I think that anyone interested in literature would enjoy novelist Meir Shalev’s discussion of the Genesis love stories – quite different than conventional Biblical analysis.
Other speakers in the SFJCC speaker series who may be of interest to those interested in religion include Rachel Elior and Moshe Idel. You can find the complete list here.
On Wednesday night at 8 (as they say, check your local listings), Great Performances on PBS will feature Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic in their opening night concert, taped on October 8 at Walt Disney Concert Hall. The program includes a new piece by John Adams, City Noir, and Mahler's First Symphony.
I have already spoken with a number of people who were in the Los Angeles audience that night, and in the wake of their overwhelming enthusiasm I'd say, don't miss it.
(Although he claims to be unbiased, he must be flattered by the use of his translation, so Alter’s claim “whatever I have to say about it reflects nothing but my considered response to its images” does not ring completely true.)
It certainly looks better than that awful Manga Bible.
(HT: Tzvee)
I like the KJV too (although I like Tyndale more).
But I just don’t feel tempted to attend this pastor’s (and what a nice touch to be interviewed in his overalls) barbeque – even with the promise of meeting most of his 14 church members.
You see, I’ve never done [and never plan to do] the Fahrenheit 451 thing – too many bad memories.
(HT: Craig Smith)
PS: This is the first time I’ve broken my design rule and posted in color. So you know the clip must be worth watching.
Did you get a free book for reviewing? Did you get any other sort of gift? Do you get an Amazon affiliates kickback?
I wish to bring to your attention Willis Barnstone’s Restored New Testament. I have ordered, but not yet received this book, so I cannot personally comment on it, but I think some of you may be interested in it (particularly those of you familiar with Barnstone’s translations, including his Other Bible and Gnostic Bible).
Here is the review from Library Journal:
The Restored New Testament: A New Translation with Commentary, Including the Gnostic Gospels, Thomas, Mary, and Judas. Norton. Oct. 2009. 1152p. index. trans. from Greek by Willis Barnstone. ISBN 978-0-393-06493-3. $49.95.
In an achievement remarkable by almost any standard, and surely one of the events of the year in publishing, renowned poet and scholar Barnstone has created a new and lavish translation—almost transformation—of the canonical and noncanonical books associated with the New Testament. In part a continuation of his work in The New Covenant, Commonly Called the New Testament (2002) and The Other Bible (2005), and in many ways the completion of the pioneering efforts of other modern translators like Robert Alter, Reynolds Price, and Richmond Lattimore, The Restored New Testament offers a completely new version of familiar and unfamiliar texts, restoring the likely Hebrew forms of names, and strongly emphasizing the poetic and almost incantatory passages that have been obscured within the New Testament. Barnstone also substantially reorders the traditional arrangement of books for reasons he ably expounds in an extended and learned yet accessible preface. The high bar Barnstone has set for himself is the creation of an English-language Scripture that will move poets much as the 1611 King James Version moved Milton and Blake. Only time will tell if Barnstone has achieved his goal, but his work is fascinating, invigorating, and often beautiful. Essential.
Here is an interview from Library Journal:
Readers may be familiar with your work as a translator, poet, and editor, but it seems that in the last several years, more of your attention has gone toward religious texts. What accounts for the change?
I don’t want to abuse the catch-all word “spiritual,” but there is a spiritual or metaphysical obsession with most of the work I’ve done. In the early Sixties, I translated The Poems of Saint John of the Cross, who was Spain’s and the world’s foremost mystical poet, whose work is based on the biblical Song of Songs, which I also translated into English. I began The Restored New Testament (RNT) nearly two decades ago, and in the last several years I’ve been doing these monstrous editions and translations of diverse Biblical literature, from The Other Bible, a book of intertestamental scriptures including Dead Sea Scrolls, Gnosticism, and Apocrypha, to Poetics of Translation: History, Theory, Practice in which the Bible is the main paradigm of translation. We live in a world of impossible-to-answer questions about all the great ideas, beginning with consciousness. So begins the meditation. I think there is a common thread in my work, and less change than may appear.
What was the field of New Testament translation like when you began your project? What differences should we expect from your version?
Oh gosh! A revolution. Briefly: a restoration of the probable names of persons and places to their Greek, Aramaic, and Hebrew originals; a book that avoids Biblespeak, the half-lovely archaized speech that most translations fall into after the King James Version, or really infelicitous lowbrow talk that floats like lead when the scripture is gold. I attempt to translate the Bible as others have translated Homer or Virgil. Why not? I also show that the name changes—Elizabeth for Elisheva, James for Yaakov, Mary for Miryam—are an attempt to mask the fact that all the characters, big and small, except for the Romans, are Jews. Jesus was a circumcised rabbi who died during the Passover days of the seder. I also show by translating much of the book into verse that like all the world’s religious scripture the book was meant to be chanted as it is today in Greek Orthodox churches. We read the Song of Songs, Psalms, Job, Ecclesiastes, Proverbs, and many of the prophets as lineated poetry. We should do the same with the New Testament, which, like the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament), was half in poetry, including Revelation, the epic poem of the Bible which I did in blank verse. As prior translator Richmond Lattimore did, I change the order of the gospels, making them chronological by beginning with Mark, then Matthew, then Luke and John.
What sort of reader do you picture for the RNT? The scholar in the tower? The family in the pew? The poet under the tree?
I hope for a general reader, lowbrow, highbrow, even nobrow. Conservative Christians took to my New Covenant, a translation of the four gospels and Revelation, because they are interested in the meaning of Biblical words and they saw my work as about as faithful one can be to the original words, which cast the Bible in its morning light. I surely hope for literary readers too, who esteem Hemingway or Twain (so much like the Gospel of Mark’s racing plain narrative) or Whitman (who reminds us of Ecclesiastes). I hope for church and synagogue readers—it’s the last great biblical work by a Jew, about Jews, for Jews, as bishop John Shelby Spong points out. It should speak to the general reader, as did the earliest—and in my opinion best—translation into beautiful demotic English by William Tyndale in 1525. He wrote his Bible for the ploughboy of the fields, and even for Scots, women, Saracens and Turks. Where he translated Greek correctly into the equivalent for his time, as in “He was a luckie fella,” the King James Version pumps it up to “He was a fortunate gentleman.” I have also taken out the artificial pomp by translating student as student rather than Latin disciple, and messenger as messenger, not apostle. An apostle stays at home and admires his robes, but Paul’s apostles, many of them women, hit the road for the cause.
What could or should a restored New Testament mean for today’s world? How could it be put to use?
In a world of hatred, especially tribal religious hatreds everywhere, I hope that the book may bring peace, or further peace among Jews, Christians, and Moslems. I hope the reader feels that the restored scripture reveals the commonality of the Abrahamic sects of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. I hope the faithful and secular see a work closer to the original scripture and not bathed in the propaganda of bias and willful persuasion, a fascinating read, with verve and freshness. Unlike most scripture it has whimsy and humor for a world drowning in gravity and fear and misunderstanding. Surely laughter is part of our life and not a sin against seriousness.
Haganos HaRav 67 (Soloveitchik RH Machzor):
The Rav objected in general to the introduction into the service of new prayers not included in the traditional liturgy, noting that Chazal, well aware of the paradox inherent in insignificant man approaching God to pray for his comparatively trivial needs, were thus determined to confine the performance of prayer to rigid, standardized texts based upon Biblical sources (Community, Covenant, and Commitment, p. 115)
He stressed that man’s entire right to pray to God for anything is based upon the fact that the Bible is replete with examples of people praying and petitioning god for various needs, and their actions therefore serve as a precedent for us (Divrei Hashkafah, p. 122). Consequently, no ordinary person can have temerity to compose his own formula of prayer, given that he lacks the necessary רוח הקודש, the Divine inspiration, which the Biblical figures had. The Rav further explained that it is for this reason that the Gemara in Megillah (17a) points out that the אנשי כנסת הגדולה, the Men of the
Great Assembly, who established the texts of our prayers and blessings (see Berachos 33a), included several prophets, because a level of Divine inspiration is necessary in order to properly formulate prayers. The Rav stated that he was unimpressed with various prayer texts composed by contemporary authors (MiPeninei HaRav, pp. 127-128).Indeed, he held that no contemporary author has all the qualities that are indispensable for writing prayers. Nobody today has the inner ability, the depth, the breadth of experience, and the purity of soul that would authorize him to compose a prayer (The Lord is Righteous, pp. 298-299.)
When Cenage (which was spun off from Thomson which had acquired Routledge) bought Houghton-Mifflin, there was great fear in the Shakespeare book-lover community that it would spell doom for the Arden Shakespeare – volumes that contained deep commentary and annotations on Shakespeare editions. Houghton-Mifflin already had its own set of preferred Shakespeare textbooks – works that were far more pedestrian than the Arden editions.
And, that prognostication turned out to be partly correct – Cenage dumped Arden as quickly as it could – selling it back to Metheun (its publisher through from 1899 through 1980). And back in its rightful home, the Arden Shakespeare is doing exciting things.
One of the most exciting is the release of a new Early Modern Drama series, with Arden-style commentary and annotations of Everyman and Mankind, Philaster, and The Duchess of Malfi on the way in less than two weeks and (reportedly) The Renegado coming out next year.
So hooray. Unable to handle a unit of true quality, the mega-publishers actually spun off the Arden Shakespeare to a small publisher – its original home – that seems to take some pride in its publications.
(By the way, while I strongly recommend the Arden for their critical commentary, I cannot recommend them as a reading edition of Shakespeare. You should take Kevin Edgecomb’s advice and buy a nicely printed multi-volume edition.)
I’m only maintaining a few subscriptions to Bible blogs – a large number have become irrelevant to my current interest. But I still read a few, and the big news this week is: the NIV is being revised again.
In a very real sense this is completely irrelevant to me: I did not like, read, or trust the NIV or the TNIV. I found the translations biased, simplified, and (in the case of the TNIV) ungrammatical. My opinion is that popular modern Bible translation theory is in a rut (as is, sadly, much discussion about it) – the only translations in the last decade or so I can get excited about are those of Craig Smith, Robert Alter, and Everett Fox.
And, after all, translations wars are small beer anyway. (Ignoring source text criticism issues) the original text says what it says. Any serious discussion needs to refer back to the original text. (However, I admit to finding English translations of the Targums and Septuagint useful.)
Furthermore, there are already a wealth of translations into English representing reading levels ranging from grammar school to moderately sophisticated and a variety of different belief systems. It is hard to believe that a new translation could have a real impact with readers – at best it could merely hope to jostle some other “flavor of the month” recent translation in sales rating.
Perhaps the death of the TNIV is a blow for those Evangelicals who hoped to for their translation to have an impact on secular educational materials (currently, the NRSV and RSV [and in literature, the KJV] are dominant here). The TNIV looked to be one of the few translations that had some impact outside the Evangelical world – for example, the TNIV was used in an(outstanding) secular textbook: the Norton Critical Edition of Writings of St. Paul.
One reaction among biblio-bloggers surprises me. Many people are saying: “what shall we do until the new edition is out” as if the TNIV were somehow rendered unacceptable by the decision to revise it. It reminds me of the pitches given by publishers when a new edition of a dictionary or cookbook comes out – one is hardly required to buy the new edition.
Indeed, the old editions remain on the market for a long time (and, in the used market, continue to be available even longer.) Thus a reader who desires a copy of the “out-of-date” editions such as the RSV, Living Bible, Confraternity Bible, JPS 1917 Holy Scriptures, RV, Geneva translation, etc. has a wide variety of choices both on the new and used market).
As a reader, you can read, cite, use, and study any translation you want. And if you are worried about there being a dearth of supplementary materials, you are welcome to use any translation you want with any commentary you want.
If you visit a university bookstore, you will find that instructors – even in the hard sciences and mathematics – regularly use textbooks from the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s (and sometimes even back to the ‘30s) – indeed, one popular publisher, Dover, specializes in reprinting these volumes.
As far as the merits of the NIV 2011 are concerned, we’ll have to wait and see – it is absurd to begin to judge it before work has even begun on it. Since the NIV took 13 years (1965-1978) for the first edition and the TNIV took at least 9 years (1996 [publication date of the NIVi] – 2005) , I’m a bit surprised that the translators feel they can do an adequate job with only a two year timeline. But let’s wait and see.
In the meanwhile, there is little need to gnash teeth. The ideas that inspired the changes from the NIV to the TNIV cannot be erased with the announcement of a new translation.
From an essay by Philip Davies:
. . . A recent National Biblical Literacy Survey in the UK carried out by the Centre for Biblical Literacy Communication at St John’s College, Durham (http://www.dur.ac.uk/codec/about/cblc/) found that as few as 10 per cent of people understood the main characters in the Bible and their relevance. Figures such as Abraham and Joseph were unknown: hardly anyone could name even a few of the Ten Commandments. . . .
I know a lot of secular Jews . . . . Very few of them can demonstrate the degree of ignorance of the Bible that Christians do. For them, being Jewish means knowing the Bible, even if not accepting its religious authority. Secular Jews are nearly all proud to be Jewish and know that their Jewish identity is defined by the Bible. There is no equivalent commitment among Christians because they share no ethnic identity. . . .
(HT: James Davila)
