Robert Alter on the Literary Structure of the Bible

Aug 232013
 

Robert Alter is one of those academic stars who should be more of a star. Maybe he’s not more famous than he is because his brand of criticism is formalist and less ideologically driven than some others. I prefer the formalist approach myself because it sees literature as an encyclopedia of technique and structure. I have come to care less about what a book I admire means than how it’s constructed. Alter also opened up the Bible to me in ways I found comprehensible and fascinating. Along with Frank Kermode, he edited The Literary Guide to the Bible, which is my Bible bible. Here’s a lecture on literary repetition; you get a taste of his mind. (Be patient, the video takes a few seconds to get going, and the first person to appear is the man giving the introduction, not Alter himself.)

dg

Sometimes desire is just a caper-fruit after all

Mar 122011
 

Here’s the TLS review of 400 Years of the King James Bible. It toucheth on many topics including translation and mistranslation and, here, yes, even on Robert Alter, critic and translator, whose formalist approach to the Bible (and the novel) dg hath always found revelatory. This little bit is quite funny.

dg

The liveliest essay in the volume is Robert Alter’s “The glories and the glitches of the King James Bible”, in which he matches wits with the KJB translators. As the editor-translator of The Five Books of Moses (2004) and The Book of Psalms (2007), Alter is well qualified to appreciate not only the skill of the translators, but also their mistakes. After reading Alter’s essay, it is hard to feel quite the same way about the KJB’s rendering of the final chapter of Ecclesiastes, which many Anglicans of a certain age can still recite by heart: “the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets”. Alter is justly admiring of this “great sombre poem on mortality and the decay of the body”, but also points out that some of the poetic effect is actually the result of mistranslation. The Hebrew word hagav, which the KJB translates as “grasshopper”, may refer to the locust-tree; the word aviyyonah, which the KJB translates as “desire”, is probably another plant, the caper-fruit.

via 400 years of the King James Bible by Arnold Hunt – TLS.

On Giants

Apr 222010
 

The early books of the Bible are littered with strange names and peoples. I mentioned giants last time and the Sons of God who came down and had sex with human females. There are also the mysterious Nephilim or Refraim (I think I am getting the words right). And in Numbers and Deuteronomy, there are the giantish Anaks or Anakim. Of course, later on there is Goliath. The Anakim and Og of Bashan, mentioned in my previous giant post, are cited by Moses’ pusillanimous scouts to emphasize the might of the Canaanite hosts the Israelites will face if they go down across the Jordan as God wants them to do. Their fear (or prudence) is infectious. God gets angry and wants to kill his chosen people (once again). But Moses (once again) talks Him down, and God merely sends them off into the Wilderness til everyone in the cowardly generation dies off.

In any case, I find these giants fascinating, as I do the prophets (like Balaam) and the dreamers (like Joseph & Jacob) and the 70 tribal elders who sit down around the tabernacle, go off into an ecstatic trance, and can’t stop prophecying (although their prophecies aren’t true). I like the Children of Israel dancing naked before the Canaanite Golden Calf and whoring with the Moabite (or was it the Midianite) women (really a quasi-euphemism for lapsing into ancient religious ways)–all these are traces of cultural elements beginning to disappear before the book and monotheism, the first signs of modernity.

I also like that 1971 George C. Scott movie They Might be Giants about a wealthy man who thinks he’s Sherlock Holmes and manages to convince the psychologist his relatives hire that it’s better to live thinking there might be giants than not. Which is, of course, a re-working of Quixote. The words “they might be giants” are from the windmill chapter of the novel. Quixote convinces his friends that life is more interesting when he’s insane than when he’s not. The message of the Bible is somewhat different–there is so much effort put into stamping out the last vestiges of the ancient religions; those old beliefs are a kind of cultural insanity (uncleanness), though the problem for God and Moses is that they are also deeply attractive. As you all know (or maybe not), I wrote a book about Quixote which talks, among other things, about obsession, plot, and books.

I think I used to like Jack and the Beanstalk more than any other fairy tale. I seem to recall lying in bed a night, thinking of how I would approach a giant.

I don’t know where this is leading. Probably the fact that I drove 720 miles to Halifax on Monday and then most of the way back on Tuesday has something to do with this.

dg