sen (LUB, LUO); i giganti (LND); gjigantët (ALB).At Gen 15:20, all have transliteration except LUB. AtDeut 2:11, a great majority have transliteration, but thephrase “they are usually reckoned as Rephaim” suggest-ed to some translators a translation by “giants” (cf. LUB,


BLS). At Deut 2:20; 3:11, 13; Josh 12:4; 13:12; 17:15,transliteration also greatly prevails, but some translatorspreferred translation by “giants.” This is true for theRenaissance versions, such as GNV, KJV, and LUB.BUR deserves special attention because at Gen 14:5 and15:20, it has transliteration by Refaer, but at all otherpassages, the term is translated by Gespenstische. Con-cerning those who transliterate the word, it is noteworthythat a considerable number of translations have transliter-ation of rəpā’îm in minuscule, thus indicating that theword is understood as a designation rather than the nameof a people.

The designation of the broad valley near Jerusalemaccording to Rephaim (Josh 15:8; 18:16; 2 Sam 5:18, 22;23:13; Isa 17:5; 1 Chr 11:15; 14:9) is again connectedwith surprises. At all places, TgJ has the fixed phrasemêšar gibbārayyā’ “the plain of the giants / the mightymen, the warriors”; LXX has several variants: ek mérousgês Rhaphaïn, “by the side of the land of Raphain” (Josh15:8); a complete transliteration: Emekraphaïn (Josh18:16); a more or less complete translation: eis tèn koilá-da tôn titánōn, “in the valley of the Titans” (2 Sam 5:18);en tê koiládi tôn titánōn, “in the valley of Titans” (2 Sam5:22); en tê koiládi tôn Rhaphaeím, “in the valley ofRaphaeim” (2 Sam 23:13); en tê koiládi tôn gigántōn, “inthe valley of the giants” (1 Chr 11:15; 14:9); en pháraggistereâ, “in a rich valley” (Isa 17:5). Vg has: vallisRafaim (Josh 15:8; 18:16); in valle Rephaim (2 Sam5:18, 22; 1 Chr 11:15; 14:19; Isa 17:5); in valle Gigan-tum (2 Sam 23:13). Later European translations arealmost unanimously consistent in rendering the expres-sion ‘ēmeq rəpā’îm by “the valley of Rephaim.” Thevery few exceptions are all the more notable: the valleyof the gi(y)ants only at Josh 15:8; 18:16; elsewhere, thevalley of Rephaim (GNV, KJV, BLS, WEB, RWB); thevalley of the giants at 2 Sam 23:13 (DRA); valle de losgigantes at Josh 15:8 (SRV); la campiña de los gigantesat Josh 18:16 (SRV); valle dei giganti at Josh 18:16; 2Sam 23:13 (LND); das Tal (des Tals) der Gespenstischenat Josh 15:8; 18:16; and der (im) Gespenstergrund(BUR).

The Monstrous Animals Behemoth and Leviathan

The context and parallel passages do not make it clearwhich monstrous animals are designated by the namesBehemoth (Job 40:15) and Leviathan (Isa 27:1; Pss74:14; 104:26; Job 3:8; 40:25). The first name appears inthe context of God’s lesson that he is too great to beunderstood by Job or any other human being: “Look at

Behemoth, which I made just as I made you; it eats grasslike an ox.” Translations offer varied ways of imagingthis: TgJob reads the name of the beast as pl. of the wordbəhēmāh, “beast” and renders it by the pl. bə‘îrayyā’ ,“grazing animals, cattle”; in LXX the name is translatedwith the pl. thēría, “the wild beasts”; Aq and Theo renderit by contr. pl. ktēnē, “flocks and herds, beasts”; Vg hasthe transliterated form Behemoth. Most later versions fol-low the original and Vg by transliterating the name of thebeast. There are, however, some notable exceptions intranslation: Great Beast (BBE); mighty hippopotamus(NLT); das Flußpferd (SCH); das Urtier (BUR); dasNilpferd (EIN); l’hippopotame (LSG, BFC, NEG); leBestial (TOB); l’ippopotamo (NRV); hipopótamo(ARA); Reuzendier (LEI), nijlpaard (NBG); Nilhesten(D31).

The name Leviathan is mentioned in various roles inthe Bible: In the apocalyptic announcement of final judg-ment at Isa 27:1, it serves as a symbol for Tyre; God“will punish Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan thetwisting serpent”; at Ps 74:14, the psalmist professes thatGod worked salvation in the earth by crushing “the headsof Leviathan”; at Ps 104:26, Leviathan is mentioned asone of the manifold works of God in the realm of thesea; at Job 3:8, Job curses the night of his birth by say-ing: “Let those curse it who curse the Sea, those who areskilled to rouse up Leviathan”; and at Job 40:25, Job isreminded of the greatness of the creatures created byGod: “Can you draw out Leviathan with a fishhook, orpress down its tongue with a cord?” Translators into Ara-maic substantially changed the text: TgIsa refers theannouncement of punishment upon Leviathan (Tyre) atIsa 27:1 to Roman power at sea and proclaims that Godwill “punish the king who exalts himself like Pharaoh thefirst king, and the king who prides himself like Sen-nacherib the second king”; the name Leviathan disap-peared totally; at Ps 74:14, TgPs changes the Hebrewphrase rāšê liwyātān, “the heads of Leviathan,” into rêšêgibbārê par‘ōh, “the heads of the heros of Pharaoh”; inthe translation of Ps 104:26, the name liwyātān isretained, but at Job 3:8, TgJob changes the entire sen-tence: “May the prophets curse it who curse the day ofretribution, who are ready when aroused to lead off theirlament”; at Job 40:25, the targumist is quite accurate andalso retains the name liwyātān.

Non-Semitic translations also have various render-ings: in LXX, the word Leviathan is translated with theword drákōn at all places; Vg according to LXX has therendering dracon at Pss 74:14; 104:26, whereas at otherplaces the name is transliterated by Leviathan. The great


majority of later versions used transliteration; the excep-tions are almost limited to Ps 104:26 and to Job 40:25:crocodile (NLT); great beast (BBE); dragon (DRA);Walfische (LUO); große Fische (LUT); der Drache, dasKrokodil (ZBI in Job); das Krokodil (SCH, EIN at Job40:25); crocodile (LSG, NEG); dragon (BFC); leTortueux (TOB in Job); coccodrillo (NRV); crocodilo(ARA); krokodyl (BTP); krokodil (NBG); Krokodillen(D31). It is noteworthy that some collective versions arenot consistent in transliterating or translating the samenames. TOB, for instance, has transliteration in Isa 27:1;Pss 74:14; 104:26, and translation in Job 3:8 and 40:25;EIN has translation only in Job 40:25.

Symbolic Names of Hosea’s Children

In the first part of Hosea’s autobiography we find God’scommand to the prophet concerning the birth of his threechildren. After his unfaithful wife Gomer gave birth tothe first son, the Lord said to him (Hos 1:4): “Name himJezreel (yizrə‘e’l); for in a little while I will punish thehouse of Jehu for the blood of Jezreel …” After she borea daughter, the Lord said to him (Hos 1:6): “Name herLo-ruhamah (lō’ ruhāmāh), for I will no longer have pityon the house of Israel or forgive them.” After the birth ofhis second son, God commanded him (Hos 1:8): “Namehim Lo-ammi (lō’ ‘ammî), for you are not my people andI am not your God.” The names of Hosea’s children arestriking for their symbolic meaning in relation to thepeople of Israel. The verdict of rejection is emphasizedin two ways: first, by the Hebrew wording and styliza-tion of the names; second, by explanation following thenames in a causal clause. It seems therefore reasonablefor translators to transmit the names using transliterationinstead of translating them.

The etymological meaning of the second and thirdnames is obvious, but the first name is reminiscent of so-called folk etymology. The name yizrə‘e’l literally means“May God sow”; a West Canaanite variant is yizra‘-’el ,“May El sow.” The etymological meaning of the name,known as the town and valley of Jezreel, is positive. Butthe Valley of Jezreel was the scene of many crimes andatrocities committed by the Israelite kings, and thesememorable events are the reason for naming Hosea’s sonafter this place. The mystery of the child’s name lay inits ambivalence. Since the name Jezreel already existedas a place name, there was hardly any serious reason totranslate it. LXX and Vg transliterate it: Iezraél (LXX),Hiezrahel (Vg). On the other hand, in spite of the innerrelationship between naming and the explanation of the

names, LXX and Vg transmitted the second and the thirdnames by translation: Ouk-ēleēménē, Ou-laós-mou(LXX); Absque misericordia, Non pupulus meus (Vg).TgHos takes an opposite way: the translator retains theoriginal Semitic words of the second and third names butinterprets the literal meaning of the name Jezreel as areference to God’s scattering (literally “sowing”) ofIsrael in exile. The paraphrase reads: “And the Lord saidto him, ‘Call their name Scattered ones (məbadrayyā’),’for in yet a little while I will avenge the blood of theidolaters, which Jehu shed in Jezreel, when he put themto death because they had worshipped Baal …”.

Later versions testify to the fact that careful thoughtwas given to the dilemma as to whether to transliterate orto translate the names. Most Renaissance versions trans-mitted the symbolic names of Hosea’s children bytransliteration. LUB has transliteration of the second andthird names in a strange orthography: Jesreel, LoRy-hamo, LoAmmi. DAL shows complete reliance on LUB,for this version even retains Luther’s questionableorthography. When it comes to modern versions, somefollow the ancient and others the Renaissance tradition.The transliteration method was adopted by some modernCatholic and ecumenical versions, for instance, by FBJ,TOB, and EIN. A special phenomenon is transliterationwith added translation: Lorucama, c’est-à-dire Sans-mis-éricorde; Loammi, c’est-à-dire Non-mon-peuple (BLS);Jesreel, “Den-Gott-sät”; Lo-ruchama, “Ihr-wird-Erbar-men-nicht”; Lo-ammi, “Nicht-mein-Volk” (BUR); LoRouhama, Non-Matriciée; Lo ‘Ami, Mon-Non-Peuple(CHO). Some translators preferred just translation of thenames: Not pitied, Not my people (RSV); Without mercy,Not my people (DRA); No Mercy, Not My People (ESV);Non-amata, Non-popolo-mio (IEP); Bres milosti, Nemoje ludstvu (JAP); Brez-milosti, Ne-moje-ljudstvo(WOL); Nepomiloščena, Ne-moje-ljudstvo (SSP); etc.

Chapter 2 manifests a total restoration of God’sfavor; consequently, the names are changed. At Hos 2:3,God commands: “Say (’imərû) to your brothers, Ammi(‘ammî), and to your sisters, Ruhamah (ruhāmāh).” Theplural address indicates that the radically new name isgiven to the whole nation. TgHos substantially para-phrases God’s command to rename Hosea’s children:“Prophets! Say to your brothers, ‘My people (‘ammî),’return to my law and I will have pity on your congrega-tions.” LXX and Vg translate both names: laós mou,Ēleēménē; Populus meus, Misericordiam. The majorityof later translations transliterate the name, but a consider-able number of versions manifest more or less originalforms of translation or a combination of transliteration


and translation: mein Volck, Sie sey in gnaden (LUB);(Ammi) ony ío moj folk, ona je v’milo∫ti (DAL); Ó lidemůj, Ó milosrdenství došlá (BKR); Vous êtes mon peo-ple, Vous avez reçu miséricorde (BLS); dat zij mijn volk,dat zij in genade is (LUV); My People, Lovingly Accepted! (TNK); Ammi, mon peuple, Rouhama, Bien-aimée (TOB); Ammi (Mein Volk), Ruhama (Erbarmen)(EIN); Mein Volk!, Dir wird Erbarmen! (BUR); Ami,mon peuple!, Rouhama, matriciée (CHO); etc.

The Symbolic Name of Isaiah’s Second Son

The striking symbolic names of Hosea’s childrenrecall the naming of Isaiah’s second son (Isa 8:1-3), withthe important difference that the symbolic meaning ofnaming Isaiah’s son is not coupled with an announce-ment of doom for Israel but for Syria and Ephraim. Thepoint is the expectation that Assyria will have destroyedboth Damascus and Samaria before Isaiah’s son is morethan about a year old. This emphasizes another differ-ence between the meaning of the names of Hosea’s twochildren and Isaiah’s son: the doom of Israel is not final(cf. Hos 2-4), whereas the doom of Syria and Ephraim isfinal and irreversible. In Isaiah, doom is attested by thewords written on a tablet and by the birth of the childbearing the name according to God’s determination:

Then the LORD said to me, Take a large tablet andwrite on it in common characters, “Belonging toMaher-shalal-hash-baz,” and have it attested for meby reliable witnesses, the priest Uriah and Zechariahson of Jeberechiah. And I went to the prophetess, andshe conceived and bore a son. Then the LORD saidto me, Name him Maher-shalal-hash-baz; for beforethe child knows how to call “My father” or “Mymother,” the wealth of Damascus and the spoil ofSamaria will be carried away by the king of Assyria.

The significance of these words is made explicit by theprophet (Isa 8:18): “See, I and the children whom theLORD has given me are signs and portents in Israel fromthe LORD of hosts, who dwells on Mount Zion.”

The sign-name (lə)mahēr šālāl hāš baz is compound-ed of two synonymous nouns šālāl // baz, the verbaladjective mahēr, and the participle hāš, so that the literaltranslation is “the spoil speeds, the prey hastes,” as RSVand NRS correctly state in margin. At its first occurrence(Isa 8:1), the exact wording of the name is introduced byLamedh inscriptionis, which indicates hardly more than amere quotation-mark.2 Ancient translators decided to

translate the name. TgIsa paraphrases the name slightlydifferently at both places: môhî ləmibbaz (bəzā’û)ləme‘dê ‘ædā’āh, “He is hastening to plunder the spoiland to take away the booty.” The translator of LXX sawin the Lamedh a descriptive function, hence the render-ing: toû oxéōs pronom„n poiêsai skýlōn, “concerningmaking a rapid plunder of the spoils.” It is striking thatthe same Hebrew wording of the name in its secondoccurrence (Isa 8:3) is not rendered in the same way inLXX. It reads káleson tò ónoma autoû takhéōs skýleusonoxéōs pronómeuson, “Call his name, Spoil quickly, plun-der speedily.” Vg also translates the name differently inboth cases: Velociter spolia detrahe Cito praedare;Adcelera spolia detrahere Festina praedari.

The Renaissance and later versions manifest a vari-ety of translation and transliteration methods. GNV andDIO translate the name in the first occurrence andtransliterate it in the second: Make speede to the spoyle:haste to the praye // Mahershalalhash-baz (GNV); Eglis’affretterà di spogliare, egli solleciterà di predare IIMaher salal, Has baz (DIO). Some have the same word-ing of translation in both places: Raubebald, Eilebeute(LUB); Eilebeute-Raubebald! (BUR); Hâtez-vous deprendre les dépouilles, prenez vite le butin (BLS); Krych-lé kořisti pospíchá loupežník (BKR); Plejni bèrsu, inurupaj hitru (DAL). JAP has a slightly different formula-tion in both places: Pobéri bersh rope, ropaj hitru // Hítirope pobrati, ropaj hitru. A slight difference also existsin WOL: Hitro vzemi plen, hitro ropaj // Hitro vzemiplen, in hitro ropaj. Several versions have transliterationof the name in both places: Mahershalalhashbaz (KJV,RSV); Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz (NKJ, NIV, NIB);Maher-shalal-hash-baz (DBY, BBE, WEB, NAS, NAB,NRS). Some others transliterate the name but add atranslation: Lemahèr shalal hash baz, “Vite au butin,presse, pille” (CHO); etc. A survey of other versionsshows a similar variety of translation or transliterationand of corresponding orthography.

Etymological Translation of the Proper NamesPhilistines and Goiim

The people Philistines (Heb. pəlištîm) are mentionedfor the first time at Gen 10:14. LXX transliterates thename of this people by Phylisti(e)ím within the Hepta-teuch, but after the Heptateuch, this name is translatedalmost exclusively by the term allóphyloi, “those ofanother tribe, foreigners.” Other translations, includingthe Targums, are consistent in transliterating the name.


The double practice in dealing with this name confirms,among other linguistic and literary indicators, theassumption that LXX is the work of different authorswho lived at different periods during the last three cen-turies BCE.

The proper name Goiim appears at Gen 14:1, 9 andJosh 12:23 in the construct expression melek-gôyîm. Thephrase by itself suggests understanding an indefinitemeaning “king of nations,” but the context requires aproper name for a people or a place Goiim. The Targumstreat the Hebrew place name as a plural noun meaning“peoples, nations”; LXX has an etymological translationbasileùs (basiléōs) ethnôn at Gen 14:1, 9 and translitera-tion (basiléa) Gõim at Josh 12:23; Sym changes thename to Pamphylías; Vg has translation by rex (regem)Gentium (gentium) at all places. Most medieval, Renais-sance, and later versions do not follow Aramaic, Greek,and Latin models but transliterate the word gôyîm as aproper name. It is all the more surprising that the mostinfluential Renaissance translations translate the word asa common noun, but at this point they were not followedby many later versions: the nations (GNV, KJV, DBY,NKJ, DRA, WEB, RWB); die Heiden (LUB, LUO); dieVölker (LUT); les (N)nations (BLS, DRB); i nazioni(DIO, LND); etc. The BUR version is not consistent: atGen 14:1, 9, it uses transliteration by Gojim, at Josh12:23 translation by das Stämmegemisch.

Etymological Translation of the Proper Names Aram-naharaim and Paddan-aram

The Hebrew compounded place name ’æramnahærayim, “Aram-of-the-two-rivers” is designated inGen 24:10 as “the city of Nahor,” and it appears at Gen24:10; Deut 23:5; Judg 3:8; Ps 60:2; 1 Chr 19:6. Theplace name Paddan-aram, “the way/plain of Aram,”seems to be a country, and it appears at Gen 25:20; 28:2,5, 6, 7: 31:18; 33:18; 35:9, 26; 46:15. The attitude oftranslators to these names shows a strong tendency tointerpret in accordance with their supposed etymologicalmeaning. TgO and TgPsJ have a combination of translit-eration and explanation of the double Hebrew nameAram-naharaim at all places: ’æram dî‘al pərāt, “Aram,which is by (on) the Euphrates”; TgN reproduces the fullform of the Hebrew double name at Deut 23:4, but atGen 24:10, it renders literally only the second word,Naharaim. On the other hand, all the Targums reproducethe full form of the Hebrew form of the compound namepaddan ’æram at nearly all places; TgN exceptionallyretains only the word Paddan at Gen 25:20. LXX intro-

duces the designation Mesopotamía, “(the land) betweenrivers,” for both Hebrew names. At Gen 24:10 and Deut23:5, the Greek translator omits the first word of the dou-ble Hebrew name ’æram nahærayim, and the secondword, meaning “the two rivers,” he interprets simply asthe land between the Euphrates and Tigris. In Judg 3:8,he translates it by Syrías potamôn, “the Syria of rivers”;at Ps 60:2, the name is rendered by MesopotamíanSyrías; at 1 Chr 19:6, we find the same designation inthe opposite order, Syrías Mesopotamías. The Hebrewdouble place name paddan ’æram is rendered in LXXsimply by Mesopotamía at Gen 25:20; 28:2, 5; 31:18;elsewhere, it is rendered by the double nameMesopotamía(n, s) (tês) Syrías. For the first name, Vghas at all places the simple rendering by Mesopotamia; atPs 60:2, it has Syriam Mesopotamiam. The second nameis rendered simply by in Mesopotamiam at Gen 25:5;31:18; doubly by in (de) Mesopotamiam Syriae at Gen28:2, 5, 6; 33:18; 35:9, 26; 46:16; and simply in Syriamat Gen 28:7.

In the medieval, Renaissance, and later translations,only a minority have transliteration of the name Aram-naharaim; most translators adopt the Greek translationform Mesopotamia, introduced by LXX, and very fewtranslate the name into their own language: l’Aram-des-deux-Fleuves (TOB); paese (Paese) dei due fiumi (IEP);do aramského Dvojřičí (CEP); even fewer combinetranslation and transliteration: Haute-Mésopotamie(BFC); Siria mesopotámica (RVA); Stroomland-Aram(LEI); in (nach, von) Aram (dem) Zwiestromland (BUR).At Ps 60:2 and 1 Chr 19:6, the LXX renderingMesopotamían Surías and that of the Vg SyriamMesopotamiam obviously prompted many translators tosimilar combinations: Syrians of Mesopotamia (DBY);Mesopotamia of Syria (DRA); mit den Syrer zuMesopotamia (LUB); mit den Aramäern vonMesopotamien (LUT); mit den Syrern von Mesopotamien(ELO, ELB, SCH); mit den Aramäern Mesopotamiens(EIN); mit dem (beim) Aramäer des Zwiestromlandes(BUR); aux Syriens de Mésopotamie (LSG, NEG); lesAraméens de Mésopotamie (TOB); ai Siri diMesopotamia (NRV); els arameus de Naharaim (BCI);stemi Syrerji v’ Mesopotamij (DAL); de Syriërs vanMesopotamië (LUV); de Arameeërs van Mesopotamië(NBG); de Syriers van Mesopotamie (SVV). At 1 Chr19:6, we also find unusual translations: from the Ara-maeans of Upper Mesopotamia (NJB); des Syriens deHaute-Mésopotamie (BFC); od Aramejců z Dvojříčí(CEP). The Hebrew double name paddan ’æram istransliterated in nearly all the translations. Very few


translators use the Greek translation form Mesopotamia(LUB, DAL, N30, N38, NBK, NBN, FIN), whereassome others use mixed translation forms in their ownlanguages: Haute-Mésopotamie (BFC); la plaine d’Aram(TOB); Pádan Syrské (BKR); z Rovin aramskýh (CEP);die Aramäerflur (BUR at all places).

Etymological Translation of the Proper Names Morehand Moriah

Gen 12:6 speaks of Abraham’s itinerary “through theland to the place at Shechem, to the oak of Moreh (’ēlônmôreh).” At Deut 11:30, a description is given where themountains Gerizim and Ebal are to be found: “As youknow, they are beyond the Jordan, some distance to thewest, in the land of the Canaanites who live in theArabah, opposite Gilgal, beside the oaks of Moreh (’ē∑el’ēlônê mōreh).” At Judg 7:1, the narrator says: “Jerub-baal (that is, Gideon) and all the troops that were withhim rose early and encamped beside the spring of Harod;and the camp of Midian was north of them below the hillof Moreh (miggib‘at hammôreh), in the valley.” In theabsence of any other indications for identification of theplace name Moreh, we may assume that the same placeis meant in these three passages. We note that theHebrew word ’ēlôn(ê) stands in the singular at Gen 12:6and in the plural at Deut 11:30.

The interpretation presented in ancient and moderntranslations of the Bible is not uniform. Aramaic versionsof the Pentateuch consistently render ’ēlôn(ê) by mêšar,possibly wishing to save Abraham from the suspicion oftree-worship. At Gen 12:6 and Deut 11:30, TgO has theformulation mêšar môreh, “the plain of Moreh”; it seemslikely that the translation counteracts the Samaritanbelief in the holiness of a certain local tree. LXX trans-lates the kind of tree at Gen 12:6 and Deut 11:30 in thesingular, but interprets the name of the place accordingto its supposed etymological meaning: epì tèn dryn tènhypsēlén, “at the high oak” (Gen 12:6) and plēsíon dryòstês hypsēlês, “by the high oak” (Deut 11:30); the transla-tion of Deut 11:30 may well be based on Gen 12:6. Thisinterpretation of the place name is probably based on anunderstanding of the word as related to the root rwm, “tobe high,” on the assumption that the first and the thirdconsonants are transposed. The preserved version bySym has at Gen 12:6 tês dryòs Mambrê, “at the oak ofMambre”; Vg has at Gen 12:6 ad convallem Inlustrem, atDeut 11:30 iuxta vallem tendentem et intrantem procul.Most later translations have at Gen 12:6 and Deut 11:30

oak/terebinth/tree of Moreh, some have the plain ofMoreh, but we also find a rendering according to Vg: thenoble vale (DRA); die Steineiche des Rechtsweisers(BUR); la vallée illustre (BLS at Gen 12:6); près d’unevallée qui s’étend et s’avance bien loin (BLS at Deut11:30); une colline fort élevée (BLS at Judg 7:1).

The phrase miggib‘at hammôreh at Judg 7:1 has avariety of renderings in translations. TgJudg has an inter-pretive translation: gə‘atā’ dəmistakyā’ ləmêšərā’, “thehill that faces the plain”; LXX has transliteration of bothwords here: apò Gabaàth Hamorá; LXXO has apòGabaathamoraí. There are numerous MSS variants:Amòr (Codd. 19, 108, SyrHex); apò toû bōmoû toû Abòr,or Abōrai, Aborè, Amōrai, Amorè (Codd. II, 54, 75, 76,etc.); apò toû bounnoû toû Amorraíou (Cod. 58 in thetext); toû hypsēloû (in the margin); etc. In various MSS,both terms appear in variants: gaath, gabōath, gabaad,gabaōn, gaatham; amora, amore, amorai, tou amore, touabōrai, tou aborai, tou abōre, tou abore, amōr, abōr, touabōr, mōra, tou mōre, amorrai, amorraiōn, tou amor-raiou, borra, mõraith, tou hupsēlou, amōrai. Vg has arendering by translation: collis Excelsi. In later transla-tions, the phrase is usually rendered by a combination oftranslation/transliteration: the hill of Moreh, dem HügelMoreh, etc. Translation of both terms is very rare: vomHügel des Weisenden (BUR); Hrib te Strashe (DAL). Onthe other hand, a few versions have transliteration ofboth terms: Gabaathamorai (LXE); Gibeath-hammoreh(NAB); Gibeath-moreh (TNK); Gib’at-Gammorev(UKR).

The place name Moriah appears in the Hebrew Biblewith minor orthographic differences only in the Elohisticsource at Gen 22:2 and 2 Chr 3:1. According to Gen22:2, God commanded Abraham: “Take your son, youronly son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land ofMoriah (wəlek-ləkā ’el-’ere∑ hammōriyyāh), and offerhim there as a burnt offering on one of the mountainsthat I shall show you.” Any mountainous region associat-ed with a tradition of human sacrifice would satisfy theconditions of this report. But according to 2 Chr 3:1,Moriah is the mountain on which God appeared to Davidand on which the temple stands in Jerusalem: “Solomonbegan to build the house of the LORD in Jerusalem onMount Moriah (bəhar hammôriyyāh), where the LORDhad appeared to his father David, at the place that Davidhad designated, on the threshing floor of Ornan theJebusite.” Various early rabbinic sources testify that thegradual association between the vision of Abraham in“the land of Moriah” and the temple on “Mount Moriah”


ˆ

has suppressed the original name of the mountain ofAbraham’s trial. It is even possible that the name Moriahwas inserted into Gen 22:2 from 2 Chr 3:1 in a laterstage of redaction.

Ancient recensions and versions of Gen 22:2 presentdifferent interpretations: eis tèn gên tèn hupsēlēn, “intothe high land” (LXX); eis tèn gên tèn kataphanê, “intothe evident, clearly seen land” (Aq); … tês optasías,“into the land of appearance, of manifestation” (Sym); interram Visionis, “into the land of Vision” (Vg). The ren-dering by LXX probably has the same backgroundunderstanding as the interpretation of the toponymMoreh at Gen 12:6 and Deut 11:30, whereas other Greekand Latin versions are based on the same tradition as theSamaritan version. Syr reads the name of the people theAmorites instead of the toponym Moriah. All the Tar-gums identify the mountain Moriah with the mountain inJerusalem, where the Temple was built, for their render-ing of God’s command to Abraham at Gen 22:2 is: lāklə’ar‘ā’ pûlhānā’, “go forth to the land of worship.” Thisanachronistic shift from the proper name to a commonnoun testifies particularly clearly how strong was theearly rabbinic claim that “the land of Moriah,” whereAbraham bound Isaac, was Mount Moriah in Jerusalem.Such an interpretation presupposes that Mount Moriah inJerusalem was a cult center even in the Patriarchal Age.The Samaritan Hebrew Pentatech has the form ’ere∑ ham-môrā’āh, “the land of vision”; this form presupposes theroot rā’āh, “to see.” It is noteworthy that the Samaritansclaim Mount Gerizim as the mountain of Abraham’s trial.In view of the preference given to the translation methodat Gen 22:2, it is surprising that all the ancient versionshave transliteration of the name Moriah at 2 Chr 3:1:Amoría (LXX), Moria (Vg). It is equally surprising thatnearly all later translators transliterated the name Moriahat both places; the only exception found so far is DRA,using translation by the land of vision only at Gen 22:2.

Etymological Translation of the Proper Name Machpelah

The name Machpelah appears only in the book ofGenesis, in the narratives of the P source: 23:9, 17, 19;25:9; 49:30; 50:13. According to Gen 23:8-9, Abrahamasked the Hittites, the people of the land: “If you arewilling that I should bury my dead out of my sight, hearme, and entreat for me Ephron son of Zohar, so that hemay give me the cave of Machpelah (mə‘ārat ham-makpēlāh), which he owns; it is at the end of his field.

For the full price let him give it to me in your presenceas a possession for a burying place.” At other passages,the relation of the words makpēlāh and śādeh is various-ly described in fuller phrases as śādeh ‘eprôn ’æšer bam-makpēlāh, “the field of Ephron which is in Machpelah”(Gen 23:17); mə‘ārat śədēh hammakpəlāh, “in the caveof the field of Machpelah” (Gen 23:19; 50:13);bammə‘ārāh ’æšer biśdeh hammakpēlāh, “in the cavewhich is in the field of Machpelah” (Gen 49:30). It iseasy to see that the form makpēlāh is a derivative in thecausative participle (the type maqtil) of the root kpl, “todouble,” but the phrases and the context of the above-mentioned passages clearly indicate that the word ham-makpēlāh is used as a place name.

Ancient translations nevertheless embrace the etymo-logical meaning of the word. In LXX, the phrase is ren-dered at all places by tò spélaion tò diploûn, “the doublecave” and in Vg by spelunca duplex. TgO and TgJ alsoassociate the noun hammakpēlāh with the verb kpl and atall places use the rendering mə‘ārat kape(ê)ltā’, “the dou-ble cave”; TgN renders it similarly by mə‘ārat kəpêlāh.The common Jewish tradition of the etymological inter-pretation of the cave finds an explicit explication in b.Erubin 53a: “Rab and Samuel differ as to its meaning.One holds that the cave consisted of two chambers onewithin the other; and the other holds that it consisted of alower and upper chamber. According to him who holdsthat the chambers were one above the other the termmachpelah is well justified, but according to him whoholds that it consisted of two chambers one within theother, what could be the meaning of machpelah? — Thatit had multiples of couples.” Rashi adopts this explanationof the two possible meanings of the word mkplh.

In spite of the insistence of the ancient translatorsthat the place name Machpelah applies to the root mean-ing of the term, the medieval, Renaissance, and moderntranslators almost unanimously transliterate the boundphrase “the cave (field) of Machpelah.” Exceptions arereduced to the very literal American translation of Vg of1899, to LUB, and to Luther’s followers: the double cave(DRA); die zwifache H(h)ö(h)le (LUB, LUO); la caverne(antre) double (BLS); dvojna I(j)ama (DAL, JAP, WOF);dubbele spelunk (LUV).

Etymological Translation of the Proper Name Shephelah

In the Hebrew Bible, the word šəpēlāh, a femininenoun form from the regular adjective form šāpēl, “low,”occurs twenty times in a context indicating that the term


is used as the name or designation of a territory: Deut1:7; Josh 9:1; 10:40; 11:2, 16 (twice); 12:8; 15:33; Judg1:9; 1 Kings 10:27; Jer 17:26; 32:44; 33:13; Ob 19; Zech7:7; 1 Chr 27:28; 2 Chr 1:15; 9:27; 26:10; 28:18. Therange of its meaning is therefore “the low country, thelower part, the lowland,” and it is reminiscent of theAkkadian form šapiltu(m) meaning “lower, or innerpart.” The word in this meaning also appears in 1 Mac-cabees in Greek forms: Sephēlá (12:38); prósōpon toûpedíou, “facing the plain” (13:13). This geographicalterm always refers to the area between the Philistineplain and the southern hill country of the Holy Land. Thenature of the passages shows that any interpretation ofthe meaning of the term in a given text must consider notonly geographical but also literary and rhetorical criteria.The strong rhetorical character of most passages makes itdifficult to decide with any certainty between the optionsof proper name or a general geographical designation.

Most passages belong to the Deuteronomistic frame-work of Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Jeremiah, andChronicles. In these books, the term Shephelah appearsin similar formulaic structures. The general geographicaldescription summarizes declarations of God’s commandor promise that the Promised Land will be given toIsrael, or describes a coalition of the peoples against theIsraelites. Geographical terms often indicate the principalgeographical divisions of the Promised Land. Accordingto Deut 1:7, Moses refers to defining the borders inGod’s command at Mount Horeb: “Resume your journey,and go into the hill country of the Amorites (harhā’ěmõrî) as well as into the neighbouring regions — theArabah, the hill country, the Shephelah, the Negeb, andthe seacoast (bā‘ærābāh ûbāhār ûbaššəpēlāh ûbannegebûbəhôp hayyām) — the land of the Canaanites and theLebanon, as far as the great river, the river Euphrates.”The geographical description at Josh 9:1 includes onlythe southern part of the country by referring to the kingswho were “in the hill country and in the lowland (bāhārûbaššəpēlāh) all along the coast of the Great Sea towardLebanon” gathered together to fight Joshua and Israel. At10:40, the narrator summarizes the outcome of the battle:“So Joshua defeated the whole land, the hill country andthe Negeb and the Shephelah and the slopes (hāhārwəhannegeb wəhaššəpēlāh wəhā’æśēdôt), and all theirkings.” The general geographical description of the landsinhabited by Israel’s adversaries at Josh 11:1-3, 16-17,and 12:8 is similar. According to Judg 1:9, the people ofJudah fought against “the Canaanites who lived in thehill country, in the Negeb, and in the Shephelah (hāhārwəhannegeb wəhaššəpēlāh).”

Within the conditional promise of Jer 17:24-26, thewriter reports that “the people shall come from the townsof Judah and the places around Jerusalem, from the landof Benjamin, from the Shephelah, from the hill country,and from the Negeb (ûmin-haššəpēlāh ûmin-hāhār ûmin-hannegeb), bringing burnt offering and sacrifices.” Moreor less the same geographical coordination with somechanges of order appears in the promise of Israel’srestoration at Jer 32:44; 33:13. Obadiah’s description ofIsrael’s final triumph coordinates the regions of Negeband Shephelah (v. 19), and the same coordinationappears in Zechariah’s condemnation of hypocritical fast-ing at Zech 7:7. According to 2 Chr 28:18, the pair isused in the opposite order: “The Philistines had maderaids on the cities in the Shephelah and the Negeb ofJudah …”. According to 2 Chr 26:10, Uzziah had “largeherds, both in the Shephelah and in the plain(ûbaššəpēlāh ûbammîšôr).” There are only a few placesin which the name Shephelah stands without coordina-tion with other names or designations of territory: at Josh1:33, the term šəpēlāh stands alone designating the dis-trict of fourteen towns; at 1 Kings 10:27 (= 1 Chr 1:15; 2Chr 9:27), the name Shephelah is used in a metaphoricaldescription of Solomon’s great wealth: “The king madesilver (and gold) as common in Jerusalem as stones, andhe made cedars as numerous as the sycamores of theShephelah”; at 1 Chr 27:28, the term Shephelah is men-tioned in connection with distribution of lands to civicofficials.

In view of the nature of the passages treated, it isunderstandable that there is no unified interpretation ofthe word šəpēlāh whether in the scholarly literature or inBible translations throughout history. The coordination ofthe term with some other names or designations of terri-tory shows most clearly whether the term is used as aproper name or as a general geographical designation.The parallelism with negeb and ‘ærābāh means that bothterms are probably meant as proper names. On the otherhand, the parallelism with hāhār may constitute the fig-ure of merism, i.e, an expression of totality by usingopposite terms. On the whole, the term is so often clearlyused as a proper name that it seems reasonable totransliterate it as proper name rather than to translate it inaccordance with its etymology.

The history of Bible translations, however, shows anopposite situation. The term is rarely transliterated; sinceantiquity, it was usually translated by a great variety ofwords and phrases without paying sufficient attention tocoordination of the term with other geographical termsand to the literary or rhetorical features of the texts. We


pay special attention to ancient translations: tò pedíon,“the plain,” he pediné, “the plain country” (LXX); humil-iora, campester, plana (Vg). We note that LXX translit-erates the term by Sephēlá at Jer 32:44; Ob 1:19; 2 Chr26:10, and the Targums surprisingly by šəpeltā’ at allplaces, even though some other coordinating Hebrewplace names are, often in contrast to LXX, changed intodesignating or descriptive terms: instead of the propername negeb, there is the common noun dārômā’ ,“south,” and ‘ærābāh is changed into mêšərā’, “plain,valley.” On the other hand, VUL never transliterates it.

The medieval, Renaissance, and later translationsusually translate the term: the valley (GNV); the (low)plain(s) (KJV); low country (KJV); the vale(s) (KJV,DRA, WEB, RWB); the L(l)owland(s) (DBY, ASV, JPS,NKJ, RSV, NAS, NAU, NJB, ESV, NRS); the (western)foothills (NIV, NIB, NAB, NLT); die G(g)ründe (LUB,LUO); das Hügelland (LUT); die Nied(e)rung (BUR,ELO, ELB); das Tal (SCH); le pays plat (DRB); la val-lée (LSG, NEG); le Bas-Pays (BFC, TOB); il bassopiano(LND); la regione bassa (NRV); doline, raune, planjave(DAL, JAP, WOL); etc. There are few translations inwhich we find transliteration of the name in more orfewer passages (RSV, EIN, IEP, RVA, BCI, BTP, SSP).Because of inconsistency within most translations, it isimpossible to offer here a complete and accurate surveyof the forms of translation and transliteration of the termaccording to all passages. In RSV, for instance, the termis transliterated by Shephelah ten times and translated bylowland (Deut 1:7; Joshua; Judg 1:9; Zech 7:7) ten times.

Supposed Etymology of Harmagedon

In the context of a scene showing the last struggle ofthe forces of good and evil, we find in Rev 16:16 thename for the place of assembly of the kings of the worldto judge the demonic spirits that come from the mouthsof dragons, beasts, and false prophets: “And they (thekings) assembled them at the place that in Hebrew iscalled Harmagedon.” This name presents a puzzlebecause the word does not occur anywhere in Hebrew orGreek sources. Moreover, the MSS of this single passagetestify to three alternative readings of the name: Armage-don, Harmagedon, and Maged(d)on. Suggested interpre-tations to explain the alternative forms Harmagedon andArmagedon include: har-məgiddô, “Mount Megiddo,” asdesignating Mount Carmel near the city of Megiddo;har-mô‘ēd, “the mount of assembly,” referring to theassembling of pagan gods (Isa 14:13); har-migdô, “hisfruitful mountain,” designating Mount Zion; ‘ar-

məgiddô, “city of Megiddo”; ’arā‘ məgiddô, “land ofMegiddo” (Aramaic and Syriac); and ‘ar-hemdāh, “thecity of desire,” designating Jerusalem. To clarify thename, it is necessary to consider the historical circum-stances surrounding the city of Megiddo and the fact thatthe book of Revelation abounds in symbolical language.Mount Carmel near Megiddo was the place of Elijah’scontest with the prophets of Baal, when false prophetswere put to the sword. On the other hand, the apocalypticliterature prefers to present Mount Zion as the place fromwhich God will proceed in his battle against the forces ofevil.

The history of interpretation testifies to an equilibri-um between the alternative forms Harmaged(d)on andArmaged(d)on. In various MSS and editions of the Greekoriginal, we find the alternative forms Harmageddõn andHarmagedōn; Vg has the form Hermagedon; the Renais-sance versions have Arma-gedon (GNV); Armageddon(KJV); Harmagedon (LUB); Armagheddon (DIO);Armageddon (BKR); Harmagedon (DAL). In later ver-sions we find all these variant forms but with more varia-tion in spelling: Armagedon (JAP, WOL); Harmagedon(SSP); etc. It is interesting that the NRS changed fromusing the form Armageddon (KJV, RSV, etc.) to the formHarmagedon.

Summary

The history of the forms of the biblical namesreveals several development stages in the Hebrew, Ara-maic, Greek, Latin, and the Jewish Christian linguisticand cultural tradition in general. An examination of theextraordinary variation in transliteration or translation ofthe original forms of the biblical names in ancient andmodern Bible translations says much about the under-standing and pronunciation of Hebrew names by thetranslators. The series of transformations of the biblicalnames in ancient and later translations provides quitereliable evidence of the sources used by translators intheir translation work and of what constitutes their origi-nal contribution. It is reasonable to suppose that at leastthe forms of the important biblical proper names wereabsorbed into ancient Bible translations through theintermediary of an established ancient Jewish traditionand through previous translations no longer available.Generally speaking, nearly all biblical personal and placenames manifest the influence of linguistic, literary, andcultural traditions on pronunciation of the source form oron the translation form in another influential ancient lan-guage in a given land. For the development of the forms


of the biblical names, four languages are of utmostimportance: Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Latin. Theinfluence of these languages was naturally differentaccording to the linguistic, religious, and cultural spheresof Europe. The long history of the original or of transla-tion forms of the biblical names gives the impression thatthe majority of translations drew in their target languagethrough the intermediary of the established living tradi-tion or through ancient translations. The attitude to themain name of the God of Israel is the most striking proofof how important the role of tradition was in transmis-sion of the biblical names. Various sources testify thatthe divine name yhwh (Yahweh) was considered toosacred to be pronounced, before the oldest extant transla-tions of the Bible were created. This explains why yhwhwas substituted by the Greek translators with the generaldesignation Kýrios.

In the Jewish tradition, Jerusalem became the centerof Judaism and of the world. This fact must be taken intoconsideration in evaluation of the forms of the biblicalnames in the Palestinian and Babylonian Targums and inthe Alexandrian Greek translation of the Old Testament.In spite of their geographical distance, translators obvi-ously wanted to be in close contact with the geographicalreality of the Holy Land and with the Palestinian tradi-tion. All the more, the Jews living in Alexandria and inBabylon must have missed immediate contact with theHoly Land when a decision about whether to transliterateor to translate a particular name and how to transliterateit was made. A survey of the forms of the proper namesin ancient Jewish translations of the Bible proves, how-ever, that unity in the use of names was not such a highideal as in recent times. Especially LXX surprises withits pluralism regarding the decision for transliteration ortranslation in various sections of the Bible as well as inregard to the forms of transliteration. It is all the moreobvious that this version is significantly called after thenumber of its translators. In the case of a collective trans-lation, one could assume that division of the tasksaccording to individual translators is the only or at leastthe main reason for inconsistency in the use of the formsof biblical names. But how to explain inconsistency inversions by one person, for instance in Vg and in manylater European versions? Such cases force us to assumethat translators were not especially prepared to deal withthe challenges of biblical names. Most of them wereobviously not particularly in favor of the ideal of theirphonetic, morphological, and orthographic unification. Itseems that the pluralism is rooted in reading of the Scrip-tures in the synagogues and in homes. Translators

received there the initiative for transliteration or transla-tion and for various forms of transliteration of the names.They did not possess, however, either grammar or dic-tionary or concordance.

The medieval, Renaissance, and later European Bibletranslations were based more or less primarily on theoriginal text, on LXX in its various versions, on Vg, andon some earlier translations into other European lan-guages. Translators who are in favor of a unified systemof translation could easily discover that consistency inusing the forms of biblical proper names is much greaterin the original than in ancient translations, therefore theymust have found the inconsistency in transliteration andtranslation technique unacceptable. Inconsistency is con-fusing especially regarding the phonetics and morpholo-gy of well-known names. A greater attention to the origi-nal text in modern times explains why consistency intransliterating or translating of proper names in modernversions of the Bible is greater than in ancient transla-tions. It seems that in ancient times, tradition dominatedmore strongly over the biblical text and context than inmodern critical times. Only in modern times did the textand context acquire their proper role. Examples of radi-cal deviation from tradition and of a return to the sourceforms is a modern phenomenon, but the marks of thismovement are present already in the medieval andRenaissance translations of the Bible. This movementdoes not explain why since Renaissance times there hasbeen a greater tendency to transliterate rather than totranslate biblical proper names, but this does demonstratethat all the fundamental dilemmas concern all transla-tions to the same extent. In relation to phonetic forms ofbiblical names, there is, therefore, only a limited justifi-cation to speak of Jewish, Orthodox, Catholic, andProtestant traditions in use of the forms of biblical propernames.

What are the possibilities of establishing reliance oftranslators on previous translations? In general, it is truethat translators in the East took LXX and in the West Vgconsiderably into account in addition to the original text.It is well-known that numerous European translatorsexplicitly relied upon recognized ancient and contempo-rary translations. The forms of biblical proper namesmore than other linguistic and literary elements manifestthe degree of dependence between some translations ofthe Bible. If in individual cases the model and the copyare equal both in content and form of the name, up toorthographic details, reliance is obvious. The question ofreliance on previous translations is of special interest.When the content and the form of translation or translit-


eration coincide, it becomes apparent that a given latertranslator drew on the former one who was in general hismodel. Coincidences of this kind between LUB, DAL,and some other versions according to LUB clearly provea very great dependence of DAL and some other Euro-pean translations on LUB. Even more striking is the factthat GNV and LUB obviously often drew on LXX or onVg rather than on the original text. Plurality concerningthe forms of biblical proper names in ancient times andthe great influence of antiquity on the development ofEuropean cultures on all levels are today great reasonsfor the attempts to return to the sources and to makevalid the authority of the original text. Justifiable excep-tions are only the well-known names being a part ofnational cultures.

Unfortunately, the tendency to harmonize the formsof biblical proper names with the original text does notproceed consistently enough. It is noteworthy that TOBwas prepared on a precedent agreement of the translatorson the “homogénéité de la traduction,” but the estab-lished rules hardly included unifying the forms of propernames.3 In recent times, only the German authors of EINtook the necessary effort to establish phonetic rules fortransliterating the proper names.4 These rules served as awelcome basis for the standardization of the forms ofbiblical proper names in the new SSP. In the German andSlovenian versions, all the proper names except thosewhich are part of an established cultural tradition are pre-served in their Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek forms. Anyattempt to change the overpowering authority of the pho-netics of the well-known biblical names would mean tostrike out boldly in the direction of a split with the livinglanguage and culture.

Author’s NoteA first, shorter version of this study, entitled “Prevajanjeimen v renesančnih prevodih Svetega pisma / Translationof Names in Renaissance Bible Translations” was pub-lished in Slovenian in the Proceedings of the Associationof Slovene Literary Translators, Volume 27: Prevajanjesrednjeveških in renesančnih besedil / Translation ofMedieval and Renaissance Texts, edited by MartinaOžbot (Ljubljana: Društvo slovenskih književnih preva-jalcev, 2002), pp. 13-25. For this publication, the materi-al treated was substantially enlarged and the argumentcompleted.

Notes

1For bibliographies consulted, see especially H. Thacker-ay, A Grammar of the Old Testament in Greek (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1909; reprintHildesheim et al.: G. Olms, 1987; G. Lisowsky, DieTranskription der hebräischen Eigennamen des Penta-teuch in der Septuaginta (Dissertation, Basel: 1940); M.Harl et al., La Bible d’Alexandrie: LXX (Paris: Serf,1986-); B. Zadok, The Pre-Hellenistic-Israelite Anthro-ponomy and Prosopography (OLA 28; Leuven: Peeters,1988); J. W. Wevers, Notes on the Greek Text of Genesis-Deuteronomy (SBL.SCSt 35, 30, 44, 46, 39; Atlanta, Ga.:Scholars Press 1993-1998); M. M. Jinbachian, Les tech-niques de traduction dans la Genèse en Armenien clas-sique (Lisbon: 1998); E. Tov, The Greek and HebrewBible: Collected Essays on the Septuagint (VT.S 57; Lei-den / Boston / Cologne: E. J. Brill, 1999); T. Ilan, Lexi-con of Jewish Names in Late Antiquity. Part I: Palestine330 BCE-200 CE (TSAJ 91; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck,2002).

2 See E. Kautzsch and A. E. Cowley, Gesenius’ HebrewGrammar (15th ed.; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), § 119 k.

3See Ph. Reymond, “Vers une traduction françaiseoecuménique de la Bible,” Hebräische Wortforschung:Festschrift zum 80. Geburtstag von Walter Baumgartner(VT.S 16; Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1967), 231-243.

4 See K. D. Fricke and B. Schwank, Ökumenisches Verze-ichnis der biblischen Eigennamen nach den LoccumerRichtlinien (Stuttgart: Katholische Bibelanstalt / Würt-tembergische Bibelanstalt, 1971; reprint 1981); H. Haug(ed.), Namen und Orte der Bibel (Stuttgart: DeutscheBibelgesellschaft, 2002).

Bible Versions in Various LanguagesACF Almeida, Corrigida Fiel: Brazilian Portugese

Version (1753/1819/1847/1994/1995)

ALB Albanian Version (1994)

Aq Aquila

ARA Almeida, Revista e Atualizada: Brazilian Por-tuguese Version (1993)

ARC Almeida, Revista e Corrigida: Brazilian Por-tuguese Version (1969)

ASV American Standard Version (1901)


îm

û ∫ ůî

BBE Bible in Basic English (1949/1964)

BCI Biblia Catalana: Traducció Interconfessional(1996)

BFC Bible en Français Courant (1997)

BKR Bible Kralická: Czech Bible (1613)

BLS La Bible de Lemaître de Sacy: French translationmade by Louis-Isaac Lemaître de Sacy of Port-Royal (1657-1696)

BRP Bíblia Sagrada Traduzida em Português (1994)

BTP Biblia Tysiaclecia: Polish Bible (1965/1984)

BUR Buber/Rosenzweig: Translation of the Old Testa-ment into German (1925-1936)

CEP Český Ekumenický Překlad: Czech Bible (1985)CHO La Bible de André Chouraqui (1985)DAL Dalmatin: The first Slovenian complete Bible

translation made by Jurij Dalmatin and co-opera-tors (1584)

D31 Danish Bible (1907/1931)

DBY Darby: English Darby Bible (1884/1890)

DIO La Bibbia di Diodati: Italian Bible (1641)

DRA Douay-Rheims American Edition: English Bible(1899)

DRB Darby: French Darby Bible (1885)

EIN Einheitsübersetzung der Heiligen Schrift: Ger-man Bible (1980)

ELB Elberfelder Bibel, Revised Version: GermanBible (1993)

ELO Elberfelder Bibel: German Darby Bible (1905)

ESV English Standard Version (2001)

FBJ French Bible de Jérusalem (1973)

FIN Finnish Bible: Pyhä Raamattu käännös(1933/1938)

GNV Geneva English Bible (1599)

HUN Hungarian Karoli Bible: Magyar nyelvü Karoli

IEP Italian Edizione Paolina Bible (1995-1996)

JAP Japelj: The second Slovenian complete Bibletranslation made by Jurij Japelj and co-operators(1784-1802)

JPS Jewish Publication Society Bible (1917)

KJV King James Version: English Bible (1611/1769)

LBA La Biblia de Las Americas: Spanish Bible (1986)

LEI Leidse Vertaling: Dutch Revised Leiden Bible(1912/1994)

LND La Nuova Diodati: Italian Revised Diodati Bible(1991)

LSG Louis Segond: French Version (1910)

LUB Luther Bibel: Die gantze Heilige Schrifft Deud-sch (Wittenberg 1545)

LUO Luther Bibel: German Revised Luther Bible(1912)

LUT Lutherbibel: German Revised Luther Bible(1984)

LUV Lutherse Vertaling: Dutch Revised Luther Bible(1648/1750/1933/1994)

LXE LXX English Version by Sir Lancelot C. L.Brenton (1844, 1851)

LXX Septuagint (Greek) Translation of the Old Testa-ment

LXXO Hexaplaric Recension of LXX

MGK Modern Greek Bible (1850)

MS(S) Manuscript(s)

N30 Norwegian Bible: Bokmíl (1930)

N38 Norwegian Bible: Nynorsk (1938)

NAB New American Bible ( 1970, 1986, 1991)

NAS New American Standard Bible (1977)

NAU New American Standard Bible (NASB 1995)


NBG Netherlands Bijbelgenootschap Vertaling: DutchBible (1951)

NBK Nřrsk Bibel Konkordant: Norwegian Bible(1994)

NBN Norsk Bibel Nynorsk: Norwegian Bible (1994)

NEG Nouvelle Édition de Genève: French Bible(1975)

NIB New International Bible: British Version (1973,1978, 1984)

NIV New International Version: American Version(1973, 1978, 1984)

NJB New Jerusalem Bible in English (1985)

NKJ New King James Version (NKJV 1982)

NLT New Living Translation of the Holy Bible (1996)

NRS New Revised Standard Version (NRSV 1989)

NRV La Sacra Bibbia Nuova Riveduta: Italian Bible(1994)

R60 Reina Valera Revisada: Spanish Bible (1960)

R95 Reina Valera Revisada: Spanish Bible (1995)

RSV Revised Standard Version (1952)

RVA La Santa Biblia Reina-Valera Actualizada: Span-ish Bible (1989)

RWB The English Revised 1833 Webster Update 1995(1988-1997)

SCH Schlachter Version: German Bible (1951)

SRV Spanish Reina-Valera Bible (1909)

SSP Slovenski Standardni Prevod: Slovenian Stan-dard Version (1996)

SVV Statenvertaling: Dutch Bible (1637)

Sym Symmachus Ben Joseph

SyrHex Syro-Hexapla

Theo Theodotion

Tg Targum

TgJ Targum Jonathan

TgN Targum Neofiti 1 of the Vatican Library

TgO Targum Onqelos

TgPsJ Targum Pseudo-Jonathan

TNK Tanakh: New Jewish English Version (NJV1985)

TOB Traduction Oecuménique de la Bible: FrenchBible (1988)

UKR Ukrainian Version of the Bible (1996)

VL Vetus Latina

Vg Latin Vulgate Bible

WEB English Noah Webster Bible (1833)WOL Wolf: The third Slovenian complete Bible trans-

lation made by a group of translators and namedafter bishop Anton Alojz Wolf (1856-1859)

ZBI Zürcher Bibel: German Bible (1907-1931)


In the matter of language we should, by a discrete combination of loyalty to the forms and sounds of theoriginal language and a certain tastefulness in handlingturns of phrase, aim to do justice to the vitality of theculture we are trying to translate.

Isidore Okpewho

I

Ahmadou Kourouma (1927–2003) made his mark onFrancophone literature with his first novel, Les soleilsdes indépendences (1976), now considered an Africanclassic. With Monné, outrages, et défis (his favorite), Enattendant le vote des bêtes sauvages, and Allah n’est pasobligé ..., his reputation continues to grow, not only as amaster storyteller but as a brave, witty, sardonic, anddeeply truthful observer of life in sub-Saharan Africa inthe wake of colonization, independence, and the ColdWar.1 He also wrote a play (Le diseur de vérité, 1998),four beautifully illustrated books for children describingaspects of traditional Malinke society, and one for youngpeople addressing problems of traditional culture. Hisbooks have won the Prix Tropiques (1998), the GrandPrix de la Société des gens de lettres, Livre Inter (1999),the Prix Renaudot, and the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens(1999), but Ahmadou Kourouma remains largelyunknown in the English-speaking world.

An English translation of En attendant le vote desbêtes sauvages by Carroll F. Coates was published in theUnited States in 2001; a second translation, by FrankWynne, appeared in the United Kingdom in 2003.2 Ithought it would be interesting to compare the two andevaluate them primarily on the basis of two criteria: (1)Kourouma’s own stated objectives, gleaned from pub-lished interviews, and (2) the translator’s understandingof the cultural context.

One of Kourouma’s primary objectives was to makehis Malinke oral culture come alive in a written languagenot its own. He wrote in French because his first lan-guage, Malinke, although spoken by some ten millionpeople, has no standard written form. But he was notcontent to use French (the language most perfectly adapt-ed to the universal nature of thought, or so thought deGaulle) simply to describe the culture. Instead, he broke

sacrosanct rules of syntax and grammar to make it actu-ally reflect the Malinke way of thought. Among French-speaking readers, Kourouma is known, indeed notorious,for disregarding the sequence of tenses, using nouns asverbs and vice versa, dropping articles, inventing words,and so on. He explained his style by reminding us thatsome three hundred million Africans use French as ameans of communication, and it is inevitable that thisjealously guarded language escape its keepers and takeon a new dimension.3 “My characters are Malinkes, andwhen a Malinke speaks, he has his own way of lookingat reality ... they must speak in the text as they speak intheir own language.”4 But the language of the novels isnot simply a transcription of Malinke oral discourse.Instead, Malinke is the substrate on which Kourouma art-fully builds his own new style. Makhily Gassama goes sofar as to assert that the real protagonist of Kourouma’snovels is, in fact, his style — the Malinke style trans-posed into French without recourse to slang or pidgin.5

However, because English is more flexible than French,English readers are not likely to be aware of the linguis-tic improprieties that so disgusted Gassama initially.6 AnEnglish translation may then have to concentrate onqualities other than linguistic modification to convey thesense of otherness. Through the veil of French, the trans-lator must discern the signs of Malinke culture andreproduce them as faithfully as possible.

Like all great novelists, Kourouma had other goals aswell: he wanted to be a witness to his times, a Malinkevoice confronting the West with the profoundly disorient-ing effects of colonization (Les soleils desindépendences, 1976, and Monné, outrages, et défis,1990), the disastrous results of the Cold War in Africa(En attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages, 1998), and thehorrifying world of child soldiers (Allah n’est pas obligé..., 2000). And he wanted to present the problems of con-temporary Africans in terms of the human problems weall face.7 The better the translation, the louder his voicewill be heard.

The problem of cultural context is a major stumblingblock. Because Kourouma wrote in French, the only lan-guage he knew well that also has a written form, transla-tors of French may feel they are in familiar territory. But,as Madeleine Borgomano warns, we should not be


EN ATTENDANT LE VOTE DES BETES SAUVAGES, BY AHMADOUKOUROUMA: A COMPARISON OF TWO ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS

By Judith Schaefer

deceived: this is a foreign text requiring effort and flexi-bility for understanding.8 Kourouma himself said that thedistance between the language he used and the contenthe described is greater than that occurring when, forexample, an Italian speaks French.9 Christopher L. Millerargues persuasively that “a fair Western reading ofAfrican literatures demands engagement with, and evendependence on, anthropology.”10 For this text, I wouldadd history and even natural history to the reading list.Translators of Kourouma must do their homework.

Finally, there is the problem of translating a workbased on West African oral literature, rich in epic talescomparable to Homer’s Iliad and the anonymousChanson de Roland. Kourouma structures this novel on avariant of the West African epic: the donsomana, a taletold and sung for a master hunter and intended to purifyhim, to enable him to recapture lost power. The manyepisodes are told and sung over an extended period oftime by a griot and his responder in a pattern of call andresponse familiar to us in jazz. In The Ozidi Saga, J.P.Clark-Bekederemo describes such a performance as amany-faceted event, with words, music, dance, drama,ritual, and magic, and suggests Western opera, especiallyWagnerian opera, as a useful comparison.11 The WestAfrican epic is characterized by dramatic delivery withemphatic pauses, direct address, repetition of words andphrases, distinctive rhythm, alliteration, anaphora, andabundant neologisms; yet there is also extensive use ofeveryday language.12 The whole is shot through withproverbs and sayings, many shades of humor, elaboratedigressions, and interjections by members of the audi-ence. This last characteristic leads to a multiplicity ofvoices, and it is not always clear who is speaking. Nordoes Kourouma intend that it should be. “Some of thesevoices can be identified, but in other utterances, differ-ence more than identity seems to be the root condition.”13

Sometimes it is Kourouma himself who speaks, as if hewere one of those sitting in the circle. The translatormust be aware of these multiple voices and adjust thestyle if appropriate.

How should the translator who has little experienceof sub-Saharan Africa and no possibility of visiting theregion take on a West African novel? The first task is toidentify the unfamiliar cultural concepts (in this portionof the novel, the hunter brotherhood or society, WestAfrican montagnards, wrestling, proverbs, oral tradition)and then head for the library. Especially recommended isthe reading of some examples of West African tales andepics, many of which have been transcribed intoFrench.14 Then, motion pictures made in West Africa are

great eye-openers. They provide a rudimentary culturalcontext, visual rather than simply intellectual, and leavethe viewer with images to refer to when searching for theright word or phrase. Two that I saw recently providedhappy insights with regard to our subject: MadameBrouette, from Senegal, provides a gorgeous example ofa griot in action; and Alex’s Wedding, a documentarymade in Cameroon, shows people using proverbs as partof everyday conversation.15 Finally, there is always theWeb. Astonishing bits of information can be found there,and interesting dictionaries are also available online.

II

A brief summary of the novel’s plot will make the selec-tion chosen for comparative translation more comprehen-sible.

The setting is postindependence Africa, when “thepowers of East and West delivered us bound hand andfoot into the hands of the worst of dictators, who did asthey liked with us during the Cold War.”16 Koyaga, dicta-tor of the fictitious Republic of the Gulf, hears his lifestory told by a griot, a traditional poet-singer, in a tradi-tional epic form. The narration (based on the donsomanaform already described) unfolds during six nights, eachnight covering a portion of Koyaga’s life: his birth andparentage, his youth, his coming to power, and his initia-tory travels to visit Africa’s other infamous dictators,their names and countries thinly disguised. Long, enter-taining digressions relating the adventures of other char-acters intervene. (Such digressions are typical of theWest African epic and not “sudden disruptions,” asCoates describes them in his Afterword.17) The finalepisode recounts the near downfall of Koyaga’s longreign and predicts his survival, this time through a demo-cratic election — even if it takes wild animals to cast thewinning votes.

III

I will analyze the translations of the first two pages ofthe novel line by line. Most of the translation problemsencountered throughout the novel are already evidenthere. First the French, next the two translations (CC =Carrol F. Coates and FW = Frank Wynne), and last, mysuggestions and comments (JS), which are based on thecriteria already proposed. I will also comment occasion-ally on style. The terms or phrases in question are under-lined. All the lines of this excerpt are included and arenumbered.


THE COMPLETE TEXT

VEILLÉE I

Votre nom : Koyaga! Votre totem : faucon!Vous êtes soldat et président. Vous resterez le prési-dent et le plus grand général de la République duGolfe tant qu’Allah ne reprendra pas (que des annéeset années encore il nous en préserve!) le souffle quivous anime. Vous êtes chasseur! Vous resterez avecRamsès II et Soundiata l’un des trois plus grandschasseurs de l’humanité. Retenez le nom de Koyaga,le chasseur et président-dictateur de la République duGolfe.

Voilà que le soleil à présent commence à dis-paraître derrière les montagnes. C’est bientôt la nuit.Vous avez convoqué les sept plus prestigieux maîtresparmi la foule des chasseurs accourus. Ils sont làassis en rond et en tailleur, autour de vous. Ils onttous leur tenue de chasse : les bonnets phrygiens, lescottes auxquelles sont accrochés de multiples grigris,petits miroirs et amulettes. Ils portent tous en ban-doulière le long fusil de traite et arborent tous dans lamain droite le chasse-mouches de maître. Vous,Koyaga, trônez dans le fauteuil au centre du cercle.Maclédio, votre ministre de l’Orientation, est installéà votre droite. Moi, Bingo, je suis le sora ; jelouange, chante et joue de la cora. Un sora est unchantre, un aède qui dit les exploits des chasseurs etencense les héros chasseurs. Retenez mon nom deBingo, je suis le griot musicien de la confrérie deschasseurs.

L’homme à ma droite, le saltimbanque accoutrédans ce costume effarant, avec la flûte, s’appelleTiécoura. Tiekoura est mon répondeur. Un sora sefait toujours accompagner par un apprenti appelérépondeur. Retenez le nom de Tiécoura, monapprenti répondeur, un initié en phase purificatoire,un fou du roi.

Nous voilà donc tous sous l’apatame du jardin devotre résidence. Tout est donc prêt, tout le mondeest en place. Je dirai le récit purificatoire de votrevie de maître chasseur et de dictateur. Le récitpurificatoire est appelé en malinké un donsomana.C’est une geste. Il est dit par un sora accompagnépar un répondeur cordoua. Un cordoua est un initiéen phase purifictoire, en phase cathartique. Tiécouraest un cordoua et comme tout cordoua il fait le bouf-fon, le pitre, le fou. Il se permet tout et il n’y a rienqu’on ne lui pardonne pas.

Tiécoura, tout le monde est réuni, tout est dit.Ajoute votre grain de sel.

Le répondeur joue de la flûte, gigote, danse.Brusquement s’arrête et interpelle le présidentKoyaga.

—Président, général et dictateur Koyaga, nouschanterons et danserons votre donsomana en cinqveillées. Nous dirons la vérité. La vérité sur votredictature. La vérité sur vos parents, vos collabora-teurs. Toute la vérité sur vos saloperies, vos conner-ies ; nous dénoncerons vos mensonges, vos nom-breux crimes et assassinats . . .

—Arrête d’injurier un grand homme d’honneuret de bien comme notre père de la nation Koyaga.Sinon la malédiction et le malheur te poursuivront ette détruiront. Arrête donc! Arrête!

Une veillée ne se dit pas sans qu’en sourdine aurécit ronronne un thème. La vénération de la tradi-tion est une bonne chose. Ce sera le thème dont sor-tiront les proverbes qui seront évoqués au cours desintermèdes de cette première veillée. La traditiondoit être respectée parce que :

Si le perdrix s’envole son enfant ne reste pas àterre.

Malgré le séjour prolongé d’un oiseau perchésur un baobab, il n’oublie pas que le nid dans lequelil a été couvé est dans l’arbuste.

Et quand on ne sait où l’on va, qu’on sache d’oùl’on vient.

(En attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages, AhmadouKourouma. Editions du Seuil. Paris. 1998, 9-11.)

THE COMPARISON

1. VEILLÉE ICC: FIRST SUMUFW: First vigil JS: NIGHT I

In traditional West Africa, tales are told at night, afterthe evening meal — an unproductive time; it is forbiddento tell them in the daytime.18 J.P. Clark-Bekederemo saysthat the Ozidi Saga is “told and acted in seven nights.”“Veillée” refers to a time of day and by extension a gath-ering at that time of day, so I question CC’s use of“sumu.” It transforms a matter-of-fact term into an eso-teric one. Nor do I think the word “vigil,” defined as a“watch” or “wake” and implying prayer and devotion,


fits here. In West African traditional culture, story-tellingis instead a major form of entertainment for rural people.I suggest following Clark-Bekederemo’s example andusing Night One (I), Night Two (II), and so on.

2. Votre nom : Koyaga! Votre totem : faucon!CC: Your name: Koyaga! Your totem: the falcon!FW: Your name: Koyaga! Your totem: the falcon! JS: Your name: Koyaga! Your totem: Falcon!

I would leave out “the” before “falcon” because it seemsto relegate the falcon to its biological status of bird andignore its more powerful traditional, animist significance.Initiation into the brotherhood of hunters involved closestudy of animals and their ways and habitats. Each gameanimal according to its size and status, has a degree ofnyama — “evil or vengeful power” — that may pursuethe hunter who kills it. The grigris attached to their shirts(see line 9) are there to protect the hunters from thispower. West African hunters identified closely with theanimals they hunted, conceiving of them as “like people,with families, societies, enemies, habits, personalities.”19

Choosing Falcon as a totem was an attempt to identifywith the bird’s fierceness and skill as a hunter.

3. Vous êtes soldat et président.CC: You are a soldier and president.FW: Soldier and president are you.JS: You are a soldier and a president.

Here, the issue is word order and level of discourse.In English, inversion is a common rhetorical device tolend emphasis. In Malinke, the most common sequenceis subject + verb + complement,20 with emphasis addedin the ways already described, so I suggest leaving theoriginal word order and adding the article “a” before“president,” leaving the sentence a simple statement offact.

4. Vous resterez le président et le plus grandgénéral de la République du Golfe tant qu’Allah nereprendra pas (que des années et années encore ilnous en préserve!) le souffle qui vous anime.

CC: You will remain president and the greatestgeneral of the Republic of the Gulf as long as Allah(may he spare us for years and years to come!) doesnot take from you the breath that animates you.

FW: You will be the President of the Républiquedu Golfe and its greatest general for as long as Allah(may he yet preserve us for years and years to come)

does not take from you the breath that gives you life.JS: You will be the president and the greatest

general of the Republic of the Gulf so long as Allahdoes not take back (may he spare us this for yearsand years to come!) the breath that gives you life.

In the parenthetical clause, the wish is for the post-ponement of Koyaga’s demise, and not that of our own.The final part of CC’s sentence does not preserve therhythm of the original: “animates” has one too many syllables.

5. Vous êtes chasseur! Vous resterez avecRamsès II et Soundiata l’un des trois plus grandschasseurs de l’humanité.

CC: You are a hunter! Along with Ramses II andSundyata, you will remain one of the three greatesthunters of humankind.

FW: You are a hunter. With Rameses II andSundyata, you are forever one of the three greathunters among men.

JS: You are a hunter! You, Ramses II andSundyata — you will always be one of the threegreatest hunters known to mankind.

The phrase “hunters of humankind” is ambiguous.FW leaves out the exclamation point, a helpful device toconvey a spoken emphasis we cannot hear. The secondsentence is problematic, and FW’s version is certainlyone way to handle it, but he should have left “you” in thefirst position (anaphora, mentioned above).

6. Retenez le nom de Koyaga, le chasseur etprésident-dictateur de la République du Golfe.

CC: Remember the name of Koyaga, hunter andpresident-dictator of the Republic of the Gulf.

FW: Remember the name of Koyaga, hunter andPresident-dictator of the République du Golfe.

Questions of capitalization and retention of names inFrench arise here. In my view, arguments could be madefor both versions.

7. Voilà que le soleil à présent commence à dis-paraître derrière les montagnes. C’est bientôt la nuit.

CC: Now the sun is beginning to disappearbehind the mountains. Soon it will be night.

FW: See, the sun begins to disappear behind themountains. It will soon be night.


I like FW’s better. “See,” is more direct, moreindicative of the oral style; the reader imagines a gesture.The speaker is addressing Koyaga directly.

8. Vous avez convoqué les sept plus prestigieuxmaîtres parmi la foule des chasseurs accourus.

CC: You have summoned the seven most presti-gious masters among the multitude of hunters thathave come running.

FW: You have called together the seven mostcelebrated masters from the multitude of hunters whocame forward.

JS: You have called together the seven mostprestigious masters from the crowd of hunters gath-ered here.

In CC’s version, the relative pronoun should be“who” and not “that.” And I think it helps the rhythmand is more in keeping with the oral style and withKourouma’s “Malinkéization” of French to stick to sim-ple past tenses rather than compound ones. For “accou-ru” I have used “gathered” in the sense of a crowd gath-ering, of a turnout, of people coming together from vari-ous other places to a single point to witness an event.This would be the case in rural Africa; hunters (and otherspectators) would have come from all around to attendthe donsomana.

9. Ils sont là assis en rond et en tailleur, autourde vous. Ils ont tous leur tenue de chasse: les bonnetsphrygiens, les cottes auxquelles sont accrochés demultiples grigris, petits miroirs et amulettes.

CC: They are sitting cross-legged in a circlearound you with their Phrygian bonnets and theirhunting cloaks bedecked with gris-gris, tiny mirrors,and amulets.

FW: Here they sit, crouched about you. Theywear their hunting dress, their Phrygian caps hungabout with grigi, mirrors and amulets.

JS: Here they are, sitting cross-legged in a circlearound you. They are all wearing their huntingclothes: phrygian bonnets, shirts with all sorts of gri-gris, little mirrors, and amulets attached.

CC has transformed the oral to the written by com-bining sentences and by using “bedecked,” a rather fancyword. His sentence is merely descriptive, whereas thesora is speaking directly to Koyaga — and to us, thereader, the invisible audience. Here, Kourouma helps usout, as he frequently does, with a bit of specific cultural

information, which neither translator got quite right. The“cotte” is not a cloak but a simple long shirt or tunic,pulled on over the head.21 FW left it out, as he did “entailleur.” The word “all/tous” should be included; it isrepeated in the next sentence, as the description contin-ues.

10. Ils portent tous en bandoulière le long fusilde traite et arborent tous dans la main droite le chas-se-mouches de maître.

CC: They all have their long slave rifles slungover their shoulders and a master’s fly-swatter intheir right hands.

FW: They wear their long rifles slung over theirshoulders, in their right hands they bear the fly-swat-ters of the master.

JS: They all wear their long trade rifle on a ban-dolier and all hold in their right hand the fly-whiskof a master.

“La traite” sometimes refers to the slave trade, butthe distinguishing feature of a “fusil de traite” is that itwas always of lesser quality than the European traders’own firearms. “Slave rifles” implies that the hunters areslaves. I would repeat the word “all,” because as alreadymentioned, repetition is an important element of the WestAfrican oral style. And I believe it is better stylisticallyto use “right hand” in the singular, since each person hasonly one.

“Fly-swatters” is incorrect and misleading. The termis “fly whisk,” and the implement, which may have hadpurely practical origins (remember, West Africa is notonly in the tropics but also in the tsetse fly belt) has longhad ritual significance. It is the symbol of a masterhunter’s science, an instrument of thaumaturgy, an essen-tial part of his impedimenta, considered as powerful ashis rifle or any other weapon.22 A fly whisk consists of abundle of braided grass or leather thongs, or of the hairof various animals attached to a handle decorated withcarvings, beads, or cowries.23

11. Vous, Koyaga, trônez dans le fauteuil au cen-tre du cercle.

CC: You, Koyaga, sit enthroned at the center ofthe circle.

FW: You, Koyaga, sit enthroned in the center.

Why omit “the circle”?

12. Maclédio, votre ministre de l’Orientation, est


installé à votre droite. CC: Macledio, your minister of orientation, is

seated on your right hand.FW: At your right hand sits Macledio, your

Minister of Orientation.JS: Macledio, your Minister of Orientation, sits

to your right.

Again, FW uses inversion where it is not called for.Both translators use “right hand” where “right” is suffi-cient. CC has Macledio sitting “on” Koyaga’s hand.

13. Moi, Bingo, je suis le sora; je louange,chante et joue de la cora.

CC: I, Bingo, am the sèrè; I praise, I sing, and Iplay the kora.

FW: I am Bingo, the sora; I sing, I pay tributeand pluck the cora.

JS: I, Bingo, am the sora; I praise immoderately,sing, and play the kora.

Why not keep the word Kourouma uses, “sora”?“Praise” is better than “pay tribute” because it is simplerand because soras (master griots)24 are known as praise-singers. I added “immoderately” because griots are paidto exaggerate. “Pluck” is good (FW) because it implies astringed instrument, something the reader might notknow.

14. Un sora est un chantre, un aède qui dit lesexploits des chasseurs et encense les héros chasseurs.

CC: A sèrè is a minstrel, a bard who recounts theexploits of the hunters and praises their heros.

FW: A sora is a teller of tales, one who relatesthe stories of the hunters to spur their heroes togreater feats.

JS: A sora is a praise-singer, a bard who tells thedeeds of hunters and flatters the hunter heros.

Do not continue with italics. In the French, Malinkewords, once used, intentionally become part of the ordi-nary vocabulary of the book.25 In this sentence, the soraturns to us, the readers, as part of his wider audience, toexplain exactly what a sora is: An official praise-singer(“chantre”), a bard in the tradition of Homer (“aède”),who recounts the deeds of hunters and flatters(“encense”) their heros.

15. Retenez mon nom de Bingo, je suis le griotmusicien de la confrérie des chasseurs.

CC: Remember my name, Bingo; I am the griotmusician of the society of hunters.

FW: Remember the name of Bingo, I am thegriot, the poet and chronicler, the musician of thisBrotherhood of Hunters.

JS: Remember my name, Bingo, I am the griotmusician of the brotherhood of hunters.

Do not use italics; see “sora,” line 14. Furthermore,in these days of World Music, I think the word “griot” isbecoming well known. I think “brotherhood” is betterbecause it has the same number of syllables as “con-frérie.” Cissé describes a kind of freemasonry espousingequality, brotherhood, and understanding among all nomatter their race, social origins, beliefs, function.26 Noneed to capitalize the term.

16. L’homme à ma droite, le saltimbanqueaccoutré dans ce costume effarant, avec la flûte,s’appelle Tiécoura. Tiécoura est mon répondeur.

CC: The man on my right, the acrobat dressed inhis outrageous costume and with his flute, is calledTiekura. Tiekura is my responder.

FW: On my right, the performer with his fluteand strange attire, is Tiécoura. He is my responder;

JS: The man on my right, the acrobat in the out-rageous get-up, with the flute, is called Tiekoura.Tiekoura is my responder.

In the next few lines, Kourouma will describe theresponder in more detail. We find out that he is a foil forthe sora — a buffoon, a trickster, a fool. For now, welearn only that his behavior and appearance are out of theordinary. Dominique Zahan describes a fantastic, eccen-tric figure cavorting around wearing an outrageous hat offeathers, or a whole bird, or a vulture’s wing decoratedwith birds’ beaks, skulls, and claws. On his body, a pow-derhorn, necklaces of beans and catfish bones, and otherrattly things attached to a sort of net shirt, and trouserstight, with one pantleg long and one short, or billowyand made of many different-colored pieces.27 Neithertranslator gives “accoutré” its somewhat pejorative value.FW’s “performer” is too general, and he neglects the ele-ment of repetition by omitting the name at the beginningof the second sentence. FW also combines this sentencewith the following one, connecting them with a semi-colon, thereby detracting from the oral style.

17. Un sora se fait toujours accompagner par unapprenti appelé répondeur. Retenez le nom de


Tiécoura, mon apprenti répondeur, un initié en phasepurificatoire, un fou du roi.

CC: A sèrè is always accompanied by an appren-tice called a responder. Remember the name ofTiekura, my apprentice responder — he is an initiategoing through the purificatory stage, a king’s jester.

FW: ... a sora is always accompanied by hisapprentice or responder. Remember the name ofTiécoura, my apprentice, my responder; an initiateundergoing purification; a king’s fool.

JS: A sora is always accompanied by an appren-tice called a responder. Remember the name ofTiekoura, my apprentice responder, an initiate in thepurification stage, a king’s fool.

For sèrè, see lines 13 and 14. In the second sentence,CC uses too many words, and misses the chance toduplicate the rhythm of the original final phrase by usingthe two-syllable “jester” instead of the simple butemphatic “fool.” FW substitutes “his” for the general“an,” not a major mistake but indicative of a certain per-vasive haste.

18. Nous voilà donc tous sous l’apatame dujardin de votre résidence. Tout est donc prêt, tout lemonde est en place.

CC: Here we all are, in the garden apatam ofyour residence. Everything is ready; everybody is inplace.

FW: Here are we all gathered in the great gar-dens of your palace. Everything is ready, each is inhis place.

JS: So, here we all are at the pavilion in the gar-den of your residence. All is ready, everyone is inplace.

An “apatame” is a typical West African structure: aroof supported by pillars, built as a gathering place. Itmay be small or large, a simple straw roof supported byrough wooden pillars or something more elaborate. WestAfrican readers would recognize the term, but I think forWestern readers a translation is helpful. Such informationcan be found on the web or in the Dictionnaire de fran-cophonie universelle, which is available online.28 I wouldquibble with CC’s “everybody” as being too lumpy aword to use here.

19. Je dirai le récit purificatoire de votre vie demaître chasseur et de dictateur.

CC: I will recite the purificatory narrative of

your life as master hunter and dictator.FW: I will tell the tale of purification; the story

of your life, life as master hunter and dictator.JS: I will tell the purification tale of your life as

master hunter and dictator. Unlike the original text, FW’s version repeats “life,”

the effect being more written than oral. It also placesemphasis on telling the life story, thereby lessening theimpact of the outspoken, audaceous “dictator.” One doesnot usually call a dictator that to his face.

20. Le récit purificatoire est appelé en malinkéun donsomana. C’est une geste. Il est dit par un soraaccompagné par un répondeur cordoua. Un cordouaest un initié en phase purificatoire, en phase cathar-tique.

CC: The purificatory narrative is called, inManinka, a donsomana. That is an epic. It is recitedby a sèrè accompanied by a responder or koroduwa.A koroduwa is an initiate in the purificatory stage,the cathartic stage.

FW: In the Malinké tongue, the tale is called adonsomana. It is an epic told by a sora with hiskoroduwa — an apprentice in the purificatory stage,the cathartic stage.

JS: The purification tale is called in Malinke adonsomana. It’s an epic, a heroic tale. It’s told by asora accompanied by a responder, a kordoua. A kor-doua is an initiate undergoing purification, undergo-ing catharsis.

I see no reason to change “Malinké” to “Maninka”(CC). Both names, as well as “Mandinka,” appear to bevalid, and Kourouma uses “Malinké” in interviews.29

Here again, FW combines sentences, achieving anacceptable written style at the expense of an oral one. Asfor “cordoua,” various spellings are possible, mostadding the extra syllable, for example, “kore dugaw,”“kore duga,” and “korèdugaw.”30 But because there issuch variety, why not stick with Kourouma’s “cordoua”(or kordoua)? I suggest expanding the translation of“geste” because in English, the word “epic” has becomesomewhat unmoored from its literary source, and “geste”as used here is specifically literary. Again, FW has com-bined sentences to a more written than oral effect. Foruse of italics, see line 14.

21. Tiécoura est un cordoua et comme tout cor-doua il fait le bouffon, le pitre, le fou.

CC: Tiecoura is a koroduwa, and, like all koro-


duwa, he plays the buffoon, the clown, the jester.FW: Tiécoura is a koroduwa and, like all of his

kind, he plays the fool, the idiot, the loon.JS: Tiekoura is a kordoua and like all kordouas

he plays the buffoon, the clown, the fool.

Again, the tendency to render a text based on oral lit-erature in a style appropriate for written texts. I wouldleave out the first three commas (CC), keeping them onlyin items in a series. FW neglects to repeat “kordoua.”“Loon,” a northern waterbird not found in Africa andalso, to us, a silly, crazy person, is geographically andculturally out of place. Our characters are West Africanhunters who have intimate knowledge of each and everycreature of the bush and would be astounded to see aloon among them.

22. Il se permet tout et il n’y a rien qu’on ne luipardonne pas.

CC: He does anything he wants, and nothing hedoes goes unpardoned.

FW: He can do as he wishes, Everything is per-mitted him, and nothing that he does goes unpar-doned.

JS: He says and does whatever he wants andthere’s nothing we won’t forgive him.

According to Zahan, a kordoua has almost completelicense, and his antics, jokes, obscenities, and outlandishclothing evoke general hilarity. Cissé describes him as a“bouffon sacré.” Bad copyediting in the FW version.

23. Tiécoura, tout le monde est réuni, tout est dit.Ajoute votre grain de sel.

CC: Tiekura — everybody is here, everythinghas been said. Add your grain of salt.

FW: Tiécoura, all are gathered here, all has beensaid. Add your pinch of salt.

JS: Tiekoura, everyone is here now, all is said.Add your pinch of salt.

Again, the clumsy “everybody.” In English, “a grainof salt” is an idiom suggesting caution (“take it with agrain of salt”). A “pinch of salt” suggests adding flavor,which Tiekoura will do.

24. Le répondeur joue de la flûte, gigote, danse.Brusquement s’arrête et interpelle le présidentKoyaga.

CC: The responder plays the flute, wiggles, and

dances. Abruptly, he stops and calls to PresidentKoyaga:

FW: The koroduwa trills his flute, jiggles anddances. Suddenly he stops and addresses PresidentKoyaga:

JS: The responder plays the flute, dissolves inspasms, does a dance. Stops suddenly and addressesPresident Koyaga.

To see West African dancers perform is to realizethat “wiggle” and “jiggle” only barely conjure up thetrue picture. I would expand on “gigoter,” as above.Kourouma omits the subject in the second sentence, acommon structure in West African oral performance.31

The omission should be maintained. Why change“responder” to koroduwa? For italics, see line 14.

25. Président, général et dictateur Koyaga, nouschanterons et danserons votre donsomana en cinqveillées. Nous dirons la vérité. La vérité sur votredictature. La vérité sur vos parents, vos collabora-teurs. Toute la vérité sur vos saloperies, vos conner-ies; nous dénoncerons vos mensonges, vos nombreuxcrimes et assassinats ...

CC: “President, General, Dictator Koyaga, weare going to sing and dance your donsomana duringfive festive sumu. We shall tell the truth. The truthabout your dictatorship. The truth about your parentsand your collaborators. All the truth about your filthytricks and your bullshit; we shall denounce your lies,your numerous crimes and assassinations.”

FW: ‘President Koyaga, General, Dictator, herewe will sing and dance your donsomana over thefeast of six vigils. We will tell the truth, about yourdictatorship, your parents, and your collaborators.The whole truth about your dirty tricks, your bullshit,your lies, your many crimes and assassinations ...’

JS: “President, general, and dictator Koyaga, weare going to sing and dance your donsomana for fivenights. We are going to tell the truth. The truth aboutyour dictatorship. The truth about your parents, yourcollaborators. The whole truth about your filthybehavior, your stupidities; we will denounce yourlies, your many crimes and assassinations ...”

“Festive” and “feast” are not necessarily part of adonsomana. CC uses “shall,” which is inconsistent withthe ordinary language of this oral performance. I think“saloperies” refers to disgusting personal behavior andnot to “dirty tricks” or “filthy tricks,” which seem to


have a more political connotation. And “bullshit” (non-sense, foolish talk) jars here; it is too colloquial and alsonot strong enough. The suspension points should be leftin; they are indicators of a meaningful pause in the oralpresentation. Note that the speaker is Tiecoura, theresponder, and not Bingo, the sora, as CC states in hisAfterword. Remember that soras are praise singers,whereas kordouas have license to say whatever theywant — in this case, to insult Koyaga.

26. Arrête d’injurier un grand homme d’honneuret de bien comme notre père de la nation Koyaga.Sinon la malédiction et le malheur te poursuivront ette détruiront. Arrête donc! Arrête!

CC: “Stop insulting a great and righteous man ofhonor like Koyaga, the father of our nation. If youdon’t, malediction and misfortune will pursue youand destroy you. So stop it! Stop it!

FW: Cease from insulting this gentleman, a manof great honour as is Koyaga, the father of our nationfor if you do not ruin and damnation will hunt youdown and destroy you. Hold your tongue!

JS: “ ... Otherwise curses and bad luck will huntyou down and destroy you.”

Who is speaking here? Probably Macledio, Koyaga’sMinister of Orientation. Such ambiguity is often found inthe polyphonic discourse of Kourouma’s novels as hereproduces the style of a traditional oral performance,and sometimes the speaker is Kourouma himself, as if hewere at the donsomana in person.32 The translator mustsometimes guess who is speaking and perhaps adjust thestyle accordingly. FW forgets the quotation marks andruns the sentences together (see lines 5 and 9), but hischange of tone clearly suggests that a third person isspeaking. I would translate “malediction” and “malheur”using words that suggest the fetishistic, magical dimen-sion of the characters’ world view. “Ruin and damnation”suggest capitalism and Christianity.

27. Une veillée ne se dit pas sans qu’en sourdineau récit ronronne un thème.

CC: A festive assembly cannot be conductedwithout a theme as an undertone to the narration.

FW: A vigil cannot be spoken without a theme,purring softly in its wake.

JS: A night’s tale can’t be told without a themehumming along in the background.

Here, I would combine “veillée” and “récit.” I use

“humming” to emphasize the musical aspect of the per-formance. FW has the theme coming along after the taleis told (“in its wake”) rather than permeating the wholeevening. CC’s sentence is clumsy. For “festive assembly”see line 25.

28. La vénération de la tradition est une bonnechose. Ce sera le thème dont sortiront les proverbesqui seront évoqués au cours des intermèdes de cettepremière veillée.

CC: Veneration of tradition is a good thing. Fromthis theme will come the proverbs enunciated duringthe interludes of this first sumu.

FW: It is wise and good to respect tradition. Thiswill be the theme from which will spring theproverbs spoken in the interludes of this our firstvigil.

JS: ... This will be the theme of the proverbsevoked during the interludes of this first night.

29. La tradition doit être respectée parce que:CC: Tradition must be respected for the follow-

ing reasons:FW: Tradition should be respected for:JS: Tradition must be respected because

CC probably added the extra words to justify thecolon, but I think the colon could be omitted in the inter-est of simplicity. Three proverbs bring this section to aclose.

A. Si le perdrix s’envole son enfant ne reste pasà terre.

CC: If the partridge flies away, its child cannotremain on the ground.

FW: When the partridge takes flight, its fledglingdoes not linger on the ground.

JS: If the partridge flies away its chick doesn’tstay on the ground.

“Fledgling” is too specific a word for a proverb.“Chick” is appropriate when speaking of birds but is alsoa familiar term of endearment.

B. Malgré le séjour prolongé d’un oiseau perchésur un baobab, il n’oublie pas que le nid dans lequelit a été couvé est dans l’arbuste.

CC: Regardless of a bird’s long sojourn in thebaobab, he will never forget the nest of the humbleshrub where he was hatched.


FW: Though he may sojourn long in the branch-es of the baobab, the partridge will never forget thenest of lowly brush where he was hatched.

JS: No matter how long a bird perches in abaobab, it doesn’t forget that the nest it hatched in isdown in a bush.

“Sojourn” is too formal; no need to turn a “oiseau”into a partridge.

C. Et quand on ne sait où l’on va, qu’on sached’où l’on vient.

CC: And if one does not know where he isgoing, let him recall the place from which he comes.

FW: So then, though a man know not whither heis going, let him remember whence he came.

JS: And if you don’t know where you’re going,at least know where you came from.

Both translators ignore the oral style and are too for-mal. Proverbs have traditionally been one of the chiefforms of oral expression among West Africans. Whenconversation lags, a proverb — “conversation’s horse”(not FW’s “thoroughbred”)33 — carries it along.34 EachAfrican linguistic group has its own body of proverbs,which may number in the thousands, and whereas someembody general truths about the human condition, othersrepresent the social and juridical code of the particularsociety and may be intentionally cryptic, with allusionsno outsider would understand.35 Even those owning theproverbs are sometimes hard pressed to give a clearexplanation, but obscurity may itself be a virtue in that itstimulates reflection (and subsequent conversation — ahighly valued activity in an oral society).36 bell hookssaid we should regard not-understanding as a space forlearning.37 And so we should with the proverbs in Enattendant. However, the translator should beware ofusing obscurity as an excuse for poor translation. Forexample, take this one from Night II:

Si un canari se casse sur la tete, lave-toi de cetteeau.

CC: If a kannari breaks on your head, wash withthe water.

FW: If a canary falls on your head, wash in thiswater.

JS: If a water pot breaks on your head, use thewater to wash yourself.

This proverb does not have to be obscure. A “canari”

is a large clay pot used for cooking and to carry water (onthe head). Why use “kannari” when “water jar” or “waterpot” makes it all clear. FW’s translation reduces theproverb to nonsense and violates the author’s integrity.

A further point: the style of West African proverbs isoften not brief, pithy, and oracular, as is common inEuropean languages, but conversational, so I suggestusing ordinary words and contractions when translatingthem. Remember, they are meant to be spoken, not read.I disagree with CC’s assertion in his Afterword “that theylikely have mystical impact.”

There is much more to be said about the translationof the proverbs in this novel, but that should probably bethe subject of another article. Kourouma’s most recentpublication, Le Grand Livre des proverbes africains,38

which appeared just a month before his death, will cer-tainly shed light on this important component of Africanthought and literature. I look forward to reading it.

IV

Other examples of mistranslated words occur in bothtexts, but misunderstood concepts, also evident in both,are arguably more serious. Here are two examples, bothfrom the first chapter, in which key aspects of WestAfrican culture, the culture Kourouma was so intent onrepresenting, do not come across clearly.

The sora begins his tale with the story of Koyaga’sfather, one of the so-called Paleonegritics who originallylived in isolated communities in the mountainous regionsranging from Senegal on the west to Sudan. Neithertranslator has understood the interesting habitations ofthese montagnard people, who, according to Kourouma,lived in fortins. These fortins, or little forts, were not vil-lages but individual circular, walled compounds, eitherscattered across the landscape or more or less clusteredto form a village. Each compound housed not a clan ortribe but usually one adult male and his extended family:his several wives, their children, and possibly some otheradult relatives. Centuries ago, to escape the depredationsof slave-trading groups coming from the north and south,these people left the plains and took refuge in the moun-tains. There they built their various versions of easilydefended walled compounds, either clustered or dis-persed.39 Thus, when the French had to subjugate thesepeople “fortin par fortin,” it meant one family at a time— a difficult and dangerous matter. Here is one phrasethat shows the translators going astray:

Chaque chef de famille vit dans son fortin ...


CC: Each head of a family lives in his fortifiedvillage ...

FW: Each clan lived in a walled village ... JS: Each head of a family lives in his little fort ...

Not understanding “fortin” leads to confusion intranslating “chef de famille” and renders other lines lesscomprehensible. The subsequent phrase “sans organisa-tion sociale,” (with no social organization) doesn’tentirely make sense if the people lived in a village ascommonly conceived. To further emphasize the autono-my of each family, Kourouma goes on to say that theauthority of the “chef de famille” (the “head of the fami-ly,” and not the “chieftain” [FW], or “chief” [CC])extends no farther than he can shoot an arrow. Bothtranslators missed the clues.

As the tale of the Paleo montagnards (also called thenaked men) continues, a lack of cultural understandingcauses CC and, to a lesser extent, FW to botch one ofKourouma’s favorite devices: the fateful results of mis-translation. To get the episode right, the translator mustknow that throughout West Africa, the wrestling matchhas for centuries been a favorite sport.40 Kourouma, everthe willing translator of his own culture, explains that themost admired man among the naked men is “l’évélema,le champion de luttes initiatiques” (the évélema, thechampion of initiatory wrestling matches) and thatTchao, Koyaga’s father, was such a man. The story con-tinues: The First World War is going badly for theFrench; they need to beef up their army and decide torecruit Africans from the colonies. They tell the griots,who often served as messengers and translators, to tellthe Paleos, the naked men, that they are needed to fightin the war and will be paid. The griots understand theFrench to say that they need hero wrestlers, because“Malheureusement, dans le langage des montagnards,c’est le même vocable qui dit bagarre, lutte et guerre.”(Unfortunately, in the language of the montagnards theword for fight, wrestling match, and war is the same.)When Tchao, the champion wrestler, hears the message,he volunteers, thinking he will go beyond the seas to par-ticipate in some huge world championship of wrestling.Only in the trenches of Verdun does he discover the dif-ference between wrestling and war.

Kourouma uses “lutte, luttes initiatiques, championde lutte.” CC never once uses the words “wrestle” or“wrestlers,” substituting “fighting,” “combat,” “hand-to-hand combat,” and “hero fighters,” which lead to thisvague phrase: “Tchao learned the difference between warand hand-to-hand combat ... .” FW is inconsistent, using

“wrestler” initially and then switching to “combat of ini-tiation,” and “fighter”; ultimately, however, he gets thesemantic quid-pro-quo in this key phrase right:

FW: ... in the language of the mountain people,to wrestle, to fight and to wage war share the sameword.

CC: ... in the language of the mountain people,the same word means ‘brawl,’ ‘combat,’ and ‘war.’

CC leaves out “wrestling” entirely, thus missing thepoint.

V

I’m acutely aware that translation is a perilous business,with each word, phrase, and sentence presenting anopportunity for creative interpretation but also error.Probably no translation can be said to be perfect, and theversions I suggest in this paper are no exception. But thepoint I want to make is that translators who work in cul-tural areas outside their expertise cannot simply rely oninstinct; they are obligated to do rather extensive prelimi-nary research. Both CC and FW seem to have been lax inthis regard. That said, I think that FW’s translation is thebetter one because it is easier to read — its vocabulary isbetter and its sentences more graceful. CC includes anAfterword that is informative with regard to Kouroumahimself but misleading or incomplete on the subjects ofhis style and “Aesthetic Functions of History andTradition.” CC’s addition of a glossary might seem help-ful, but I don’t believe Kourouma’s intention was towrite a novel that required one. In my view, its presencecasts an unnecessary scholarly, even pedantic, pall over asplendid work of imagination that stands unequivocallyon its own.

Author’s NoteI wish to thank Michael J. Milton for his careful editingof this article.

Notes1Ahmadou Kourouma, Les soleils des indépendences(Paris: Seuil, 1976); Monné, outrages, et défis (Paris:Seuil, 1990); En attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages(Paris: Seuil, 1998); Allah n’est pas obligé . . . (Paris:Seuil, 2000).2Kourouma, Waiting for the Vote of the Wild Animals,trans. Carrol F. Coates (Charlottesville and London:University Press of Virginia, 2001); Waiting for the Wild


Beasts to Vote, trans. Frank Wynne (London: WilliamHeinemann, 2003).3Kourouma, “Il faudrait qu’on parle de nous,” inter-viewed by Manfred Loimeier, Africulture #54, October1998. www.africulture.com.4Kourouma, “Des écrivains à la dure,” interviewed byRené Lefort and Mauro Rosi, UNESCO Courier, March1999. www.unesco.org/courier.5Makhily Gassama, La langue d’Ahmadou Kourouma(Paris: Karthala et ACCT, 1995), 21.6Ibid., 17. 7Kourouma, interviewed by Lefort and Rosi.8Madeleine Borgomano, Ahmadou Kourouma: Le guerri-er griot (Paris: L’harmattan, 1998), 5.9Kourouma, interviewed by Lefort and Rosi.10Christopher L. Miller, Theories of Africans (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1990), 4.11J.P. Clark-Bekederemo, The Ozidi Saga: collected andtranslated from the Ijo of Okabou Ojobolo (1977; reprintwith a critical introduction by Isidore Okpewho,Washington D.C.: Howard University Press, 1991, xxix). 12Gordon Innes, “Formulae in Mandinka Epic: TheProblems of Translation,” in Okpewho, in The OralPerformance in Africa, ed. Isidore Okpewho (Ibadan:Spectrum Books, Limited, 1990), 103; Isidore Okpewho,in Okpewho, op. cit., 113; Kourouma, interview byLefort and Rosi. 13Miller, 223.14See Youssouf Tata Cissé, La confrérie des chasseursMalinké et Bambara (Ivry: Editions nouvelles du Sud,1994) and Clark-Bekederemo for some examples.15Moussa Sene Absa, Madame Brouette, Productions laFête, Inc. and MSA Productions, Canada and Senegal,2002 (motion picture); Jean Marie Teno, Alex’s Wedding,Les Films du Raphia, Cameroon, 2002 (documentarymotion picture). 16Kourouma, “Ahmadou Kourouma, humaniste et hommede parole,” interviewed by François Xavier, April 14,2003. www.e-terviews.net. 17Coates, in Kourouma, Waiting for the Vote of the WildAnimals, 267. 18Pierre Alexander, “Zones culturelles et grandes tradi-tions orales,” in Le Grand Atlas des littératures, ed.Jacques Bersani (Paris: Encyclopaedia Universalis,1990), 92.19Cissé, 64.20Gérard Dumestre, ed. and trans., La geste de Ségou:Racontée par des Griots Bambara (Paris: LibrairieArmand Colin, 1979), 37. 21See the illustration on the dust jacket of the Coates

translation and Pamela McClusky, Art from Africa, LongSteps Never Broke a Back (Seattle and Princeton: SeattleArt Museum and Princeton University Press, 2002), 63ff.A web search will also turn up photographs.22Cissé, 63.23For photographs of fly whisks in the collection of theAmerican Museum of Natural History, seehttp://anthro.amnh.org.24Kourouma, “La nuit du chasseur,” interviewed byAntoine de Gaudemar, Libération Livres, October 15,1998. www.liberation.com.25Miller, 218. 26Cissé, 22.27Dominique Zahan, Sociétés d’initiation Bambara(Paris: Mouton & Co., 1960), 157. Mary Kingsleydescribed a griot she met: “Each minstrel has a song-net— a strongly made net of fishing net sort. On to this netare tied all manner and sorts of things, pythons’ backbones, tobacco pipes, bits of china, feathers, bits of hide,birds’ heads, reptiles’ headbones, &,& ... ” and comment-ing on his performance wrote, “Ah! that was somethinglike a song! It would have roused a rock to enthusiasm.”Mary Kingsley, West African Studies (1899; with a newintroduction by John E. Flint, London: Frank Cass andCo., 1964 ), 126–127.28www.hachette-livre.com.29Guy Atkins, Manding: Focus on an AfricanCivilization, ed. Guy Atkins (London: Centre for AfricanStudies, [1972]), 1.30Zahan, 160.31I don’t think Kourouma simply forgot to include a sub-ject here. In the tale called “The Rescue” (Okpewho,129), there are lines such as these: “Fired the rifle.”“Came out snapping.” 32Kourouma, “Kourouma le colossal,” interviewed byMarc Fenoli, January 18, 1999. www.libe.com. “I did notuse quotation marks because they would have been toocumbersome ... it is always the characters who are speak-ing. Interventions by the narrator are not set off from therest, as if I were present at the donsomana, and mythoughts appear as if in parentheses.” (My translation.) 33“Le proverbe est le cheval de la parole; quand la parolese perd, c’est grâce au proverbe qu’on la retrouve.” AlainNicolas, “Le cheval de la parole s’emballe,” review ofKourouma, En attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages,L’Humanité, November 6, 1998. www.humanite.fr.34See note 16. 35Alexander, 92.36According to Camara Laye, “... la parole, le goût despalabres et du dialogue, le rhythme dans la parole, ce

69

goût qui peut faire demeurer les vieillards tout un moisdurant, sous l’arbre à palabres pour trancher un litige,c’est bien cela qui charactérise les peuples africains.” InMadeleine Borogamo, Ahmadou Kourouma: Le “guerri-er” griot (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998), 160. 37bell hooks, “Language, a Place of Struggle,” in BetweenLanguages and Cultures: Translation and Cross-CulturalTexts, ed. Anuradha Dingwaney and Carol Maier,(Pittsburgh: U. of Pittsburgh Press, 1995), 299. 38Paris: Presses du châtelet, November 2003. 39Christian Seignobos, Nord Cameroun, montagnes ethautes terres (Roquevaire: Editions parenthèses, 1982);Sory Camara, Gens de la parole (Paris and Conakry:ACCT/Karthala and SAEC, 1992), 31–34; Kourouma,“Kourouma le colossal,” interviewed by Marc Fenoli,January 19, 1999. www.libe.com. A beautiful illustrationof a cluster of such compounds appears in Kourouma’sbook for children, Une journée avec Le chasseur, hérosafricain (Orange: Editions grandir, 1999), 18–19. 40Ugo A. Agada, “Mgba in Ehugbo (Afikpo),” Anu 1, no. 2 (April 1979): 35–50. Mungo Park saw a wrestlingmatch in December 1795: “... in the evening [they] invit-ed me to see a neobering, or wrestling match .... This isan exhibition very common in all the Mandingo coun-tries.” An interesting description follows. Mungo Park,Travels into the Interior of Africa (1816; reprint with apreface by Jeremy Swift, London and New York: Elandand Hipocrene Books, Inc., 1983), 30. Dr. Owusu-Ansah, the Acting Chief Executive of theNational Sports Council, in Ghana, said in 2002, “... it isdangerous to kill these traditional games which are partand parcel of the life of the African.”http://groups.msn.com/CommonwealthWrestling/ghanawrestling.msnw.

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___. “Writing as Translation: African Literature and theChallenges of Translation.” Research in AfricanLiteratures, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Summer 1999): 75-87.

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BOOK REVIEW

THE NEW COVENANT. Commonly Called the NewTestament. Vol. 1: The Four Gospels and Apocalypse.Newly Translated from the Greek and Informed bySemitic Sources. Translated by Willis Barnstone. NewYork: Riverhead Books, 2002. ISBN 1-57322-182-1.

Thalia Pandiri, Reviewer

With this impressive volume, Willis Barnstone hasgiven us not only a new translation of the four gospelsand the Apocalypse from the New Testament (NewCovenant, henceforth NC) but also an impressive workof scholarship. Never one to sidestep a challenge,Barnstone has embraced the task of retranslating andrecontextualizing a canonical and sacred text. Those whotranslate canonical texts are likely to be criticized forproducing a far inferior version of an “untranslatable”original text, even of violating and betraying that text.Retranslation, when an earlier translation has itselfbecome canonical and has influenced the language andliterature of the target culture (as did the 1611 KingJames translation [KJV] of the Bible or August WilhelmSchlegel’s translations of Shakespeare for German), canbe even more risky, because there is no longer the justifi-cation that the original text needs to be made accessible:why is a new translation needed? When a sacred text isat issue, the obstacles are magnified. John Wycliff, in thefourteenth century, was rewarded for translating Jerome’sLatin Bible into the English vernacular by having hisbones dug up and burned. William Tyndale (ca.1494–1536), whose translation (from the Greek andHebrew texts rather than the Latin version) of the NewTestament and several books of the Old Testament intothe spoken English of his time was intended to be readand heard with comprehension and delight by those with-out Latin and by the illiterate “ploughboy in the fields,”was attacked viciously as an instrument of the devil bySir Thomas More, was imprisoned and in the end stran-gled by the hangman and burned at the stake. Today’stranslator of the Bible into English runs no such risk, buthe or she must still have good reasons. Willis Barnstonedoes, and he presents them clearly and cogently.

“Why a new translation of a biblical text?”Barnstone asks the question in his preface and providesunassailable answers. The most obvious is that different

ages demand different versions, both because languagechanges and because aesthetic expectations change: “oldtranslations are remote and contemporary ones do notsing.” [NC p. 16] Among modern translations, Barnstonehas high praise for Richmond Lattimore’s 1962 transla-tion of the New Testament, but it went largely unnoticedand is now unknown and unavailable. The need for anew translation is not only aesthetic, however, and if itwere, Barnstone might not have taken on this work andcertainly would have tackled it with less passion. He iseloquent in his admiration of Tyndale’s “masterful”translation “which is as austerely plain and beautiful as afield of wheat,” [NC p. 9] and of the 1611 KJV, whichadopts much of Tyndale’s work with only minor lexicalchanges and more standardized spelling and builds on it.The KJV “with all its recognized magnificence of word,is plainer, less convoluted than any contemporary ver-sion, closer to the Greek text, and more accurate [...].”“Its authors were genial in deciphering complexity in theGreek and rendering straightforward English prose. Itsstrength and emotional impact lie not only in the by-now-sacred majesty of memorable phrasing but in itsclear and comprehensible speech. No serious writer inEnglish can afford to ignore its speech, and since its pub-lication few major writers have not been strongly affect-ed by it.” [NC p. 437]

Barnstone’s mission is not only to make the words ofthe NC “sing” to a modern ear but also to reverse the“deracination” of Jesus/Yeshua, the expunging of theJewish identity of this rabbi (and probably Pharisee), hisfamily and followers, and the anti-Jewish redaction thatturned Jesus/Yeshua into a gentile distinct from “theJews,” who are made the other, and the enemy. His inter-est in biblical scripture (canonical, apocryphal, and col-lateral texts) and in the collection, redaction, translation,and dissemination of those texts is neither new nor tran-sitory but has remained a constant even as he was writ-ing poetry, memoirs, criticism; translating from a rangeof languages and literatures; editing collections of textsfrom widely different countries and cultures. A transla-tion of the Song of Songs was published in 1970. In1984, he edited (and wrote the introductions for) TheOther Bible: Jewish Pseudoepigrapha, ChristianApocrypha, Gnostic Scriptures, Kabbalah, Dead SeaScrolls. The year 2003, one year after the publication of


The New Covenant, saw the publication of an impressive,and massive, volume coedited with Marvin Meyer, TheGnostic Bible. Both these recent publications are inessence heralded by the central section (fully one third ofthe entire volume) of his 1993 The Poetics ofTranslation, a book that also sets forth his own practiceof translation in a theoretical and historical context.Some of the material on the history of the Bible and itstranslations and on his own theory and practice of trans-lation that appears in The New Covenant comes from ThePoetics of Translation (II. “History: The Bible asParadigm of Translation,” subdivided into two chapters,“Prehistory of the Bible and Its Invisible Translations”and “History of the Bible and Its Flagrant Translations”).Because the earlier discussion is more detailed, readersmight wish to revisit the older text while reading theintroductory and concluding material in The NewCovenant.

Not new either is his wish for a translation that doesnot “remove Jesus from his Jewishness” (PT, p. 69) dera-cinating him and his followers and turning them intogentiles. He tackles the hijacking of the (Jewish) NewCovenant at length in the introductory section of PT,“Problems and Parables: How Through False Translationinto and from the Bible Jesus Ceased To Be a Jew”) aswell as in the substantial central section of the book.Earlier translators wished to make the words of the Bibleaccessible to the faithful: religious conviction motivatedJerome, Wycliff, Martin Luther, Tyndale, the scholarscommissioned by King James, and later translators intodifferent vernaculars, or recent modernizers. Barnstone’spurpose is to produce a work that will speak to all, thatwill serve as both a sacred and a secular text, and in theprocess redress old injustices and militate against theantisemitism built into the Greek New Testament (KaineDiatheke) and made worse by Catholic and Protestanttranslators. Barnstone’s declared aim is to

provide open reading for Jews, Christians, and allpeoples and faiths or nonfaiths, without exclusion,without worry whether one is of the elect or theeternally damned. Jews should be able to read thisbook of marvels, of their authorship, about them-selves, about some Jews who believe they havefound the Jewish messiah, whose offspring becomeknown as messianics or Christian. It is imperative toremember that it is not the gentiles (non-Jews) but abody of Jews who nourish and first proclaim Yeshuato be their messiah. [...] This translation — havingmade Yeshua’s Judaism obvious through its restora-

tion of Jewish names and its annotation and after-word — should encourage Jews to read the NewCovenant without terror, without fear for their verylives and souls. If that degree of enlightenment isaccomplished, apart from literary aspirations, thisversion will be a happy one. (NC pp. 439-440)

The format of this volume, and a significant propor-tion of the scholarly apparatus, are intended to educatereaders familiar with earlier authorized versions and, lesscrucially, the growing number of readers wholly unfamil-iar with the New Covenant. The titles of chapters thatfollow the body of the translation suggest the tenor andscope of Barnstone’s argument: “Anti-Judaism and theNew Covenant”; “How Yeshua Ben Yosef BecameYeshua the Messiah and Jesus the Christ”; “HistoricalBases of Yeshua’s Life and Death: Journey from Event toGospel”; “Christian Jews or Jewish Christians”; “OldBibles of the Early Christians”; “Old Covenant or NewCovenant as in Old Circumcision or New Circumcision”;“The Church Agon Between the Hebrew Bible and theNew Covenant and an Almost Happy Reconciliation”;“A Gentleman’s Agreement in the Gospels that Jews inthe Yeshua Movement Not Be Perceived as Jews”; “TheEvangelists as Apologists for Rome”; “To Soften theBlows by Softening the Translation or To Let It All HangOut.” In the expansive footnotes that accompany thetranslation, Barnstone calls attention to the anti-Jewishbias and the pro-Roman, pro-gentile propaganda inro-duced into the gospels [p. 65 n. 72; p. 214 n. 55; p. 260n. 193; p. 275 n. 210; p. 281 n. 223). He reminds us thatthe Samaritans were Jews, one of the many sects activein the time of Yeshua. His discussions are erudite, clear,and a pleasure to read. Even without the notes, just usingthe Hebrew/Aramaic names for people and places servesas a constant reminder that Yeshua was a rabbi (a titlepreserved in the Greek New Testament), probably him-self a Pharisee, that he and his followers were Jews whospoke Aramaic in a corner of the eastern Mediterraneanwhere Aramaic, Latin, and Greek coexisted. Yeshua,Yohanan (the Dipper), Miryam take a moment of gettingused to, but Barnstone is right to make it impossible toignore the context of the narratives and their protago-nists.

It may have become clear by this point that, likeCharles Kinbote of Nabokov’s Pale Fire and likeNabokov himself as translator of Pushkin’s EugeneOnegin, I am a lover of footnotes. Barnstone has givenus 1018, and I read each one carefully, always with inter-est and most often with pleasure. Barnstone has worked


closely with the koine Greek (the common spoken Greekof the man in the street when the gospels were written),and his translation is also “informed by Semitic sources,”Hebrew and Aramaic. As both a note-fetishist and aphilologist, I appreciated the care with which he chooseseach word, his arguments in support of a particular trans-lation or interpretation. Most of the time, he is right: theverb hamartano originally meant missing the mark, forinstance not hitting a target with your arrow; in a lessconcrete sense, it meant committing an error of judg-ment, making a mistake. The verb, and the noun derivedfrom it, hamartia, came to mean a moral error or, inChristian terms, “sin,” but the older meaning has notbeen wholly displaced by the more unforgiving andabsolute Christian usage, even today. Barnstone’s presen-tation of this information is detailed and cogent.

The reader, however, is then confused by comingacross stock phrases such as “remission of sins” in anumber of passages in the translation. It is not until anote on p. 334 (John) that he makes clear his (valid)rationale for treating the Greek word differently in differ-ent contexts. It would have been useful to have that dis-cussion earlier. His note on anamartetos, one who doesnot miss the mark, someone who is without fault or whohas never made a mistake (p. 333 n. 87, on Yohanan 8) isright on target and is more accurate than the KJV “hewho is without sin.” The note on hamartolos (p. 221 n.115) is less helpful: Barnstone appropriately translateshamartolos as “sinful” [Luke 5] but then gives his stan-dard explanation of the classical hamartia. Nothingwrong here, but because hamartolos is a word that doesnot appear in earlier, non-Christian Greek, the note is abit of a red herring.

Particularly felicitous is his discussion of faula (p.314 n. 44, to Yohanan/John 3:20), which he translatesaccurately as “shoddy things” (“For all who do shoddythings hate the light” is Barnstone’s excellent version;the KJV has “For every one that doeth evil hateth thelight.”) Interesting too is his note on Loukas/Luke 8, thestory of the demoniac (the man possessed by uncleanspirits, or demons) and the pigs: Barnstone followsTyndale in rendering the Greek daimon accurately as“demon” — as does the Revised — whereas the KJV andthe Jerusalem Catholic versions translate the Greek as“devil.” Largely philological notes may also provide bitsof interesting if not essential information: in a note to theparable of the “widow’s mite” or the “widow’s smallcopper coin,” we learn that there are 100 lepta, or smallcopper coins, in a drachma. Incidentally, the Greek texthas “two lepta,” the plural of lepton. Why Barnstone

opts for “leptas” as a plural in his translation puzzles me.It may be that he wanted a form that would suggest aplural ending to an English audience, and in any case thisis a minuscule detail.

There are, however, a few points where I thinkBarnstone is not without hamartia. It would be superhu-man to make no errors of judgment in a work this ambi-tious, large, and full of detail. There are a few instancesof sloppiness in the notes. On p. 84 n. 118, to Mark 12,while paraptoma can be appropriately rendered as “falsestep,” a falling by the wayside, falling off the path, nei-ther ptoma nor its plural ptomata can ever mean “steps,”as Barnstone maintains. In this instance, as in a few oth-ers, the translation is not adversely affected. But there aresome errors that leave their mark on the translation, and Iwould like to single them out precisely because they areso rare, and I find no fault with the rest of the translation.

First, a clear error. In Matthew 27:16, Barnstonetranslates the Greek desmion episemon as “a learnedprisoner.” This seemed strange to me (episemos canmean “well-known” and “notorious,” and later on “offi-cial” or “formal,” but not “learned”). The note is confus-ing when it comes to the Greek, but it sheds light on howthis error (not sin) occurred. In the note, p. 194 n. 179,the translator says:

The prisoner’s epithet is from the Greek episemon(epistemon) which means “learned,” “sagacious,”“prudent,” or “wise.” In virtually all translationsBarrabas is “notorious,” with the exception of theKJV, which is neutral to positive, where he is called“a notable prisoner.”

What has happened is clear: Barnstone has somehowread “episemon” (an accusative, object case ending inomicron nu) as the transliterated “epistemon” (in Greek anominative, subject case ending in omega nu, which inthis context would be ungrammatical: the object case isepistemona). It’s an error in reading the Greek, which iswhy his translation differs from everyone else’s. Bar-abba (“son of man”) is well known, whether his reputa-tion be good or bad, but “learned” is not what he iscalled.

The next example is a more complex and interestingmistake. Barnstone argues that a Greek idiomatic phrasecan mean something that it never does, but since hetranslates this phrase correctly in another passage, whatis misleading him here seems not to be linguistic inade-quacy but rather the desire to have the words meansomething more than they do. Yohanan 8:24 and 8:28, in


Barnstone’s translation, reads “if you do not believe thatI am” … “then you will know that I am.” I was madeuneasy by the translation, but more uneasy by the note,which strikes me as quite fanciful:

This phrase is normally translated “I am he,” but theGreek says ego eimi (ego eimi), “I am.” “I am he”may be implied, or “I am myself,” or the solitarymystery of “I am.” It is richer to give only what theGreek gives, “I am,” and then, not bound by inter-pretation in translation, read the verse creatively. Asfor Yeshua’s take on the phrase, in the next line he isasked the essential enigma, “Who are you?” Hisanswer is a riddle, which should be respected. [p. 335 n. 91]

Attractive as Barnstone’s call for creativity is, and cor-rect as it is to say that Yeshua often talks in riddles, thetranslation is not only far from “not bound by interpreta-tion” but is based on interpretation in defiance of normalGreek usage. “Ego eimi” NEVER means “I am” in theway the translator wants to take it, because Greek doesnot use the personal pronoun in this particularly Englishway. In fact, it has the emphatic force of “it’s me,” or“I’m the one,” etc. This is exactly what the beggar says(ego eimi) in John/Yohanan 9:9, when his sight has beenrestored by Yeshua and some say “it’s him” while otherssay, “No, but it looks like him.” Barnstone correctly ren-ders the man’s response as “It’s me.”

One last example, this one more of a rare (in factunique) lapse in good sense than a conventional mistake.After wisely saying he will not try to substitute political-ly correct female gender pronouns for the original gen-der, given that the age in which these texts came aboutwas not politically correct, Barnstone has a moment ofweakness — all the more jarring because it is isolated, asfar as I could see — in John (Yohanan) 13:11: “nor is thesent one greater than he who sent her” [emphasis mine].The Greek passage has “the [male] slave is not greater[masculine adjective] than his master, nor is the personsent (apostolos) greater (masculine adjective) than the[male] person who sent him.” The whole passage is mas-culine, the context is masculine, and the intrusion ofwhat looks like a knee-jerk, politically correct femininepronoun is wholly atypical of Barnstone. Perhaps a laterpolemical redactor tampered with the text.

And one final complaint: Given how lavish (and attimes pedantic) Barnstone is when it comes to footnotes,I expected him to explain why in one instance he trans-lates the same problem and mystery word epiousion in

the “Lord’s Prayer” as “daily” (bread) in Matthew 6 andas “morning” (bread) in Luke 11:2. Not only is the trans-lation different in each case, but there is no comment onthe Greek word, whose meaning is uncertain and whichhas sparked a great deal of theological debate. “Epi”means “on,” “in addition,” “against” (among otherthings), and “ousion” is an adjectival form derived from“ousia,” “essence” or “substance.” We may recall themurderous riots over “homoiousios” (of similar sub-stance) and “homoousios” (of the same substance) whenit comes to the divine nature of Jesus. What is this “con-substantial” (?) bread in this prayer? What Hebrew orAramaic word is being translated? Given how detailedand scholarly some of the footnotes are, Barnstone’ssilence here is baffling and disappointing.

Essays and footnotes aside, is this translation of thefour gospels and the Apocalypse (one version of manybelonging to a popular genre, as Barnstone points out inhis introduction to this particular Revelation) powerfulenough to become canonical, or at least to be read widelyand remembered? Will it be assigned reading in collegecourses — a fate that ensures the dissemination and atleast the temporary survival of a text today as it did inantiquity? Barnstone (NC p. 26) has said he is aiming fora version that is “simple and modern, without droppinginto basic English,” that he wants “the English to comealive in a version close in meaning to the original,” thathe has with delight examined each word afresh as hechose how to translate the Greek, and that he tried tocarry some of the sound and music of the Greek intoEnglish.

Perhaps, however, no version is likely to be imprint-ed on the public consciousness if it is not experiencedprimarily as a sacred text. I grew up with the KaineDiatheke and the Septuagint Greek Old Testament, at atime when there was no separation between the GreekOrthodox Chuch and the State in Greece. Religion was arequired subject in school, and for six years, we spentseveral hours a week in class receiving philological andtheological instruction. The first year was devoted to theNew Testament, the second to the Septuagint, and thenwe moved on to study the words and music of psalms,chants, tropes, and hymns and eventually the exegeticaltexts of the early Church Fathers and of Byzantine the-ologians. We had to learn the words of the koine NewTestament by heart, but this was not a classroom exercisealone. Church attendance was both obligatory (for stu-dents) and customary even among the not particularlypious. Biblical texts, whether spoken or chanted or sung,were experienced not so much through the eyes but pri-


marily through the ears and through the mouth. This is the poetry that is imprinted on me, and

whether or not the text is broken up into lines that sug-gest poetry is irrelevant to me: I hear it as poetry, andone phrase will trigger an entire passage in my mind.During a recent stay on Cyprus over Easter, I wasreminded of this visceral familiarity both in myself andin others who did not study but who attend churches andmonasteries regularly and with devotion. The GreekCypriote community is in many ways more traditionalthan urban Greeks in Greece are today, and church atten-dance is taken much more seriously. My hostess, a zeal-ous frequenter of churches, monasteries, and chapels,was in her glory during Holy Week, and I accompaniedher, arriving at the very beginning of each service, wellbefore the majority of more casual worshippers appeared,and staying to the very end, long after most had takencommunion and left. To my slight surprise, everything Ihad ever learned was still there, very close to the surface:the words, the melodies of the chants. And many aroundme who had never studied biblical Greek, which is quitedifferent from modern spoken Greek, also had all thewords and melodies in their ears, in their minds, andready to flow from their mouths. This is what Barnstonewould wish for his poetry; it won’t happen for me, and Iam not sure it will affect others in the way that Jerome’sLatin version took over the minds and imaginations ofmedieval monastics or the KJV left its mark for centuriesnot only on Protestants but on lovers of literature. Thereis no doubt, however, that it deserves a chance.

Selecting individual passages to compare with theKJV (the only serious competition, to my mind) seemsarbitrary: Barnstone’s translation reads smoothly whentaken in its entirety, and some of its virtue lies in notdeviating from the KJV merely for the sake of novelty.To get a sense of what Barnstone does, one needs toexamine passages of some length. With that caveatlector, here are two well-known poetic moments, fromthe Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5) and fromApocalypse/Revelation 6:12-17.

Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom ofheaven.

Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.Blessed are they that do hunger and thirst after righteous-

ness: for they shall be filled.Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the

children of God.Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’

sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute

you, and shall say all manner of evil against youfalsely, for my sake.

Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your rewardin heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets whichwere before you.

Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost hissavour, wherewith shall it be salted? it is thenceforthgood for nothing, but to be cast out and to be troddenunder foot of men.Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hillcannot be hid.Neither do men light a candle and put it under a bushel,but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that arein the house.

(KJV Matthew 5:3-15))

Blessed are the poor in spiritfor theirs is the kingdom of the skies.Blessed are they who mourn the deadfor they will be comforted.Blessed are the gentlefor they will inherit the earth.Blessed are the hungry and thirsty for justicefor they will be heartily fed.Blessed are the mercifulfor they will obtain mercy.Blessed are the clean in heartfor they will see God.Blessed are the peacemakersfor they will be called the children of God,Blessed are they who are persecuted for the sake

of their justicefor theirs is the kingdom of the skies.Blessed are you when they revile, persecute and speak

every cunning evil against you, lying, because of me.

Rejoice and be glad, for your reward in the heavens ishuge, and in this way did they persecute the prophetsbefore you.

You are the salt of the earth.But if the salt has lost its taste, how will it recover its

salt?Its powers are for nothing except to be thrown away and

trampled underfoot by others.


You are the light of the world.A city cannot be hidden when it is set on a mountain.Nor do they light a lamp and place it under a basket,

but on a stand,and it glows on everyone in the house.

(Barnstone, NC p. 117)

12. And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, andlo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun becameblack as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became asblood;13. And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as afig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of amighty wind.14. And the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolledtogether; and every mountain and island were moved outof their places.15. And the kings of the earth, and the great men, and therich men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men,and every bondman, and every free man, hid themselvesin the dens and in the rocks of the mountains;16. And said to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us, andhide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne,and from the wrath of the Lamb:17. For the great day of his wrath is come; and who shallbe able to stand?

(KJV Revelation 6:12-17)

When the lamb opened the sixth seal I lookedand there took place a great earthquakeand the sun became black like sackcloth of hairand the full moon became like blood,and the stars of the sky fell to the earthas the fig tree drops its unripe fruitshaken by a great wind. And the skyvanished like a scroll rolling upand every mountain and island of the earthwas torn up from its place and moved.And the kings of the earth and the great menand commanders of thousands and every slaveand the free hid in caves and mountain rocks,and said to the mountains and rocks, “Fall on usand hide us from the face of him who is sittingon the throne and from the anger of the lambbecause the great day of his anger has come,and before him who has the force to stand?”1

(Barnstone NC p. 396)

Clearly, Barnstone’s version is more colloquially com-fortable for today’s reader, avoiding archaic verb forms,pronouns, and syntax, replacing words (like “righteous-ness”) whose currency is not what it was in earlier cen-turies or which have since acquired different connota-tions. At times, the substitution seems useful, but perhapsnot always: to me, “wrath” still means something more,and more superhuman, than “anger,” but I am old-fash-ioned. Readers less sentimentally attached to the KJVthan I am might well respond differently, and I thinkBarnstone’s translation, on the whole, has great merit.This is a work that must be read by anyone interested intranslation and in the politics of translation, and certainlyno library should be without it. A second volume ispromised, and I look forward to it.

Notes

1It is interesting to compare Barnstone’s version with the1962 translation by Richmond Lattimore, whom headmires. [The Revelation of John, translated byRichmond Lattimore. Harcourt, Brace and World, Ltd.New York: 1962, p. 15]. Lattimore’s version, while itdoes not claim to be poetry, is in fact poetic.

And I saw when he opened the sixth seal, andthere came a great earthquake, and the sunturned black like cloth of hair, and all the moonbecame as blood, and the stars of the skydropped upon the earth as the fig tree casts itsunripe figs shaken by a great wind, and the skyshrank upon itself like a scroll curling, and everymountain and island was shaken from its place.And the kings of the earth and the great men andthe commanders of thousands and the rich andthe strong, all, slave and free, hid themselves inthe caves and the rocks of the mountains, andsaid to the mountains and the rocks: Fall upon usand hide us from the face of him who sits uponthe throne and the anger of the Lamb, becausethe great day of their anger has come, and whocan stand?



CONTRIBUTORS

Martin Blackman is a poet who became fascinatedwith literary translation as an intern at CopperCanyon Press while completing his MFA in CreativeWriting from Antioch University Los Angeles.Through his experience at Copper Canyon he metWilliam O’Daly and encountered Copper Canyon’sNeruda series.

Robert S. Dupree is a professor of English andDirector of Library and University Research at theUniversity of Dallas in Irving, Texas. He is theauthor of Allen Tate and the AugustinianImagination and co-editor of Seventeenth-CenturyEnglish Poetry: The Annotated Anthology. He hasalso translated Gaston Bachelard’s Lautréamont andis the translation editor for the BachelardTranslations Series published by the Dallas Instituteof Humanities and Culture.

John DuVal’s translation of Cesare Pascarella’s TheDiscovery of America received the 1992 HaroldMorton Landon Prize for the Translation of Poetryfrom the Academy of American Poets. In 2000DuVal won an NEA fellowship for his translation ofAdam le Bossu’s Le Jeu de la feuillée. His latestbook of translation is Fabliaux Fair and Foul, published by Pegasus Paperbooks, which will alsopublish his From Adam to Adam: Seven Old FrenchPlays this fall.

Robert E. Kibler is a professor of English andHumanities at Minot State University in NorthDakota and a specialist in the literature of Chineseantiquity. He is also the Director of the NorthernPlains Writing Project at Minot State.

Jože Krašovec is a professor of Biblical Studies inthe Theological Faculty at the University ofLjubljana and holds multiple doctorates from theSorbonne, the Hebrew University, and the PontificalBiblical Institute. He supervised the newestSlovenian translation of the Bible, the SlovenianStandard Version (1996), and is a member of the

Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SASA).His studies and articles, which number approximate-ly 300, have been published in several languages,including Slovene, English, German, and French. InAugust 2004 he was elected president, for2004–2007, of the International Organization for theStudy of the Old Testament. He will be responsiblefor organizing that body’s World Congress in 2007,in Ljubljana.

Thalia Pandiri, a professor of Classics andComparative Literature at Smith College, holds aPh.D. from Columbia University in ClassicalLanguages and Literatures, and is a Fellow of theAmerican Academy in Rome. Since 2000 she is edi-tor-in-chief of the literary translation journalMetamorphoses. She has published translations ofmedieval women’s visionary narratives written inLatin, and translations of Greek poetry and prose.

William O’Daly is a poet, translator, teacher andeditor who, in addition to recently completing anhistorical novel set in China, has rendered some ofthe finest English translations of the revered ChileanNobel laureate Pablo Neruda. In an effort thatspanned fifteen years, O’Daly was the first to trans-late six of the great poet’s late and posthumousworks: Still Another Day, The Separate Rose, WinterGarden, The Sea and the Bells, The Yellow Heart,and The Book of Questions. He resides in thefoothills of Northern California with his wife anddaughter.

Thom Satterlee holds an M.F.A. in LiteraryTranslation from the University of Arkansas and cur-rently teaches creative writing at Taylor University inUpland, Indiana. His collection of translations TheHangman’s Lament: Poems of Henrik Nordbrandtwas published by Green Integer in 2003. Individualtranslations appear in The Literary Review, PrairieSchooner, Seneca Review, Osiris, InternationalPoetry Review and elsewhere. His articles on transla-tion have appeared in Translation Review, Delos, andThe Dictionary of Literary Biography. In 1998 hereceived the Translation Prize from the American-Scandinavian Foundation.


Judith Schaefer is a free-lance translator who livesin Washington, DC, and Buena Vista, Colorado. Herpublished translations, all from the German, includeBasic Questions in Paleontology: Geologic Time,Organic Evolution, and Biological Systematics, byOtto H. Schindewolf (University of Chicago Press);Recent Vertebrate Carcasses and theirPaleobiological Significance, by Johannes Weigelt(University of Chicago Press); A Zoologist Looks at

Humankind, by Adolf Portmann (ColumbiaUniversity Press); and Oratorios of the World, byKurt Pahlen (Amadeus Press). Translations from theFrench consist of many scientific papers and a bookfor young people, L’oiseau en cage, by DelphineZanga-Tsogo, all unpublished. In progress isNorthern Cameroon: Mountains and Highlands, byChristian Seignobos.


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TR 67 B - Translation Studiestranslation.utdallas.edu/translation_reviews/TR67.pdf · of the early 20th-century Spanish poets, my favorite being Lorca, his ballads, which I found