WHEN God began building
the sky
and the land
|
בְּרֵאשִׁית
בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים אֵת הַשָּׁמַיִם וְאֵת הָאָרֶץ
|
the land was not yet arranged
darkness
over depths
wind of
God fluttering
on the
face of the water
|
וְהָאָרֶץ הָיְתָה תֹהוּ וָבֹהוּ וְחֹשֶׁךְ
עַל-פְּנֵי תְהוֹם וְרוּחַ אֱלֹהִים מְרַחֶפֶת עַל-פְּנֵי הַמָּיִם
|
then said God there should be light
and there
came to be light
|
וַיֹּאמֶר אֱלֹהִים יְהִי אוֹר וַיְהִי-אוֹר
|
God liked the light
God
separated light and darkness
|
וַיַּרְא אֱלֹהִים אֶת-הָאוֹר כִּי-טוֹב
וַיַּבְדֵּל אֱלֹהִים בֵּין הָאוֹר וּבֵין הַחֹשֶׁךְ
|
the light he called Day
and the
darkness he called Night
night
fell, morning dawned, one day
|
וַיִּקְרָא אֱלֹהִים לָאוֹר יוֹם וְלַחֹשֶׁךְ
קָרָא לָיְלָה וַיְהִי-עֶרֶב וַיְהִי-בֹקֶר יוֹם אֶחָד
|
LET me begin by introducing myself. My name is Alan. I was born in England and I have lived in several parts of the world, but since my mid-twenties I have lived mostly in the Basque Country in western Europe. I have always been fascinated by languages, I have studied linguistics, and I have worked professionally in the areas of language teaching, language recovery and translation.
 |
| Rural El Salvador |
The language spoken there now is Spanish, but before the arrival of Europeans, the territory now covered by El Salvador was inhabited by several different peoples. Some of them have disappeared while others remain but their specific ethnic identities are not properly acknowledged by the state or recognised in the society. I knew nothing about the country when I first went there, but by reading and asking I found out that only one original people still retains much knowledge of their historical language, and even that is fast disappearing.
These people are the Pipils who live in parts of the countryside in the west of El Salvador and the name of their language is Nawat. This is a language related to, and also named similarly to, Nahuatl, a relatively well-known Native American language, but Nahuatl (with TL at the end) is spoken in Mexico, and Nawat (with T at the end) is the language of the Pipils of El Salvador. A lot of people around the world have heard of Nahuatl, but very few outside El Salvador have ever heard of Nawat. For the two-and-a-half years I lived in El Salvador and since my return from there in 2005, I have dedicated much personal effort to supporting the Nawat language recovery movement in different ways. But that is also not the subject of today's talk.
 |
| Paula López, a native Nawat speaker, with Jan Morrow, director of the Nawat bible translation project, in El Salvador |
Well to cut a long story short, I said no, for a number of reasons which I shall not enumerate. But Jan insisted so I told him no again. And so it went on after I was back in Europe now making a living as a translator (but not of bibles!), and in the end, after much soul-searching, one day I said yes. I had my reasons for changing my mind, while Jan had his for wanting me to do it. He was intent on having it done, and given my knowledge of Nawat and the scarcity of speakers, I honestly don't think there was anyone else he could have given the job to. I had previously mentioned to Jan, in our leisurely chats over cups of coffee on a shaded terrace in a popular shopping centre in uptown San Salvador, something about my Jewish heritage and a degree of knowledge of Hebrew, and I know these were additional "perks" in his mind.
Therefore I think it must have come as quite a surprise to Jan, perhaps even a shock, when, after we decided to give it a go, I proposed that I should start by translating the New Testament first. Why? Long story, and not the subject of this talk. But as I sometimes say, who could be a better choice than a Jew to translate the words of Jesus?
I SPENT about three years translating the Christian New Testament from koiné Greek into Nawat, completed it, and then I've been taking a short rest from any kind of bible translation to do some other stuff and recharge my batteries, while Jan in the meantime has had a chance to try and raise enough funds to get me started on the next part of my job. This year I am starting to translate the Torah! And since I have only barely begun at this point, I am, so to speak, "in the beginning", בראשׁית (Bereishit).
Therefore I think it must have come as quite a surprise to Jan, perhaps even a shock, when, after we decided to give it a go, I proposed that I should start by translating the New Testament first. Why? Long story, and not the subject of this talk. But as I sometimes say, who could be a better choice than a Jew to translate the words of Jesus?
My love affair with Genesis
We belonged to a reform synagogue in England. I went to cheder on Sundays but to be honest nobody learnt all that much Hebrew there. Sure, if you paid attention you might know how to read the prayers in the siddur, but who said anything about knowing what you were reading? On the positive side of the scale, though, I will say this at least: if anyone who has done that "basic training" should later, at any time in their life, decide they want to move forward in their study of Hebrew, ancient or modern, that foundation will now serve a purpose as preliminary groundwork. And yet I consider my own preparation to have been relatively limited; and besides, I must confess that I haven't lived in a place with a Jewish community since the end of my adolescence. Luckily that's not quite the end of my story though.
It was in my mid-thirties that I had my next significant re-encounter with Judaism and Biblical Hebrew. It was not a religious encounter, and I want to say that to avoid misunderstandings. Some might say that God works in mysterious ways: be that as it may be, what I did was to (re)-discover ancient Hebrew. And Genesis.
The circumstances were very unlikely ones. For a while I was living in a lovely place called Aberystwyth, which is a small town located in yet another small country, Wales. I had some spare time and was looking for something to read or do (besides learning Welsh, but that story is also not for today). There was no internet yet, and if someone wanted to read about something in those days it was necessary to find bookshops or a library. As a university town, Aberystwyth possessed both. To the best of my knowledge there is no permanent Jewish community in Aberystwyth either, but there is a school of theology, and while I am not terribly interested in theology, the upshot was that I accidentally bumped into a number of Jewish texts there. One was the first chumash I had held in my hand in years, and opening it to the first page I started to read: ...בראשׁית etc.
Given the way I am built, if I had found myself able to breeze through it without difficulty, I probably would have done so for five minutes and then replaced the book on the shelf and walked on to wherever I had thought I was going, but this was difficult, so I persevered and carried on reading. It didn't go very well, so with that irking me I searched for and eventually found a good grammar book and after working through that I persevered some more. Like a stubborn turtle trying to drag itself over a stone rather than walking round it the easy way, I kept reading passages from Genesis in Hebew over and over, wanting to understand everything, trying to train my ear to catch not only the basic idea but also subtle nuances of meaning and the audible lilt of the sacred text. Gradually I did make some progress. And so it was that I "discovered" Biblical Hebrew (a different thing from Modern Israeli Hebrew) in Wales, at thirty-five, and in the process rediscovered a certain book which is commonly called Genesis. And that is probably the only imaginable way in which I could have been drawn back to an interest in Genesis, so maybe God does work in mysterious ways.
The circumstances were very unlikely ones. For a while I was living in a lovely place called Aberystwyth, which is a small town located in yet another small country, Wales. I had some spare time and was looking for something to read or do (besides learning Welsh, but that story is also not for today). There was no internet yet, and if someone wanted to read about something in those days it was necessary to find bookshops or a library. As a university town, Aberystwyth possessed both. To the best of my knowledge there is no permanent Jewish community in Aberystwyth either, but there is a school of theology, and while I am not terribly interested in theology, the upshot was that I accidentally bumped into a number of Jewish texts there. One was the first chumash I had held in my hand in years, and opening it to the first page I started to read: ...בראשׁית etc.
Given the way I am built, if I had found myself able to breeze through it without difficulty, I probably would have done so for five minutes and then replaced the book on the shelf and walked on to wherever I had thought I was going, but this was difficult, so I persevered and carried on reading. It didn't go very well, so with that irking me I searched for and eventually found a good grammar book and after working through that I persevered some more. Like a stubborn turtle trying to drag itself over a stone rather than walking round it the easy way, I kept reading passages from Genesis in Hebew over and over, wanting to understand everything, trying to train my ear to catch not only the basic idea but also subtle nuances of meaning and the audible lilt of the sacred text. Gradually I did make some progress. And so it was that I "discovered" Biblical Hebrew (a different thing from Modern Israeli Hebrew) in Wales, at thirty-five, and in the process rediscovered a certain book which is commonly called Genesis. And that is probably the only imaginable way in which I could have been drawn back to an interest in Genesis, so maybe God does work in mysterious ways.
Translating Genesis
And yet, what I found as I read the book of Genesis in Hebrew, was that although I recognised the large-scale "items" (such as the creation, Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, the Flood, Abram's migration, the near-sacrifice of Isaac, the story of Jacob and the great saga of Joseph in Egypt), the telling somehow didn't sound (to me) like anything I had heard or read before, and it still doesn't to this day. Supposedly only the language differs and yet everything sounds and feels different. I suspect this was part of what drove me on to keep reading Hebrew, always expecting to find a familiar text and instead encountering a fascinatingly new, different voice, one which I found strange yet familiar, enticing but soothing, and now I'll let you into a secret. It reads better in the original.
To put it another way, Genesis loses a lot in translation. That was my experience anyhow, and for about as long as I have "known" this I have been curious about how we are to explain it. As a translator I know that no translation is perfect. As I have delved into this, and worked as a translator myself, I have grown to respect the efforts of the great many individuals and committees that have valiantly attempted to render the Hebrew Bible well into English or any other languages, but I cannot help also noticing the places where they fail. If other translations can be difficult, this one seems more difficult and that is what I have been trying to explain to myself all these years.
Lots of factors are involved. Biblical Hebrew is a very different language from modern European languages. The text has certain qualities which are conveyed through that language, so when you change the language you cannot fully reproduce all the features of the text and give the reader or listener a complete experience (I am thinking primarily of a literary experience) quite comparable to what one believes would have been the experience of the first listeners when being exposed to the original text. It loses vitality, lustre, character. It is not necessarily the translator who is at fault; but the translations that are commonly read may play a part in concealing from us the "real" Genesis because we read them as though we were reading the real thing, and even come to consider them the "authentic" Genesis that we know, and thus without knowing it we are estranged from the actual experience of the real Genesis, and fail to realise what a beautiful book the original Genesis is.
Thus it is, first of all, with great trepidation that I come forward and put myself on the spot by trying to produce a new translation of a book I have come to love and stand in awe at, knowing full well what the pitfalls are and how difficult, indeed impossible, it is to achieve what any translator would ideally want to: to provide the listener with an experience truly comparable to that offered by the original text to its original intended audience. So I am not going to enter into this as one enters into a competition, because I have no hope of "winning", I am just agreeing to play a hand, to try it anyway, to carry out an experiment and see what can be come up with.
AND here, when I wish to tell you about this experiment, I am in an additionally awkward position because my own "performance" is in a language which you also don't understand, Nawat, so how can I tell you what I have done? So throwing caution to the wind, I am going to do the almost unthinkable, by presenting you with a rough English translation of my much more studied (although still provisional) Nawat translation of an ancient Hebrew text. Instead of getting too theoretical, I want to move on now to an example and let your ears judge for themselves, so here, then, is an ad hoc rendering of the Nawat version of Chapter 3 of Genesis, the story of Adam and Eve (or Hava) in the garden of Eden:
Lots of factors are involved. Biblical Hebrew is a very different language from modern European languages. The text has certain qualities which are conveyed through that language, so when you change the language you cannot fully reproduce all the features of the text and give the reader or listener a complete experience (I am thinking primarily of a literary experience) quite comparable to what one believes would have been the experience of the first listeners when being exposed to the original text. It loses vitality, lustre, character. It is not necessarily the translator who is at fault; but the translations that are commonly read may play a part in concealing from us the "real" Genesis because we read them as though we were reading the real thing, and even come to consider them the "authentic" Genesis that we know, and thus without knowing it we are estranged from the actual experience of the real Genesis, and fail to realise what a beautiful book the original Genesis is.
Thus it is, first of all, with great trepidation that I come forward and put myself on the spot by trying to produce a new translation of a book I have come to love and stand in awe at, knowing full well what the pitfalls are and how difficult, indeed impossible, it is to achieve what any translator would ideally want to: to provide the listener with an experience truly comparable to that offered by the original text to its original intended audience. So I am not going to enter into this as one enters into a competition, because I have no hope of "winning", I am just agreeing to play a hand, to try it anyway, to carry out an experiment and see what can be come up with.
Adam and Hava (an example)
Adam and Hava
1 the snake was a wise one
of all the
animals
that Our
Lord God made
and it
said to the woman:
so God has
said
you should
not eat
anything
from the trees of the garden?
2 said the woman to the snake:
the fruit
of the trees of the garden
we are allowed to eat
3 only the fruit of the tree
that’s in
the middle of the garden
God said:
don’t eat it
and do not
touch it
or else
you shall die
4 said the snake to the woman:
you’re not
going to die
5 rather, God knows
that the
day when you eat it
you’ll
open your eyes already
and become
like God
knowing
good and not good
6 the woman saw the tree
was good
for eating its fruit
and was
beautiful to look at
and good
for becoming knowledgeable
she took
its fruit and ate
and gave
it to her husband too
and he ate
7 and they both opened their eyes
they
realised that they were naked
they sewed
leaves of the amat tree
they made
loincloths to wear
8 they heard Our Lord God
strolling
in the garden when the breeze came
the man
and his wife hid
from Our Lord
God
among the
trees of the beautiful garden
9 Our Lord God called out
to the
man, saying: where are you?
10 he said: I heard you in the garden
and I was
frightened because I’m naked,
he said, and
I hid
11 he said: who has let you know,
he said, that
you are naked?
maybe
you’ve eaten
the fruit
of the tree
I ordered
you not to?
12 said the man: the woman
that you
put with me,
he said, she
gave me
the tree’s
fruit and I ate
13 said Our Lord God to the woman:
what did
you do?
said the
woman:
the snake
tricked me and I ate
14 said Our Lord God to the snake:
because
you did this
shame on
you among all the animals
and
everything that lives in the forest
on your
belly you shall move
and clay
will you eat forever
15 hatred I shall put
between
you and woman
and between
your children and her children
they will
crush your head
and you
shall bite at their feet
16 and this is what he said to the woman:
I will
make your sorrow so great
and when
you bear children
you will suffer
great pain
your
desire will be for your husband
and he
will wield authority over you
17 and this is what he said to the man:
because
you obeyed your wife
and ate
the fruit of the tree
that I
ordered you and said:
do not eat
it, he told him,
the land
will be tough to till
you will
eat with sorrow
each day
while you live
18 thorns and weeds will sprout for you
you shall
eat grass from the earth
19 your forehead will sweat greatly
to eat
your tortilla
until you
return to the ground
for from
the earth you were taken
because
you are clay
and clay
will you turn into again
20 he named his wife Hava
she became
mother to everyone
21 and Our Lord God made for the man and
his wife
garments
of skin
and
clothed them
22 and Our Lord God said:
now
mankind has already become
like one
of us knowing good and not good
and now so
he won’t reach his hand out
and also
take the fruit of the living tree
and eat it
and live forever
23 so Our Lord God expelled him
from the
beautiful garden of Eden
and
commanded him to work
on the
land from which he had been taken
24 he chased the man away
and he
placed to the east of the beautiful garden of Eden
the
Kerubim with the sword
that
glitters and turns
guarding
the way to the living tree
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There are many things that we could notice about this passage (or any other) which would possibly be of interest to some of you, and probably of no great interest at all to others, and I will only pick out a couple of points for now.
When you translate you have to work within the linguistic resources available in the language you are translating into. Nawat has no basic word in its lexicon that means either 'bad' or 'evil' and these concepts have to be referred to as something equivalent to "not good". Thus the עץ הדעת טוב ורע has to be rendered as the tree for knowing good and not good. There is nothing illogical or otherwise objectionable about that way of putting it, it just isn't what our ears have been trained to hear it called in English so we do a double-take. But bear in mind that the same basic problem arises in English, which also lacks direct equivalents for some things in Hebrew. (Being the language of a more sophisticated culture which has words for many precise concepts, as Greek and Latin did, doesn't take care of this problem: for one thing, a perfect translation which matches the original might actually call for a word with a less precise meaning!)
What was Adam made of?
OF course, when you translate you also must work from the meanings of the original text, making sure first of all that they are understood, in context, as correctly and fully as possible and then the best route is found to putting across precisely those meanings (and not others) in a different language. If you think it is simple arithmetic, a = b or 2 + 2 = 4, then think again. I wonder how many of you noticed that I said:
because you are clay
Here, the most traditional English translations speak of dust rather than clay. Lest you start to think that I have "changed" the story here, I would draw your attention to the fact that the Hebrew word that occurs in this text, עפר (‛afar), is actually ambiguous.
Now of course, just because a word can have more than one meaning or translation doesn't necessarily mean that translators are free to take their pick, because in context one or another sense may be found to be correct, or incorrect. So what is Adam made of? Is it up to the translator to decide? God forbid! What it is up to the translator to do is to search, and if at first you don't succeed, search some more (or read about other people's searches, at least).
What the translator finds (or has read), in this case, is that the passage cited above forms the second half of a narrative which begins near the beginning of Chapter 2 with the creation of humans and animals, and of a garden, and God's instructions to Adam and Hava. This is sometimes referred to as the second creation myth, the first one being the creation of everything in six days which is told immediately previously. According to the Documentary Hypothesis, the two stories had different authors, present different styles etc.
Here we have a story that tells of how God created people and animals and put the people in a place with some instructions which they did not follow and the trouble they got themselves into as a result. At the beginning of this story it is stated that:
and again, what I am translating as 'clay' is of course in Hebrew עפר which others have translated as 'dust'. So what is עפר?
Well, a pronounced characteristic of this very ancient story which is constantly being noticed by commentators is how very anthropomorphic a picture of God it paints, quite independently of the fact that you can consider those brush strokes to be as metaphorical as you like. However you look at it, this is a God who is spoken of as taking a stroll in the garden he has made, taking a stroll!, and doing so at the very best time of the day for a stroll in a country with a hot climate, when the day starts to cool off and you can feel a breeze! How much more human-like can you get? Even in his creative actions, God is depicted as man-like, so he doesn't create the garden of Eden, he plants it. So, what might we expect such a human-like God to make the first human out of before blowing life into its nostrils: dust, or clay?
But the onus of decision on the poor translator's shoulder is lightened considerably when we observe that in Hebrew the verb used to say what God did at this point is וייצר (vayitzer), which is sometimes translated into English as fashioned. This, we are told by the specialists who know about these things, is the verb typically used in ancient Hebrew to denote what a potter does when shaping objects out of clay.
It all fits together like a jigsaw puzzle: God is depicted as a potter making a man out of what potters use to make things which is not dust. Because he is God, he does what no human potter can do, bringing his creation to life (but he does so by blowing air into his nose, again a stunningly mundane way of describing a divine act). Next God is depicted as a gardener as he plants a garden for the people he has made, and now adopting a parental role instructs them on what they are allowed to do. They disobey and God waits through the heat of the day (and the rising dramatic tension of the story) and then... he goes out for a walk in his garden where his creatures live. He calls to them, and asks Hava, rhetorically for sure because he knows the answer as well as she does: What have you done? - just as any parent or teacher would do in comparable circumstances, now, and presumably also when this story was composed. They have a "little talk". In another rather "human-like" gesture, God exhibits about as much patience as you might reasonably expect in the awkward circumstances (because he obviously must love his creatures), but he knows (and we know) that he now must impose some sort of discipline, and in a rather brief lecture he informs Adam: you are clay because that is what I made you out of, and like a potter at his wheel, it is within my power at any time and without warning to take my latest creation and if I am not pleased with it, roll it back up into a ball of clay and start again, like Demi Moore in Ghost. Which is in a way what mother nature in fact does; the ancient Hebrews just hadn't come up with a word for "recycle" yet. So: clay.
However, in Gen. 13:16 God will say to Abraham that he will make his descendants like עפר הארץ (‛afar haaretz) and in 28:14 he repeats the promise to Jacob. That God is not going to make Abraham's children like clay of the earth is clarified, if we were in any doubt, by the explanation he gives Abraham: אם־יוכל אישׁ למנות את־עפר הארץ גם־זרעך ימנה which in Nawat reads: "if anyone can count the dust of the ground, also your seed will they count" (i.e. nobody can put a number on it). Here it would not make sense to translate עפר as clay. So much for any childish idea we might have entertained about making one and only one word in the target langauge the permanent equivalent of each and every word in the original language, which as any translator will tell you is a good recipe if what you are aiming to produce is nonsense. My point being that here once again the text usually tells us what it means, if only we know how to read and listen to it.
These examples, which could easily be multiplied ad infinitum, show how, when as translators we can't be sure how to translate something, we do not please ourselves, but rather go back to our text over and over again waiting for it to tell us what we want to know. I can't say it always works but when it does, it does. And that is what I have to say, for now, about respecting and reflecting the meaning of the original text - but not about how to translate it!
I HAVEN'T finished with the word עפר yet! The use of this word, and the idea it conveys, in the Adam and Hava story illustrates another point about the text.
The original Hebrew text of the Torah (sometimes known as the consonantal text; it predates the invention of vowel signs in Hebrew and is the text still found written on Torah scrolls) shows no chapter divisions, or even sentence divisions for that matter; these things were also much later inventions. The only clues to recognising the smaller units of this text are (1) the reader's intuition and (2) traditions about such divisions which have subsequently evolved. Such intuitions are an example of the reader or listener interacting with the text, and of the text giving the reader or listener little clues along the way through the only medium originally available to it: its own words.
One way we can tell that the story of Adam and Hava begins with God fashioning Adam out of clay and placing him in the garden he has made, and ends with God removing Adam from the garden and reminding him that he is clay, is because this makes for a coherent narrative structure. Notice that it is more about narrative structure than topical content per se; you can have more than one story about the same subject but that doesn't make them the same story. That is why for example we should talk about two creation stories; it is not right to object that creation only happened once, so "obviously" there can only be one story about it. Not only can we see that there are clearly two narrations of creation, but also that they don't cover the same ground because one story ends when God was satisfied with his work and rested, while the other goes on to discuss something that went "wrong" and what God had to do to correct for it. But how do we know that is all one story? I have said that the words of the text tell us these things, but how do they do that?
One way in which narrative structure is signalled by the text which is illustrated by the example discussed is through the use of symmetry. Symmetry means being the same on both sides or at both ends; symmetry in discourse may refer to a correspondence between the way something starts and the way it ends. Such symmetry may manifest itself in terms of images, themes or just words and phrases. These ideas are not unfamiliar to us but perhaps they acquire added importance in the case of a text like this where other "external" indications of where chapters or other units begin and end are lacking, whether it be starting a new page, the placement of a title of the use of punctuation. In any case, it is common knowledge that it is very typical in the Bible that the same or similar words or phrases occur at the two extremes, the beginning and the end of a text unit, and this acts as a conventional signal to listeners or readers about the text's internal structure. And let's keep in mind the oral nature of these texts: they may have been written down but they were still intended to be heard more than seen. So even if the text had always had punctuation, paragraph breaks, capital letters and so on, listeners wouldn't be able to hear them. Listeners to oral literature, however, still manage to perceive structure in extended texts, but they can only infer that structure from what they know, and a large part of what they know are the words they hear.
The mediaeval Masoretes who established the exact reading of the biblical texts that is now accepted decided on the pointing of the Bible, the addition of all the dots and squiggles, to indicate how to pronounce the consonants and what vowels to pronounce where, with the purpose of making sure we know how to read it out loud, that is, to preserve not just the written but the oral side of the text too. They were so aware of the difficulties with this that they also put in symbols called cantillation marks to make sure each phrase was intoned correctly when read out before a congregation. But this had not been done until then so how did the Masoretes know? From tradition, and from the words themselves, just like us! The fact is that on the whole they did a very good job, and what they produced is perhaps the most important guide and perceptive analysis we have of how to read and therefore also hear the Hebrew Bible. There are also places where we may wish to contest their suggestions and try out alternative readings of obscure and difficult bits where their reading sound odd and in conflict with what we think and know, but that's fine, it's nice to have something to argue about occasionally, and a very Jewish thing if I may say so.
Syntactically Biblical Hebrew is very different from Greek, Latin or modern European languages in the austerity of its resources for indicating, through things like conjunctions, the relations between clauses and sentences. There is one Hebrew "conjunction" which occurs at the beginining of practically every Hebrew sentence, ו, which is conventionally translated as 'and', but in fact that often makes little sense at all, apart from making the English text sound odd and artificial, and that means it's a bad translation since the original text we are translating does not sound odd and artificial in that way, so why should the translation? We might think that by putting and at the beginning of every English sentence we are reflecting the original but we're not, we're creating effects and even meanings that the author never intended. One day I'll come back to this problem, but for now the point is that in European languages we are used to using the language (through conjunctions and such) to tell the listener how to fit the clauses and sentences together into a continuous discourse. In Biblical Hebrew all that is mostly just implied, meaning that it is the listener's job to figure it out.
A continuous text in Greek, Latin, Spanish, German or English is like a necklace where each idea is represented by a bead. The beads appear to us already strung together in a necklace. In Genesis, the ideas are presented in succession like beads, one after another, but the string is not provided. As listeners encounter the beads they themselves string them, so to speak, forming the necklace themselves. They construct the discourse out of the "beads". To "hear" Genesis, we need to listen and be able to string the beads. Fortunately, people can do this spontaneously and usually without even being aware they are doing it, and this is why oral texts are so widely accessible and play so well on the ear as long as we know we are supposed to listen. All that Genesis really demands is that we listen. And that translators listen too.
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| Temple Emanu-El (Honolulu) Seniors' Group meeting where I read my English version of "Adam and Hava" and gave a Nawat reading of the first creation story |
When you translate you have to work within the linguistic resources available in the language you are translating into. Nawat has no basic word in its lexicon that means either 'bad' or 'evil' and these concepts have to be referred to as something equivalent to "not good". Thus the עץ הדעת טוב ורע has to be rendered as the tree for knowing good and not good. There is nothing illogical or otherwise objectionable about that way of putting it, it just isn't what our ears have been trained to hear it called in English so we do a double-take. But bear in mind that the same basic problem arises in English, which also lacks direct equivalents for some things in Hebrew. (Being the language of a more sophisticated culture which has words for many precise concepts, as Greek and Latin did, doesn't take care of this problem: for one thing, a perfect translation which matches the original might actually call for a word with a less precise meaning!)
OF course, when you translate you also must work from the meanings of the original text, making sure first of all that they are understood, in context, as correctly and fully as possible and then the best route is found to putting across precisely those meanings (and not others) in a different language. If you think it is simple arithmetic, a = b or 2 + 2 = 4, then think again. I wonder how many of you noticed that I said:
because you are clay
and clay will you turn into again
Now of course, just because a word can have more than one meaning or translation doesn't necessarily mean that translators are free to take their pick, because in context one or another sense may be found to be correct, or incorrect. So what is Adam made of? Is it up to the translator to decide? God forbid! What it is up to the translator to do is to search, and if at first you don't succeed, search some more (or read about other people's searches, at least).
What the translator finds (or has read), in this case, is that the passage cited above forms the second half of a narrative which begins near the beginning of Chapter 2 with the creation of humans and animals, and of a garden, and God's instructions to Adam and Hava. This is sometimes referred to as the second creation myth, the first one being the creation of everything in six days which is told immediately previously. According to the Documentary Hypothesis, the two stories had different authors, present different styles etc.
Here we have a story that tells of how God created people and animals and put the people in a place with some instructions which they did not follow and the trouble they got themselves into as a result. At the beginning of this story it is stated that:
7 then Our Lord God made
Man with
clay from the earth
blew living
breath into his nostrils
and the Man came to life
and the Man came to life
and again, what I am translating as 'clay' is of course in Hebrew עפר which others have translated as 'dust'. So what is עפר?
Well, a pronounced characteristic of this very ancient story which is constantly being noticed by commentators is how very anthropomorphic a picture of God it paints, quite independently of the fact that you can consider those brush strokes to be as metaphorical as you like. However you look at it, this is a God who is spoken of as taking a stroll in the garden he has made, taking a stroll!, and doing so at the very best time of the day for a stroll in a country with a hot climate, when the day starts to cool off and you can feel a breeze! How much more human-like can you get? Even in his creative actions, God is depicted as man-like, so he doesn't create the garden of Eden, he plants it. So, what might we expect such a human-like God to make the first human out of before blowing life into its nostrils: dust, or clay?
But the onus of decision on the poor translator's shoulder is lightened considerably when we observe that in Hebrew the verb used to say what God did at this point is וייצר (vayitzer), which is sometimes translated into English as fashioned. This, we are told by the specialists who know about these things, is the verb typically used in ancient Hebrew to denote what a potter does when shaping objects out of clay.
It all fits together like a jigsaw puzzle: God is depicted as a potter making a man out of what potters use to make things which is not dust. Because he is God, he does what no human potter can do, bringing his creation to life (but he does so by blowing air into his nose, again a stunningly mundane way of describing a divine act). Next God is depicted as a gardener as he plants a garden for the people he has made, and now adopting a parental role instructs them on what they are allowed to do. They disobey and God waits through the heat of the day (and the rising dramatic tension of the story) and then... he goes out for a walk in his garden where his creatures live. He calls to them, and asks Hava, rhetorically for sure because he knows the answer as well as she does: What have you done? - just as any parent or teacher would do in comparable circumstances, now, and presumably also when this story was composed. They have a "little talk". In another rather "human-like" gesture, God exhibits about as much patience as you might reasonably expect in the awkward circumstances (because he obviously must love his creatures), but he knows (and we know) that he now must impose some sort of discipline, and in a rather brief lecture he informs Adam: you are clay because that is what I made you out of, and like a potter at his wheel, it is within my power at any time and without warning to take my latest creation and if I am not pleased with it, roll it back up into a ball of clay and start again, like Demi Moore in Ghost. Which is in a way what mother nature in fact does; the ancient Hebrews just hadn't come up with a word for "recycle" yet. So: clay.
However, in Gen. 13:16 God will say to Abraham that he will make his descendants like עפר הארץ (‛afar haaretz) and in 28:14 he repeats the promise to Jacob. That God is not going to make Abraham's children like clay of the earth is clarified, if we were in any doubt, by the explanation he gives Abraham: אם־יוכל אישׁ למנות את־עפר הארץ גם־זרעך ימנה which in Nawat reads: "if anyone can count the dust of the ground, also your seed will they count" (i.e. nobody can put a number on it). Here it would not make sense to translate עפר as clay. So much for any childish idea we might have entertained about making one and only one word in the target langauge the permanent equivalent of each and every word in the original language, which as any translator will tell you is a good recipe if what you are aiming to produce is nonsense. My point being that here once again the text usually tells us what it means, if only we know how to read and listen to it.
These examples, which could easily be multiplied ad infinitum, show how, when as translators we can't be sure how to translate something, we do not please ourselves, but rather go back to our text over and over again waiting for it to tell us what we want to know. I can't say it always works but when it does, it does. And that is what I have to say, for now, about respecting and reflecting the meaning of the original text - but not about how to translate it!
Hearing Genesis
The original Hebrew text of the Torah (sometimes known as the consonantal text; it predates the invention of vowel signs in Hebrew and is the text still found written on Torah scrolls) shows no chapter divisions, or even sentence divisions for that matter; these things were also much later inventions. The only clues to recognising the smaller units of this text are (1) the reader's intuition and (2) traditions about such divisions which have subsequently evolved. Such intuitions are an example of the reader or listener interacting with the text, and of the text giving the reader or listener little clues along the way through the only medium originally available to it: its own words.
One way we can tell that the story of Adam and Hava begins with God fashioning Adam out of clay and placing him in the garden he has made, and ends with God removing Adam from the garden and reminding him that he is clay, is because this makes for a coherent narrative structure. Notice that it is more about narrative structure than topical content per se; you can have more than one story about the same subject but that doesn't make them the same story. That is why for example we should talk about two creation stories; it is not right to object that creation only happened once, so "obviously" there can only be one story about it. Not only can we see that there are clearly two narrations of creation, but also that they don't cover the same ground because one story ends when God was satisfied with his work and rested, while the other goes on to discuss something that went "wrong" and what God had to do to correct for it. But how do we know that is all one story? I have said that the words of the text tell us these things, but how do they do that?
One way in which narrative structure is signalled by the text which is illustrated by the example discussed is through the use of symmetry. Symmetry means being the same on both sides or at both ends; symmetry in discourse may refer to a correspondence between the way something starts and the way it ends. Such symmetry may manifest itself in terms of images, themes or just words and phrases. These ideas are not unfamiliar to us but perhaps they acquire added importance in the case of a text like this where other "external" indications of where chapters or other units begin and end are lacking, whether it be starting a new page, the placement of a title of the use of punctuation. In any case, it is common knowledge that it is very typical in the Bible that the same or similar words or phrases occur at the two extremes, the beginning and the end of a text unit, and this acts as a conventional signal to listeners or readers about the text's internal structure. And let's keep in mind the oral nature of these texts: they may have been written down but they were still intended to be heard more than seen. So even if the text had always had punctuation, paragraph breaks, capital letters and so on, listeners wouldn't be able to hear them. Listeners to oral literature, however, still manage to perceive structure in extended texts, but they can only infer that structure from what they know, and a large part of what they know are the words they hear.
The mediaeval Masoretes who established the exact reading of the biblical texts that is now accepted decided on the pointing of the Bible, the addition of all the dots and squiggles, to indicate how to pronounce the consonants and what vowels to pronounce where, with the purpose of making sure we know how to read it out loud, that is, to preserve not just the written but the oral side of the text too. They were so aware of the difficulties with this that they also put in symbols called cantillation marks to make sure each phrase was intoned correctly when read out before a congregation. But this had not been done until then so how did the Masoretes know? From tradition, and from the words themselves, just like us! The fact is that on the whole they did a very good job, and what they produced is perhaps the most important guide and perceptive analysis we have of how to read and therefore also hear the Hebrew Bible. There are also places where we may wish to contest their suggestions and try out alternative readings of obscure and difficult bits where their reading sound odd and in conflict with what we think and know, but that's fine, it's nice to have something to argue about occasionally, and a very Jewish thing if I may say so.
Syntactically Biblical Hebrew is very different from Greek, Latin or modern European languages in the austerity of its resources for indicating, through things like conjunctions, the relations between clauses and sentences. There is one Hebrew "conjunction" which occurs at the beginining of practically every Hebrew sentence, ו, which is conventionally translated as 'and', but in fact that often makes little sense at all, apart from making the English text sound odd and artificial, and that means it's a bad translation since the original text we are translating does not sound odd and artificial in that way, so why should the translation? We might think that by putting and at the beginning of every English sentence we are reflecting the original but we're not, we're creating effects and even meanings that the author never intended. One day I'll come back to this problem, but for now the point is that in European languages we are used to using the language (through conjunctions and such) to tell the listener how to fit the clauses and sentences together into a continuous discourse. In Biblical Hebrew all that is mostly just implied, meaning that it is the listener's job to figure it out.
A continuous text in Greek, Latin, Spanish, German or English is like a necklace where each idea is represented by a bead. The beads appear to us already strung together in a necklace. In Genesis, the ideas are presented in succession like beads, one after another, but the string is not provided. As listeners encounter the beads they themselves string them, so to speak, forming the necklace themselves. They construct the discourse out of the "beads". To "hear" Genesis, we need to listen and be able to string the beads. Fortunately, people can do this spontaneously and usually without even being aware they are doing it, and this is why oral texts are so widely accessible and play so well on the ear as long as we know we are supposed to listen. All that Genesis really demands is that we listen. And that translators listen too.
Poetic features of the text
Now we do this in response to naturally occurring ordinary phenomena, but surely it is one of the wonders of artistic genius to be able to create "texts" which, in imitation of real-life phenomena, contain elements which likewise set up strange patterns and harmonies and echoes which the human mind (or heart or spirit) somehow picks up on and responds to, sometimes not even knowing why or what, yet perhaps being drawn or led thereby towards a higher quality of experience in some sense?
One word in our vocabulary to describe this marvellous human creative ability is poetry. Clearly in this sense for something to contain poetry it doesn't need to be a poem. There can be poetry in any artistic production, in different degrees and of different types. And when I say that Genesis is a poetic book or that it is full of poetry, I am not calling Genesis a poem. Well, not quite, though maybe it is not far off. Genesis probably contains more poetry than any of us hear in it. I don't think the mundane familiarity of Genesis and its stories and phrases does much to help us perceive the poetry; nor, or course, does the practice of reading it in translation, which is so widespread that most people scarcely ever stop to remember that there is another, different text that is the original one. In my opinion the poetic qualities of Genesis are at least as much a part of what makes it great, universal literature as anything else in it. So a translation that silences that part of the text is not a full translation; it may contain 50 chapters, yet it is no more complete than if it reached the middle of Chapter 14 and suddenly ended! Now I admit that reproducing the poetic qualities of a text in a translation is especially challenging and not something that can ever be achieved to perfection, but we can try to do something about it. And for that, once again, the translator's first task is to go to the original text, in Hebrew, and listen!
So we have seen that sometimes structure, character and additional meaning is given to a text, from within the text, by interplays of ideas (such as the idea of God as potter appearing near the beginning of the Adam and Hava story and then being alluded to again, more subtly, near the end), creating gently interconnected or crisscrossing cognitive patterns which may only touch the listener's consciousness as a background of whispers of which the hearer is never fully aware. This is a quality of literature in general, as an art form. The ordinary reader or listener doesn't need to know what is happening in those places - maybe it just happens - but the translator needs to try to notice.
Then there are the effects which have to do with the medium: interplays of words, phrases or even just sounds. Did you know that the text of Genesis, the real Hebrew Genesis, is full of puns? They are absolutely everywhere. Puns are usually untranslatable, of course, which is a shame. Sometimes this leads to awkward places in a story where, so to speak, the narrator seems to pause to give the audience time for a brief chuckle, or at least a knowing nod of the head, and there is none because, in translation, nobody has heard the "joke". Not that such word-plays and "puns" were necessarily a laughing matter for the original author and listeners; perhaps they took them seriously, perhaps they did not.
One of the first puns in Genesis is where it says that woman will be called woman because she was taken from man (Gen. 2:32 לזאת יקרא אשׁה כי מאישׁ לקחה־זאת). That is because in Hebrew the words for woman and man sound similar. But it is also perhaps because, etymologically, it is a mere coincidence that they sound similar, as the words have completely different origins (the spelling actually reflects this: notice that אישׁ iš has a yod in it, but אשׁה išša doesn't). In other words, you could argue what makes this "funny" is not that they sound similar but that they only do so accidentally. That is surely what provoked the comment, as otherwise it would be a very strange thing to say; you might as well write in your great universally-revered creation story that the reason why God called a teapot a teapot is because it is a pot for making tea in: what a banal thing to say! On the contrary, it is there because it was a pun, although the pun is lost even on Hebrew speakers now because the separate origins of אישׁ and אשׁה are no longer common knowledge. Conclusion: the people who wrote and first read or listened to the book of Genesis must have been a people who loved playing around with words. Of course for the translator this is a nightmare.
Many cases of "punning" or word-games are much subtler than this. One example occurs in the middle of the Adam and Hava story at the "joint" between the two halves of this story, between the statement that the man and his wife in the Garden of Eden were naked and they felt no shame (Gen. 2:25) and the very next verse (3:1) which says that of all the animals that God had made, the snake was a wise one. It just so happens that the two words chosen for naked and wise, by a coincidence, sound almost the same: ויהיו שׁניהם ערומים האדם ואשׁתו ולא יתבשׁשׁו׃ והנחשׁ היה ערום מכל חית השׂדה אשׁר עשׂה יהוה אלהים׃. This cannot be a coincidence, and nobody seeing or hearing the Hebrew misses the similarity, but the only explanation I can find for it is that it is a playful use of casually similar-sounding words to "bridge" from one scene of the story to the next in a rather non-consequential way, it has to be said. Perhaps the closest analogy I can think of is what American newsreaders do when they bridge to the next item by using the flimsiest of "common topics" as a pivot: "...and speaking of the weather...". And yet, it still serves to bind two scenes of the story together at the seam, and is further evidence that the two belong to the same larger narrative unit.
So, all sorts of poetic devices are constantly being brought into play in the course of Genesis, and their basis is either some sort of play with ideas or some sort of play with words, or of course both. The narrator of Genesis, not being of the kind who laugh when telling a joke, recites it with a straight face and leaves it to the audience to catch on, and so it is with the entire poetic paraphernalia deployed: we are presented with the devices but not told what they are. And the best way not to see them at all is to go with a translation that focuses on translating "the facts" without paying attention to how those facts are being told.
Another much-used device in the fabric of the Genesis text is widespread use of repetition of words and phrases. Take the opening words of Genesis, where in a passage only 52 words long in the Hebrew the following seven words (not counting little words like the) occur more than once: called, darkness, day, God, land, light, night:
when God began building
the sky and the land
the land was not yet arranged
darkness over depths
wind of God fluttering
on the face of the water
then said God there should be light
and there came to be light
God liked the light
God separated light and darkness
the light he called Day
and the darkness he called Night
night fell, morning dawned, one day
This is a kind of device that we usually can manage to replicate in our translation, although stylistically we might think it grates against our own language's stylistic aesthetics. I don't think this usage meets any such obstacle in oral cultures, and this is one way in which it is probably easier to get across the right textual "feeling" in a linguistically less sophisticated language.
Now a word about the layout I have used for many Nawat passages. The "beads" may be said to be the lines in which the text is laid out. If the logical nexus between two clauses in the Hebrew is not spelt out and could be ambiguous (if not for listeners' capacity to make their own sense out of the chain of events as told), in which case the classical translations will often step in and "tie the clauses together" to ensure a coherent and rational structure, then why should the translator glue the pieces together in one particular way? The words we have just read also illustrate this:
when God began building
the sky and the land
the land was not yet arranged
darkness over depths
wind of God fluttering
on the face of the water
This reading of the text is cinematographic, like a sequence of static images to set the scene prior to the start of the action: the land unarranged, darkness over depths, wind of God fluttering, on the face of the water. Indeed, if pressed I wouldn't know how to say for sure exactly what any of these "images" is really like: the words are suggestive but the picture remains quite vague. That is true of the Hebrew text here too, and by imitating that vagueness what I hope to be doing is to pass on to listeners the same uncertainty and freedom to build what they like out of these almost disjointed phrases that are in the original text. The land was not yet arranged and neither is our visualization of what that might look like: so be it! Who knows what תהו ובהו really looks like anyway! (There is also a particular, well-known syntactic issue surrounding this initial bit, which I will come to shortly.)on the face of the water
Forcing the hearer to construct the full discourse meaning out of the word groups rather than spoonfeeding an over-specified syntactic interpretation achieves, for the hearer, an enhanced vividness. The words and phrases fall on the ear in a different way. The mind comes alive as it picks up the word-pictures and gets busy trying to fit them together. And in my opinion, it brings the Nawat-speaking listener a step closer to the experience of the original text's target audience. Because Hebrew and Nawat are different languages, it is not necessarily the case that phrases or lines in one language correspond directly to those in the other. To attempt to do that results in language that is very forced and lacks the freshness and naturalness of the original, and which is precisely one of the things we are trying to convey in the translation. Rather, what is being done is that a techique is being used to "create a feeling" in the listener which is more akin to what is conjured up by the Hebrew text, through means that are not identical in a literal way but fundamentally similar.
In the beginning... of what?
Actually what I talked about is a very well-known problem in the literature on the subject and I take none of the credit for "discovering" this, but it is still a good case in point about how significant small details can be, and also how they do often link up to bigger issues. Anybody who can read Hebrew and is interested in seeing the piece of text I will talk about (the first words of Genesis), and doesn't already have it in front of them or know it by heart, can see the text at the top of this article.
בראשׁית (b'reshit, sometimes pronounced bereishit or indeed breyshis) means 'in the beginning'. In the Hebrew tradition, rather than the kind of titles we are used to in English, bodies of text are designated by their first word, and so בראשׁית is also the Hebrew name of the book of Genesis, the first book of the Torah. Furthermore, in the Jewish reading tradition of the Torah, it is divided up into just the right number of weekly chunks or "portions" to get through everything in a year, and each portion is designated by its first word, so that בראשׁית is furthermore also the name for the first weekly Torah portion which is read out to Jewish congregations all around the world on the week after Simchat Torah, which is a yearly celebration of the Torah held when reaching the end of the Torah and starting all over again. Thus this word is full of all sorts of meanings and associations in connection with Jewish religious cult, but actually here I am not concerned with any of that, only with its meaning in its original context as the first word of the first line of the first book of the Torah. In the beginning.
In the classic English translation of the Old and New Testaments which dates from the beginning of the 17th century, commonly known as the King James Version (KJV), this is how the first verses of Genesis are translated:
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
And what could possibly be wrong with that! (Apart, that is, from the fact that all the sentences except the very first one begin with and, regarding which see above.) Most subsequent English translations of the Bible, of which there have been many, are ultimately based on or at least heavily influenced by this one, even when they claim they are not. But this was neither the first translation of the Bible into English, nor was it the most original; it was in fact largely based on the earlier translations and in any case, in the last resort, on much older translations into other European languages, particularly the Latin translation, which was in turn largely drawn from the Greek one. The Greek one, believe it or not, may actually have been translated just from the Hebrew! That, however, had taken place as early as the second century BCE and was done by Jews. To be honest all these translations say pretty much the same thing. The first verse goes as follows:
Septuagint: Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἐποίησεν ὁ θεὸς τὸν οὐρανὸν καὶ τὴν γῆν.
Vulgate: in principio creavit Deus caelum et terram
King James: In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
In contrast to the older versions, the King James Version committee threw in a definite article between in and beginning as required by English grammar, just as the Vulgate (as the Latin version is known) lacks one because of its grammar; the Greek version could have had an article (the language has one) but doesn't use it here, perhaps on account of the Hebrew which I am now coming to.
Hebrew also could have had a definite article here but it is not there. The way we know is from the vowel: with the article it would have been בָּ (ba-) but without the article it is בְּ (b'- with the sh'wa vowel). Now this raises a problem for the grammarians: why is there no definite article if it is supposed to mean 'in the beginning'? But if it doesn't mean 'in the beginning' then what does it mean? 'In a beginning'? Unlikely.
In fact the only case in which we would expect to find the definite article absent would be if it were a construct: construct nouns never take the article (just as possessed nouns don't take an article in Welsh), you say ha-bayit 'the house' but beyt ha-yalda 'the girl's house', literally 'house the-girl'. We might say that the construct beyt means '(the) house-of'. Similarly we would say ba-bayit 'in the house' but b'-veyt ha-yalda 'in the girl's house', literally 'in-house the-girl'. Saying b'-reshit 'in beginning' can only be interpreted as 'in-(the)-beginning-of...' and raises the question 'in the beginning of WHAT?' (just as ar ddechrau on its own would lead Welsh speakers to ask: ar ddechrau BETH?). So, in the beginning of what indeed?
In fact the only case in which we would expect to find the definite article absent would be if it were a construct: construct nouns never take the article (just as possessed nouns don't take an article in Welsh), you say ha-bayit 'the house' but beyt ha-yalda 'the girl's house', literally 'house the-girl'. We might say that the construct beyt means '(the) house-of'. Similarly we would say ba-bayit 'in the house' but b'-veyt ha-yalda 'in the girl's house', literally 'in-house the-girl'. Saying b'-reshit 'in beginning' can only be interpreted as 'in-(the)-beginning-of...' and raises the question 'in the beginning of WHAT?' (just as ar ddechrau on its own would lead Welsh speakers to ask: ar ddechrau BETH?). So, in the beginning of what indeed?
There is only one possible answer to that question, it seems: the construct is always linked to whatever follows it. But what follows בראשׁית in this text is not a noun phrase as we would normally expect, it is a clause: ברא אלהים את השׁמים ואת הארץ 'God created the heaven and the earth'. To reconcile this, we might assume that perhaps this clause is to be understood as the complement of b'reshit, which gives us something like 'in the beginning of God (having) created the heaven and the earth'. But is that even grammatially possible? Well, I defer to the Hebrew grammarians who, it seems, think that while the construction is not common, it is not altogether impossible.
Thus we have found a solution to the grammatical conundrum: the reason for the schwa vowel under בְּ is that the meaning is not 'In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth' but rather 'In the beginning of God creating the heaven and the earth'. Notice, however, that this solves one problem by raising a whole new one, for we have just utterly changed the meaning of the first line of Genesis!
Not only that but we have also changed the grammatical context of the next few lines too. In the "old" translation the first verse was a complete, self-contained sentence which made an assertion: In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth PERIOD. And the earth etc. etc. Now, however, the first verse has been changed into a time clause. "In the beginning of God's creating the heaven and the earth" can be paraphrased more idiomatically as "When God started creating the heaven and the earth...". This is a subordinate clause, dependent on something that comes later in the sentence. So what happened when God started creating the heaven and the earth?
One of the most reliable English translations that I have seen, in my opinion, is the Jewish Publication Society's Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures. It seems to be based on sound, up-to-date scholarship where key issues are concerned (such as this one) though fairly conservative otherwise (i.e. it retains much of the same phrasing as other English Bibles, some of which dates back to the days of the KJV as I have said). Here is its rendering of the verses under consideration, which I think is interesting:
When God began to create heaven and earth — the earth being unformed and void, with darkness over the surface of the deep and a wind from God sweeping over the water — God said, "Let there be light"; and there was light.
Thus we have found a solution to the grammatical conundrum: the reason for the schwa vowel under בְּ is that the meaning is not 'In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth' but rather 'In the beginning of God creating the heaven and the earth'. Notice, however, that this solves one problem by raising a whole new one, for we have just utterly changed the meaning of the first line of Genesis!
Not only that but we have also changed the grammatical context of the next few lines too. In the "old" translation the first verse was a complete, self-contained sentence which made an assertion: In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth PERIOD. And the earth etc. etc. Now, however, the first verse has been changed into a time clause. "In the beginning of God's creating the heaven and the earth" can be paraphrased more idiomatically as "When God started creating the heaven and the earth...". This is a subordinate clause, dependent on something that comes later in the sentence. So what happened when God started creating the heaven and the earth?
One of the most reliable English translations that I have seen, in my opinion, is the Jewish Publication Society's Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures. It seems to be based on sound, up-to-date scholarship where key issues are concerned (such as this one) though fairly conservative otherwise (i.e. it retains much of the same phrasing as other English Bibles, some of which dates back to the days of the KJV as I have said). Here is its rendering of the verses under consideration, which I think is interesting:
When God began to create heaven and earth — the earth being unformed and void, with darkness over the surface of the deep and a wind from God sweeping over the water — God said, "Let there be light"; and there was light.
In this translation, not only is the first clause made subordinate, but so are the next three also. Notice that in most versions, dating back to the Greek and Latin translations, each of these is a separate main clause (each introduced by and). Here, most do not have and but they are rendered as adverbial clauses of circumstance. Their function in the narration is not to present actions in the "foreground" of the story but to supply background information about the state of things at the time (i.e. the time when God began to create heaven and earth). This is perfectly compatible with the grammatical and discourse structure of the Hebrew text where, as I explained earlier, the exact syntactic relations between clauses is typically not explicit. The interesting upshot is that whereas in the old translations the first statement that something happens, the first event in the story, we might say, is "God created the heaven and the earth", in this new reading the first main clause, the first thing that happens, is "God said [Let there be light]".
Below is my Nawat and my Nawat-into-English translation of the first creation story, Gen. 1:1 to 2:4, complete:
Envoi
Ken kiketzki ne Teut ne
ilwikak wan ne tal
1
1 KWAK ne Teut pejki
kinketza
ne ilwikak wan ne tal
2 ne tal inteuk
muektalijtuk
takumi ijpak miktan
ejekat pal Teut papataka
pak iishkalyu ne at
3 kwakuni inak Teut ma
nemi tawil
wan muchijki ne tawil
4 kiwelitak Teut ne tawil
kikupej Teut tawil tech takumi
5 ne tawil kinutzki Tunal
wan ne takumi kinutzki Tayua
tayuakik, tatwik, se tunal
6 inak Teut ma muchiwa
se pachantuk tatajku ne at
kikupewa at itech at
7 kichijki Teut ne
pachantuk
kikupej ne at itankupa ne pachantuk
tech ne at ijpak ne pachantuk
wan kiane nakak
8 wan ne pachantuk
kinutzki Ilwikak
tayuakik, tatwik, ukse tunal
9 inak Teut ma musentepewa
ne at itankupa ne ejekat
ma nesi tal waktuk
wan kiane nakak
10 ne tal waktuk kinutzki
Tal
ne at sentepejtuk kinutzki Weyat
wan kiwelitak ne Teut
11 inak Teut ma
shushuknajkisa
ne tal iwan sajsakat
mulinit wan ishkisat
kwajkwawit takilchiwat
kitaliat intakil ken yejemet
kipia ne iish kalijtik
wan kiane nakak
12 kishtij ne tal sajsakat
kisa ne iish ken yejemet
kwajkwawit kitaliat intakil
kipia ne iish ken yejemet
wan kiwelitak ne Teut
13 tayuakik, tatwik, yey
tunal
14 inak Teut ma muchiwakan
tajtawil tik ipachantuk ne ilwikak
kinkupewat tunal wan tayua
pal muishmatit ijilwit
tujtunal wan shijshiwit
15 tajtawil tik ipachantuk
ne ilwikak
pal kitawiluat ne tal
wan kiane nakak
16 kichijki Teut ume wey
tawil
ne wey itekuyu ne tunal
ne chikitik itekuyu ne tayua
nusan ne sitalmet
17 kintalij Teut tik
ipachantuk ne ilwilkak
pal kitawiluat ne tal
18 kintekimakat tunal wan
tayua
wan kinkupewat tawil wan takumi
wan kiwelitak ne Teut
19 tayuakik, tatwik, nawi
tunal
20 inak ne Teut ma kumuni
ne at
iwan kumuninimet yultuk
ma patanikan pataninimet
pak tal, pak ipachantuk ne ejekat
21 kinketzki Teut ne wejwey
akuat
wan muchi tay ulini yultuk
ne kumuni tik ne at sejse ken sejse
wan ne patanini kipia iejtapal sejse ken sejse
wan kiwelitak ne Teut
22 kinteuchij Teut wan
inak:
shitajtakiltalikan, shimumiakchiwakan
shiktemakan ne ajat
wan ne tujtutut ma mijmiak pak ne tal
23 tayuakik, tatwik, makwil
tunal
24 inak ne Teut ma
kinhishti ne tal
ne yujyultuk sejse ken sejse,
takwalmet wan ulininimet
wan tekwanimet ipal ne tal sejse ken sejse
wan kiane nakak
25 kinchijki Teut
tekwanimet
ipal ne tal sejse ken sejse
wan ne takwalmet sejse ken sejse
wan muchi ne ulinit talchi, sejse ken sejse
wan kiwelitak ne Teut
26 inak Teut: tikchiwakan
Takat kenha ken tejemet
ma tatukti ijpak michintal
tujtutut ipal ne ejekat
takwalmet, wan muchi ne tal
wan muchi tay ulini talchi
27 kiketzki Teut ne Takat
ken Yajasan
kenha ken ne Teut kiketzki
ukich wan siwat kinketzki
28 kinteuchij ne Teut wan
kinhilwij:
shitajtakiltalikan, shimumiakchiwakan
shiktemakan ne taltikpak
shimuchiwakan itejtekuyu
shitatuktikan ijpak michintal
ne tujtutut pal ne ejekat
wan muchi tay ulini talchi
29 inak Teut: naja
nimetzinmaka
muchi ne sajsakat ishkisat
nemit pak muchi ne tal
wan muchi ne kwajkwawit
kichiwat intakil kipia iish
yejemet anmupal pal ankikwat
30 wan pal takwat muchi ne
takwalmet
wan muchi ne tujtutut pal ne ejekat
wan muchi ne ulinit talchi
ne ijtik yejemet nemi iijiu yultuk
muchi ne kijkilit nikinmaka
wan kiane nakak
31 kitak Teut muchi tay
kichijtuk
wan sujsul kiwelitak
tayuakik, tatwik, ne tunal chikwasen
2
1 mutamijket ilwikak wan
tal
wan muchi ne taltikpak
2 wan kitamij Teut tik ne
tunal chikume
ne itekiw kichijtuya
wan musewij tik ne chikume
ika yekawik muchi itekiw
3 kiteuchij ne Teut ne
tunal chikume
wan inak ka wey uni tunal
ka tik yaja sewik itekiw
pal kichiwa muchi tay kiketzki
4 wan ini ken ijtuk wan ne
ilwikak wan ne tal
kwak yejemet pejket muchiwat
|
How God built the sky and the land
1
1 WHEN God began building
the sky and
the land
2 the land was not yet arranged
darkness
over depths
wind of
God fluttering
on the
face of the water
3 then said God there should be light
and there
came to be light
4 God liked the light
God
separated light and darkness
5 the light he called Day
and the
darkness he called Night
night
fell, morning dawned, one day
6 God said there should be made
an expanse
amidst the water
separating
water from water
7 God made the expanse
that
separated the water under the expanse
from the
water over the expanse
and so it
was
8 and the expanse he called Sky
night
fell, morning dawned, another day
9 God said there should be a gathering
of the
water under the air
for dry
land to appear
and so it
was
10 the dry land he called Land
the
gathered water he called Ocean
and God
liked it
11 God said there should be a flourishing
of the
land with grasses
sprouting
and seeding
trees
producing fruit
bearing
fruit like them
having a
seed inside
and so it
was
12 the earth brought forth grasses
whose seed
was like them
trees
producing fruit
bearing
fruit like them
and God
liked it
13 night fell, morning dawned, three days
14 God said there should be made
lights in
the expanse of the sky
separating
day and night
for the
knowing of holidays
days and
years
15 lights in the expanse of the sky
to light
up the land
and so it
was
16 God made two big lights
the big
one master of the day
the small
one master of the night
also the
stars
17 God put them in the expanse of the sky
to light
up the land
18 command day and night
and separate
light and darkness
and God
liked it
19 night fell, morning dawned, four days
20 God said the water should swarm
with
swarming life
that
flying things should fly
on land,
on the expanse of the air
21 God built the great water-serpents
and all
moving life
that
swarms in the water each like each
and the
flying things with wings each like each
and God
liked it
22 God blessed them and said:
bear
fruit, proliferate
fill up
the waters
and let
the birds be many over the land
23 night fell, morning dawned, five days
24 God said the land should bear
living
things each like each,
animals
and moving things
and
wildlife each like each
and so it
was
25 God made wild beasts
of the
land each like each
and the
animals each like each
and all
that moves on the ground, each like each
and God
liked it
26 said God: let us make
Man
similar to ourselves
to rule
over the fishes
birds of
the air
animals, and
all the land
and all
that moves on the ground
27 God built Man like Himself
similar to
God he made him
male and
female he made them
28 God blessed them and said to them:
bear
fruit, proliferate
fill the
earth
become its
masters
rule over
the fishes
the birds
of the air
and all that
moves on the ground
29 God said: I give you
all the
seeding grasses
that are
on all the land
and all
the trees
bearing
fruit with seeds
they are
yours to eat
30 and for all the animals, to eat
and all
the birds of the air
and all
that moves on the ground
in which
the breath of life is
I give
them the vegetation
and so it
was
31 God saw all he had done
and liked
it very much
night
fell, morning dawned, six days
2
1 sky and land were finished
and all
the earth
2 and God finished on the sixth day
the work
he had done
and rested
on the seventh
because
all his work was completed
3 God blessed the seventh day
and called
that day great
for on it
his work ended
of making
everything he built
4 and this is the story of the sky and
the land
when they
came to be made
|
Envoi
I entertain the hypothesis that members of simpler material cultures which have more in common with the ancient Israelites regarding the lives they live and their relationship with the physical and spiritual world will have something of an advantage over the rest of us in this respect. The most efficient way to tap that advantage is surely to bring them face to face with the original text as well as that can be reflected in their own language, rather than going through the mediation of Greek, Latin and modern European translations. If I am right, and the job is done well, this puts them in a privileged position with regard to access to the literary splendour of this ancient legacy of humanity. Thus I hold that there is literary justification for going back to the beginnings, when translating this great work of universal literature into indigenous languages, in the way I am attempting to do in this adventurous translation project.
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