First of all I would like you to look at this, figure out what it is (that shouldn't take long, I don't think) and then - and this is the important bit - read it out loud. This is not to find out if you can read, we know that; just do it anyway...
hmpty dmpty st n ' wll hmpty dmpty hd ' grt fll ll th kngs hrss nd ll th kngs mn cldnt stck hmpty tgthr gn t b r nt t b tht s th qstn whthr ts nblr n th mnd t sffr th slngs nd rrws f trgs frtn r t tk rms gnst ' s f trbls nd by ppsng nd thm nc pn ' tm thr wr thr brs dddy br mmmy br nd bby br...
Now of course what I have done here is to remove the letters a, e, i, o and u (but I have replaced the occurrences of the indefinite article a with an apostrophe to stop it disappearing altogether). One purpose of this was to give those of you who don't already know this from experience a glimpse of approximately how it feels to be reading a Biblical Hebrew consonantal text, as it appears in torah scrolls for example, and what all Hebrew (or Aramaic or Ugaritic or Arabic etc.) reading was like before the introduction of vowel signs.
How did you do? Well before you answer, here is my guess at how it probably went. First it was strange but then it got slightly better after you got the "hang" of what the task consisted of. (The fashion in present-day texting may have helped: nothing new there!) But even after you got the "hang" of it it still wan't all that easy. Some of the words are ambiguous as written. If you really tried reading it out loud as you were supposed to you may have observed what was happening in your mind "in real time" as you tried to solve these, and I believe there are three strategies you could have used (and it was probably a mixture of all three):
- Guess (try out the first thing that pops into your head).
- Work it out rationally by figuring out what makes sense grammatically or semantically in the context.
- Remember how it goes because you've heard it before (once you've realised what it is you're reading).
I would speculate that the following factors would all increase you're likelihood of being able to decipher this correctly and efficiently: (1) having done this often before (i.e. lots of practice); (2) having a thorough (native or near-native-like) command of the language (in the present case, English); (3) benefitting from a good (native or near-native-like) acquaintance with English-language culture.
If we substitute "Hebrew" for "English", ancient readers of the Hebrew Bible can be assumed to have had all these advantages. Then there came a time when (2) was weakened as Jews turned to other languages for day-to-day ordinary conversation (first Aramaic, then Greek, Latin and so on, then Yiddish for example, and finally German, English, French, Spanish etc.), and then also for daily reading and writing purposes too, until already in the Middle Ages Hebrew became only the language in which they read the Torah or their prayer books. At this point it is only natural that reading a Hebrew consonantal text became harder, and the only ways they could manage to do so at all were by relying on (1) and (3), i.e. practising a lot and remaining immersed in the entire "Hebrew" culture (which might go so far as to entail knowing entire passages by heart!), or by inventing a system to indicate the vowels alongside the consonants, which they eventually did.
But this essay is not really going to be about vowels, so let us move on. What I really wish to talk about today is other issues which become apparent once we peel away the layer to which I have just drawn attention, which we can do most easily by just putting the English vowels back in and looking at what we have left. So now I must ask you to bear with me again and follow my instructions for the next step in this experiment, which is to read the following out loud once again:
Now that we are no longer focusing on deciphering the words, we can reflect on what happens here on other levels. If this is supposed to be a model of what reading Biblical Hebrew is like, then we are now imagining that the person reading is a native speaker of Biblical Hebrew (something that probably hasn't happened for a long, long time) who is used to the script and has no trouble at all understanding the words. But beyond the words, what about the sense and understanding of the text? Because in the original text there was no punctuation and spacing was not used to lay out a text in the same way we are accustomed to doing today. Here there is pretty much just an endless chain of words, and the rest is up to us!
humpty dumpty sat on a wall
humpty dumpty had a great fall
all the king's horses and all the kings men
couldn't stick humpty together again
____________________
to be or not to be that is the question
whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
the slings and arrows of outragious fortune
or to take arms against a sea of troubles
and by opposing end them
____________________
once upon a time there were three bears daddy bear mummy bear and baby bear...
The little love-god, lying once asleep, laid by his side his heart-inflaming brand, whilst many nymphs that vowed chaste life to keep came tripping by; but in her maiden hand the fairest votary took up that fire which many legions of true hearts had warmed.
Once upon a time there were three bears:
Daddy bear, Mummy bear and baby bear...
LXX: καὶ ἀπέδρα αὐτὸς καὶ πάντα τὰ αὐτοῦ καὶ διέβη τὸν ποταμὸν καὶ ὥρμησεν εἰς τὸ ὄρος Γαλααδ. ἀνηγγέλη δὲ Λαβαν τῷ Σύρῳ τῇ τρίτῃ ἡμέρᾳ ὅτι ἀπέδρα Ιακωβ
Vulgate: cumque abisset tam ipse quam omnia quae iuris eius erant et amne transmisso pergeret contra montem Galaad. nuntiatum est Laban die tertio quod fugeret Iacob
Nawat:
There are a number of things about translation I can use this example to illustrate. Let's begin, first of all, with a closer look at the Hebrew. The original consonantal text, besides lacking vowels, lacks indications about divisions of any kind. At a much later time a sign was written which divides the text into small units which correspond to what are today called the verses, and we usually employ a symbol that looks like a colon (:) to represent that basic division. If the verses were always grammatically sentences, then we could say that this sign, the סוֹף פָּסוּק (sof pasuq), is like a full stop (period); the analogy is rather inadequate, however, unless we are perfectly clear about the fact that these verses are not necessarily grammatical sentences. They may be thought of as some kind of discourse unit perhaps, but they do not have a rigorous syntactic function. In any case, historically we should remember that these were not actual verses of the modern kind because they had not yet been grouped into chapters and numbered. That is something that came later. In the first Hebrew example above, the verse numbers are given as they are typically presented in a Tanakh (a Hebrew "Old Testament"), using Hebrew numbers (i.e. letters of the Hebrew alphabetic with numerical values) in a small font, and I have left the colon-like sof pasuq symbol there at the end of the first verse.
As well as adding vowel signs (the same ones shown in the first Hebrew specimen above), the Masoretes also added cantillation marks. Cantillation is the name given to the traditional practice of chanting during bible readings in the synagogue, and the marks may be thought of as almost like a form of musical notation. But these marks are also sometimes compared to punctuations marks, except that once again, their function should not be thought of as fully grammatical, but somehow discourse-related. I do not want to get into a deep discussion about cantillation marks for two reasons: it would get very technical, and I don't know a great deal about it. But I will show an example for those curious:
However, I have the impression that there are parts of the Genesis text that only need to be read without any attention to indications of any kind, overlooking punctuation, cantillation marks, traditional verse divisions or standard translations, just the Hebrew words, and with a sufficient command of Hebrew the words group themselves, practically, in a way which seems quite obvious.
Another way to understand the process is by focusing on the oral dimension. To be sure, the written Torah text is a written text, but although it is a tree with a written trunk (the Torah scroll), it has oral roots and oral branches. Oral roots because the materials that make up the written text originated in things that were first transmitted by word of mouth: they are based on oral tradition. Oral branches because the written Torah scroll is intended to be read out loud and heard, so it is still eminently a text to be listened to. Indeed, the Nawat translation of Genesis shares these characteristics for it too is written, indeed, but it is written to be read both silently and out loud, but primarily out loud because today most Nawat speakers cannot read, and also because I am consciously writing the translation as an oral text that is meant to be listened to (both for practical reasons and in imitation of the Hebrew Genesis, which is also meant to be listened to).
Now let us remind ourselves that when a text is oral it doesn't "have" punctuation marks, capital letters, line breaks, blank spaces between stanzas and so on. The only thing it has is the words, and the delivery of the person reciting it. When people are reciting from memory (as people in oral cultures seem to be capable of doing), they are more likely to be remembering aspects of previous oral deliveries than punctuation and page layout. The only other input they receive is what the words themselves suggest, how they group themselves spontaneously on the basis of the sound, sense and structure of the text. Therefore it is not really a question of whether a passage is verse or simple prose (i.e. of how it should be laid out on the page), it is a matter of the rhythms, patterns and dynamics that emerge from the words themselves, which the attentive reader perceives and the attentive listener likewise perceives. The decision to ignore punctuation is related to a desire to retrieve the text's orality.
So, the words in the Hebrew text gather of their own accord into word groups, which in some passages more than others, such as the one cited in the current example, are notably regular in metric shape or length and seem to tap out a rhythm of their own, which we need not invent but simply need to discover. Rather than classify the result as a "poem", a "story in verse" or something else, I prefer to be less categorical and simply think of this as a feature of the orality of the text. But I do perceive these features or patterns as enhancements of the texts in question, which can take on a significant role in bringing a passage to life, making us perceive it more intensely, allowing us to remember it better and encouraging the listener to admire its beauty. And besides, if those features or patterns are really there then they are part of the text and it should not really be separated from them!
But what are these "word groups" that I am talking about? I have written each group on a separate line in the Nawat translation, but what do the groups consist of? What characterizes each line here?
Look first at the four lines of Humpty Dumpty. To some extent what characterizes the lines is syntax. The first two lines are clauses. The third and fourth lines are all one clause but the third is the subject and the fourth is the predicate:
[humpty dumpty sat on a wall]
[humpty dumpty had a great fall]
[all the king's horses and all the kings men
couldn't stick humpty together again]
In the Nawat Genesis example, the first three lines are clauses (the second line contains two short conjoined clauses) while the fourth and fifth lines make up one sentence, in which the fifth line is a subordinate clause:
Indeed, the great majority of such word groups in my translation of Genesis represent complete syntactic entities or constituents, and in this sense linguistically they are units. Here I have illustrated this through the Nawat (and the English gloss), but the same is just as true of the Hebrew text (interested readers are welcome to check). So in general the prosodic units are syntactic (i.e. grammatical) units.
But just as importantly, they are semantic (sense) units too. This is a point I made in my first, introductory post When God began building the sky and the land. There the illustrative text was the opening words (1:1-2) of Genesis:
So also the Hebrew original:
As I said in that post, this way of reading the original text is "cinematographic", like a sequence of images: the land unarranged, darkness over depths, wind of God fluttering, on the face of the water...
It is easy to multiply examples, but let me give you a few more to consider:
Gen. 2:4b-7
Nawat:
This is a longer example than those we have seen so far and it gives us an opportunity to note some other details. The word-group idea works (in texts where it works) in Hebrew, and it can be made to work in Nawat too. 90% of the time the two languages will allow accurate word groups to be constructed which correspond in sense and content and sound good, but it is in the nature of different languages to be different, and so sometimes things do not line up. Thus there will from time to time be two groups (two lines) in Nawat doing the job of just one in Hebrew, or vice-versa, two Hebrew word groups are best combined into just one in Nawat. In the Hebrew text as laid out here, I have placed an apostrophe (') rather than a vertical line (|) where Hebrew word groups do not quite find a direct correlate with the same number of corresponding word groups in Nawat. In such cases, the Hebrew reads well with these as ordinary word group divisions (i.e. they could have been |); the different symbol only means that the Nawat differs with regard to a word group division at these points. As the examples all show, these non-correlations only occur a small proportion of the time, so this is a measure of the high degree to which the Nawat progresses in parallel with the original Hebrew text.
Another point to note here is that, for the first time, we have an example that spans another kind of division used in the layout of the Nawat text, indicated by a blank line. This is used to block out the Nawat text into larger units or "stanzas".
Gen. 3:8-13
Nawat:
To sum up then, much of my Nawat translation of Genesis is laid out on scarcely punctuated short lines of text, giving it the appearance of verse. Most lines in these passages function rather like "sound bites". Many or them can stand alone as clauses or sentences, or at least phrases, with a definite meaning, especially in context: Yakov fled with all that was his; wind of God fluttering; and the Man came to life; and I was frightened because I'm naked. But these are not just units in linguistic terms, they are also rhythmic units in the telling of tales, and what is more, they are pictures, fleeting images, shots in a video sequence. The Nawat translation appears this way because I believe that this is very similar to the way the original Hebrew text is in these places, and listening to the Hebrew in this way allows it to make more sense, certainly, than taking a Greek, Latin or English version as the model and trying to discover how the translated verses say it in the original Hebrew. And the other reason why it appears that way in the Nawat is because I believe that Nawat can do this; it can probably do it better than Greek, Latin or English. Which can result in a text whose impact on the listener is a closer approximation and a more delightful literary experience, given that the Hebrew text is better literature than the translations!
But if literature always makes demands on its audience, different kinds of literature may make different kinds of demands. Not that I think Genesis (the "real Genesis") makes especially heavy demands: literature doesn't need to be difficult reading (or listening) to be great literature, and there is nothing particularly difficult about this text as a text to read or, preferably, to listen to. The first demand is merely that: to listen to it. Genesis has great seductive powers and can do much if we will only go a little way towards it: we need only listen. To the words, to the sound patterns (through rhythm and repetition), to the simple progressions of phrases, clauses and sentences, and of course to the images, because in oral literature we hear images in order to see them. And last but not least, we must fit those images together into situations, landscapes and narratives, because that is the listener's job.
I have compared the word groups, verses or images that come from Genesis in quick succession to beads of a necklace, but there is no necklace provided, for unlike European languages which give you complex propositions sewn together into intricate mental macro-structures, Hebrew and Nawat take no delight in such baroque verbal architecture. They just give you the beads, one by one, and you are required to pass the string through them and add them to the necklace as you go. Compare:
Thereupon Jacob put his children and wives on camels; and he drove off all his livestock and all the wealth that he had amassed, the livestock in his possession that he had acquired in Paddan-aram, to go to his father Isaac in the land of Canaan
Meanwhile Laban had gone to shear his sheep, and Rachel stole her father's household idols. Jacob kept Laban the Aramean in the dark, not telling him that he was fleeing, and fled with all that he had. Soon he was across the Euphrates and heading toward the hill country ofGilead .
On the third day, Laban was told that Jacob had fled. So he took his kinsmen with him and pursued him a distance of seven days, catching up with him in the hill country ofGilead .
The differences are rarely of content. Different wordings are often the result of the availability of different linguistic resources in English and Nawat, rather than differences of interpretation of the meaning of the original. This is not about changing the meaning, it is about capturing the "feel of the text", and trying to produce a text that approaches, though it cannot reach, the beauty of the original. For a brief, self-contained example of that beauty I would suggest you now read the narrative "God tests Abraham" (Gen. 22) which is about halfway down the page in the Sample Translations file.
I have not laid out all of Genesis in this way, although many passages are presented fully or partially in this "verse-like" format. I have been guided by the "feeling" I receive when reading the passages in question and my intuitive sense about the large-scale flow of the book's discourse. These choices are personal and reflect my own aesthetic interpretation (though frequently guided by the enhanced understanding of the text that is facilitated by the reading of enlightened commentaries). I don't consider the decision to format a part of the text one way of the other crucial for the meaning of the passages, which always closely follows the Hebrew text. I do think that my approach has the potential to enhance the readers's or listener's aesthetic appreciation and also, probably, to facilitate understanding. Sometimes poetry is more difficult to comprehend than prose, but I do not believe that this verse format places any added obstacle in the way of understanding; quite the contrary, I suspect that it makes it easier to listen to and follow, by breaking down the content into small modules or "beads" of sound and meaning of simple sense and structure rather than rolling them up into longer, syntactically complex periods.
To be continued next week, when we will look at how the nature of Biblical Hebrew grammar seems to "conspire" with this kind of remarkable expository style, which may go some way to explaining why it never sounds the same in translation.
Well my guess is that, especially if you are a native English speaker, you didn't do too badly! As you were reading along you would have realised various things and made use of them to guide your reading. Among the things you will have realised are, I am sure: (1) At two points there is a complete break and we're abruptly switching to a different text. (2) Each of the three parts has a distinct prosodic character. We can express this by using some modern conventions which are not found in the ancient Hebrew manuscripts but which will make a big difference to how we perceive the text, if we will just use line spaces to indicate major "rhythmic units" (i.e. lines of verse) and a horizontal line to separate "disconnected" sections of text:
humpty dumpty sat on a wall
humpty dumpty had a great fall
all the king's horses and all the kings men
couldn't stick humpty together again
____________________
to be or not to be that is the question
whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
the slings and arrows of outragious fortune
or to take arms against a sea of troubles
and by opposing end them
____________________
once upon a time there were three bears daddy bear mummy bear and baby bear...
There, now that's much better isn't it! For readers accustomed to modern conventions there are still some details that could make this even clearer, things like punctuation and capital letters, but this is definitely an improvement. But although we feel more comfortable with the text laid out like this, I rather suspect that mostly what we see here is what you were already doing out loud if you read out the preceding text as I asked you to, at least if you are a native English speaker. This layout just makes the prosodic divisions and units explicit, but as a reader you could already infer those divisions and units from the unformatted text, and you could do that for two reasons: (1) cultural knowledge: you already know the texts, and part of your prior knowledge of them is knowledge of their prosody; (2) even if you hadn't known the texts, on hearing the texts you would pick up the patterns very fast, and even when reading the text out loud to other people you would be fairly confident about how it fits together prosodically because your "ear" would guide you along. And the way your ear would guide you is by letting itself be led along by the words.
You may like to try this out for yourself. Try reading this (out loud, of course):
This is the beginning of Shakespeare's Sonnet 154, in case you want to look it up, but you don't really need to. Notice what happens when you read (again I will assume you are a native English speaker for this): even if you're not sure what it's talking about (though if you do know it probably helps), as you read the words they fall into groups and the groups acquire a rhythm and from their rhythm a pattern emerges and the emergent pattern carries you along as you continue to read words and the words continue to group themselves and, as a reader, you can hardly help responding to the rhythm and expressing it in your voice as you recite, in such a way that a listener who is not seeing the text also catches the patterns produced by the words. The point I wish to make here is that this last text is from a poem, and the fact that it is a poem is not dependent on it being laid out on paper in the form of verse, but rather it possesses that form, and the ear picks it up, on account of the words that make up the text itself. Poetry resides in words and thoughts: it is not in punctuation, spacing or other features of the printed page.
The ear can hear the difference between poetry and prose. However, it can be a subtle difference, and we need to be careful because prose has its rhythms too. Some prose passages could actually be laid out as if they were verse:
Daddy bear, Mummy bear and baby bear...
No English speaker can deny that these words have a clear prosodic pattern. We all know, in that pattern, where the short pauses go, what the intonation of each phrase is like, and so on. This may be, again, partly cultural knowledge, but it is also part of our command of English on some level. And yet it would seem very strange to call this story a poem; it belongs to a different genre. And again, that is not really dependent on the way it is printed.
The features I am discussing are just as much features of oral literature, where there is no paper involved and no written words, just the words, themselves. The words alone make a text prose, poetry or something in-between. Probably the very distinction between "prose" and "poetry" is a cultural artifact and not an intrinsic part of the "words" either. It is a distinction which is made more rigid and absolute in our culture of the printed word. What most interests me in trying to apply this notion to the way Biblical texts are read is not trying to determine in some absolute sense which bits are categorically poems (though they may or may not be treated as poems in a given translation, and the original manuscripts do not usually "tell us" what they are except when there is a heading such as "A psalm of David") or prose (and what about when it is something in-between?) What I am trying to get at is that
- the layout of the original text is immaterial, because
- the Old Testament is composed of texts meant to be heard
- and when hearing the text all you can hear is the words
- but if you hear the (original) words the ear can recognise the way they group and pattern
- and the rhythms that emerge are not always but often poetic or at least verse-like.
As a translator I ask myself whether, that being the case, the translation should not attempt to reflect this feature of the original text. I think it is fair to say that many translators of the past have often failed to do so, and it may be argued that they have "changed" the nature of the text in doing so, no matter how "literal" they have been (and perhaps even because of that) in their rendition of words. So those translators also looked at the words, yes, but not perhaps so much in their prosodic context. In any case my focus is not on criticising the work of other translators but rather on trying to establish what it is that I should adopt as my own objective in my translation.
I have delayed long enough looking at an actual Biblical example, so here is one to start with: Genesis 31, verses 21 and 22. First I will give the Hebrew text with vowels, more or less as it would normally be laid out without cantillation signs (for the benefit of those of us more used to seeing it in some such format). Several translations follow: the ancient Greek version known as the Septuagint (LXX), the standard Latin version (Vulgate), the classical English King James version (KJV), the Jewish Publication Society's English translation of 1985 (JPS) and Everett Fox's English rendition in his book Genesis and Exodus (EF). Then I have repeated the pure consonantal text of the Hebrew, but now I insert four vertical lines indicating how my ear spontaneously groups the chain of words into prosodic groups as I read it. Finally I will present a Nawat version (accompanied by a parallel English gloss of the Nawat), which aims to reflect not only the propositional content but also the "rhythm" of the Hebrew.
I have delayed long enough looking at an actual Biblical example, so here is one to start with: Genesis 31, verses 21 and 22. First I will give the Hebrew text with vowels, more or less as it would normally be laid out without cantillation signs (for the benefit of those of us more used to seeing it in some such format). Several translations follow: the ancient Greek version known as the Septuagint (LXX), the standard Latin version (Vulgate), the classical English King James version (KJV), the Jewish Publication Society's English translation of 1985 (JPS) and Everett Fox's English rendition in his book Genesis and Exodus (EF). Then I have repeated the pure consonantal text of the Hebrew, but now I insert four vertical lines indicating how my ear spontaneously groups the chain of words into prosodic groups as I read it. Finally I will present a Nawat version (accompanied by a parallel English gloss of the Nawat), which aims to reflect not only the propositional content but also the "rhythm" of the Hebrew.
Hebrew:
כא וַיִּבְרַח הוּא וְכָל-אֲשֶׁר-לוֹ וַיָּקָם וַיַּעֲבֹר אֶת-הַנָּהָר וַיָּשֶׂם אֶת-פָּנָיו הַר הַגִּלְעָד: כב וַיֻּגַּד לְלָבָן בַּיּוֹם הַשְּׁלִישִׁי כִּי בָרַח, יַעֲקֹב
KJV: So he fled with all that he had; and he rose up, and passed over the river, and set his face toward the mount Gilead. And it was told Laban on the third day that Jacob was fled.
JPS: ...and [Jacob] fled with all that he had. Soon he was across the Euphrates and heading toward the hill country of Gilead. <paragraph> On the third day, Laban was told that Jacob had fled...
EF:
And flee he did, he and all that was his;
he arose and crossed the River, setting his face toward the mountain-country of Gil'ad.
Lavan was told on the third day that Yaakov had fled
Hebrew:
ויברח הוא וכל־אשׁר־לו | ויקם ויעבר את־הנהר | וישׂם את־פניו הר הגלעד | ויגד ללבן ביום השׁלישׁי | כי ברח יעקב
chuluj Yakob iwan muchi tay ipal
ajsik ne apan wan panuk sentapal
mutalij tik ne ujti pal ne tepet pal Gilad
kilwijket Laban tik ne tunal yey
ka
chulujtuya Yakob
|
Yakov fled with all that was his
he reached the river and crossed over
he put himself on the road to the
they told Laban on the third day
that Yakov had fled
|
There are a number of things about translation I can use this example to illustrate. Let's begin, first of all, with a closer look at the Hebrew. The original consonantal text, besides lacking vowels, lacks indications about divisions of any kind. At a much later time a sign was written which divides the text into small units which correspond to what are today called the verses, and we usually employ a symbol that looks like a colon (:) to represent that basic division. If the verses were always grammatically sentences, then we could say that this sign, the סוֹף פָּסוּק (sof pasuq), is like a full stop (period); the analogy is rather inadequate, however, unless we are perfectly clear about the fact that these verses are not necessarily grammatical sentences. They may be thought of as some kind of discourse unit perhaps, but they do not have a rigorous syntactic function. In any case, historically we should remember that these were not actual verses of the modern kind because they had not yet been grouped into chapters and numbered. That is something that came later. In the first Hebrew example above, the verse numbers are given as they are typically presented in a Tanakh (a Hebrew "Old Testament"), using Hebrew numbers (i.e. letters of the Hebrew alphabetic with numerical values) in a small font, and I have left the colon-like sof pasuq symbol there at the end of the first verse.
As well as adding vowel signs (the same ones shown in the first Hebrew specimen above), the Masoretes also added cantillation marks. Cantillation is the name given to the traditional practice of chanting during bible readings in the synagogue, and the marks may be thought of as almost like a form of musical notation. But these marks are also sometimes compared to punctuations marks, except that once again, their function should not be thought of as fully grammatical, but somehow discourse-related. I do not want to get into a deep discussion about cantillation marks for two reasons: it would get very technical, and I don't know a great deal about it. But I will show an example for those curious:
כא וַיִּבְרַ֥ח הוּא֙ וְכָל־אֲשֶׁר־ל֔וֹ וַיָּ֖קָם וַיַּֽעֲבֹ֣ר אֶת־הַנָּהָ֑ר וַיָּ֥שֶׂם אֶת־פָּנָ֖יו הַ֥ר הַגִּלְעָֽד׃ כב וַיֻּגַּ֥ד לְלָבָ֖ן בַּיּ֣וֹם הַשְּׁלִישִׁ֑י כִּ֥י בָרַ֖ח יַֽעֲקֹֽב׃
Another way to understand the process is by focusing on the oral dimension. To be sure, the written Torah text is a written text, but although it is a tree with a written trunk (the Torah scroll), it has oral roots and oral branches. Oral roots because the materials that make up the written text originated in things that were first transmitted by word of mouth: they are based on oral tradition. Oral branches because the written Torah scroll is intended to be read out loud and heard, so it is still eminently a text to be listened to. Indeed, the Nawat translation of Genesis shares these characteristics for it too is written, indeed, but it is written to be read both silently and out loud, but primarily out loud because today most Nawat speakers cannot read, and also because I am consciously writing the translation as an oral text that is meant to be listened to (both for practical reasons and in imitation of the Hebrew Genesis, which is also meant to be listened to).
Now let us remind ourselves that when a text is oral it doesn't "have" punctuation marks, capital letters, line breaks, blank spaces between stanzas and so on. The only thing it has is the words, and the delivery of the person reciting it. When people are reciting from memory (as people in oral cultures seem to be capable of doing), they are more likely to be remembering aspects of previous oral deliveries than punctuation and page layout. The only other input they receive is what the words themselves suggest, how they group themselves spontaneously on the basis of the sound, sense and structure of the text. Therefore it is not really a question of whether a passage is verse or simple prose (i.e. of how it should be laid out on the page), it is a matter of the rhythms, patterns and dynamics that emerge from the words themselves, which the attentive reader perceives and the attentive listener likewise perceives. The decision to ignore punctuation is related to a desire to retrieve the text's orality.
So, the words in the Hebrew text gather of their own accord into word groups, which in some passages more than others, such as the one cited in the current example, are notably regular in metric shape or length and seem to tap out a rhythm of their own, which we need not invent but simply need to discover. Rather than classify the result as a "poem", a "story in verse" or something else, I prefer to be less categorical and simply think of this as a feature of the orality of the text. But I do perceive these features or patterns as enhancements of the texts in question, which can take on a significant role in bringing a passage to life, making us perceive it more intensely, allowing us to remember it better and encouraging the listener to admire its beauty. And besides, if those features or patterns are really there then they are part of the text and it should not really be separated from them!
But what are these "word groups" that I am talking about? I have written each group on a separate line in the Nawat translation, but what do the groups consist of? What characterizes each line here?
Look first at the four lines of Humpty Dumpty. To some extent what characterizes the lines is syntax. The first two lines are clauses. The third and fourth lines are all one clause but the third is the subject and the fourth is the predicate:
[humpty dumpty sat on a wall]
[humpty dumpty had a great fall]
[all the king's horses and all the kings men
couldn't stick humpty together again]
[chuluj Yakob iwan muchi tay ipal]
[ajsik ne apan] [wan panuk sentapal]
[mutalij tik ne ujti pal ne tepet pal Gilad]
[kilwijket Laban tik ne tunal yey
[ka chulujtuya Yakob]]
|
[Yakov fled with all that was his]
[he reached the river] [and crossed over]
[he put himself on the road to the
[they told Laban on the third day
[that Yakov had fled]]
|
But just as importantly, they are semantic (sense) units too. This is a point I made in my first, introductory post When God began building the sky and the land. There the illustrative text was the opening words (1:1-2) of Genesis:
kwak ne Teut pejki kinketza
ne ilwikak wan ne tal
ne tal inteuk muektalijtuk
takumi ijpak miktan
ejekat pal Teut papataka
pak iishkalyu ne at
|
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
|
So also the Hebrew original:
בראשׁית ברא אלהים | את השׁמים ואת הארץ | והארץ היתה תהו ובהו | וחשׁך על־פני תהום | ורוח אלהים מרחפת | על־פני המים
It is easy to multiply examples, but let me give you a few more to consider:
Gen. 2:4b-7
Hebrew:
' ביום עשׂות יהוה אלהים | ארץ ושׁמים׃ | וכל שׂיח השׂדה | טרם יהיה בארץ וכל־עשׂב השׂדה ' טרם יצמח | כי לא המטיר ' יהוה אלהים על־הארץ | ואדם אין לעבד את־האדמה׃ | ואד יעלה מן־הארץ | והשׁקה את־כל־פני־האדמה׃
וייצר יהוה אלהים | את־האדם עפר מן־האדמה | ויפח באפיו נשׁמת חיים | ויהי האדם לנפשׁ חיה׃
kwak pejki kichiwa Tutajwan ne Teut
tal wan ilwikak
nian se kwawit inteuk kanaj
nian se sakat mulinik pak ne tal
ika inte kishinijtuk at
Tutajwan ne Teut ijpak tal
wan takat te kanaj pal tajpia mil
wan tejku se mishti tech ne tal
kiajwilia ne taltikpak
kwakuni kichijki Tutajwan ne Teut
ne Takat wan sukit pal ne tal
kishpitzki tik ne iyak iijiu yultuk
wan ne Takat mukwepki yultuk
|
when Our Lord God began to make
land and sky
there was neither a single tree yet
nor any grass sprouted on the earth
for Our Lord God had caused no rain
to fall upon the land
and there were no people to tend a field
and mist rose from the earth
watering the world
then Our Lord God made
Man with clay from the earth
blew living breath into his nostrils
and the Man came to life
|
This is a longer example than those we have seen so far and it gives us an opportunity to note some other details. The word-group idea works (in texts where it works) in Hebrew, and it can be made to work in Nawat too. 90% of the time the two languages will allow accurate word groups to be constructed which correspond in sense and content and sound good, but it is in the nature of different languages to be different, and so sometimes things do not line up. Thus there will from time to time be two groups (two lines) in Nawat doing the job of just one in Hebrew, or vice-versa, two Hebrew word groups are best combined into just one in Nawat. In the Hebrew text as laid out here, I have placed an apostrophe (') rather than a vertical line (|) where Hebrew word groups do not quite find a direct correlate with the same number of corresponding word groups in Nawat. In such cases, the Hebrew reads well with these as ordinary word group divisions (i.e. they could have been |); the different symbol only means that the Nawat differs with regard to a word group division at these points. As the examples all show, these non-correlations only occur a small proportion of the time, so this is a measure of the high degree to which the Nawat progresses in parallel with the original Hebrew text.
Another point to note here is that, for the first time, we have an example that spans another kind of division used in the layout of the Nawat text, indicated by a blank line. This is used to block out the Nawat text into larger units or "stanzas".
Gen. 3:8-13
Hebrew:*
| וישׁמעו את־קול יהוה אלהים | מתהלך בגן לרוח היום | ויתחבא האדם ואשׁתו מפני יהוה אלהים | בתוך עץ הגן׃ | ויקרא יהוה אלהים | אל־האדם ויאמר לו איכה׃ | ויאמר את־קלך שׁמעתי בגן | ואירא כי־עירם אנכי ' ואחבא׃ | ויאמר מי הגיד לך | כי עירם אתה | המן־העץ | אשׁר צויתיך לבלתי אכל־ממנו ' אכלת׃ | ויאמר האדם האשׁה | אשׁר נתתה עמדי | הוא נתנה־לי | מן־העץ ואכל׃ | ויאמר יהוה אלהים לאשׁה | מה־זאת עשׂית | ותאמר האשׁה | הנחשׁ השׁיאני ואכל׃ וישׁמעו את־קול יהוה אלהים | מתהלך בגן לרוח היום | ויתחבא האדם ואשׁתו מפני יהוה אלהים | בתוך עץ הגן׃ | ויקרא יהוה אלהים | אל־האדם ויאמר לו איכה׃ | ויאמר את־קלך שׁמעתי בגן | ואירא כי־עירם אנכי ' ואחבא׃ | ויאמר מי הגיד לך | כי עירם אתה | המן־העץ | אשׁר צויתיך לבלתי אכל־ממנו ' אכלת׃ | ויאמר האדם האשׁה | אשׁר נתתה עמדי | הוא נתנה־לי | מן־העץ ואכל׃ | ויאמר יהוה אלהים לאשׁה | מה־זאת עשׂית | ותאמר האשׁה | הנחשׁ השׁיאני ואכל׃
* There are some font/format issues which generate incorrect displays. At the end of the first line, the vertical line ought to be between veishto and mipnei, not between adonai and elohim!
kikakket Tutajwan ne Teut
pashalua tik ne mil
minashket ne takat wan isiwaw
itech Tutajwan ne Teut
tatajku ne kwajkwawit pal ne yekmil
kinutzki Tutajwan ne Teut
ne takat, ina:
inak: nimetzkakik tik ne mil
wan nimajmawki ika naja nipetztituk,
inak, wan niminashki
inak: ká metznawatijtuk,
inak, ka taja tipetztituk?
anka ne itakil ne kwawit
nimetztuktij ma inte shikwa
taja tikwajtuk?
inak ne takat: ne siwat
ne tiktalijtuk nuwan,
inak, yaja nechmakak
ne itakil ne kwawit wan nikwaj
kilwij Tutajwan ne Teut ne siwat:
tay tikchijki?
inak ne siwat:
ne kuat nechshijshikuj wan nitakwaj
|
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
Our Lord God called out
to the man, saying: where are you?
he said: I heard you in the garden
and I was frightened because I’m naked,
he said, and I hid
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?
said the man: the woman
that you put with me,
he said, she gave me
the tree’s fruit and I ate
said Our Lord God to the woman:
what did you do?
said the woman:
the snake tricked me and I ate
|
To sum up then, much of my Nawat translation of Genesis is laid out on scarcely punctuated short lines of text, giving it the appearance of verse. Most lines in these passages function rather like "sound bites". Many or them can stand alone as clauses or sentences, or at least phrases, with a definite meaning, especially in context: Yakov fled with all that was his; wind of God fluttering; and the Man came to life; and I was frightened because I'm naked. But these are not just units in linguistic terms, they are also rhythmic units in the telling of tales, and what is more, they are pictures, fleeting images, shots in a video sequence. The Nawat translation appears this way because I believe that this is very similar to the way the original Hebrew text is in these places, and listening to the Hebrew in this way allows it to make more sense, certainly, than taking a Greek, Latin or English version as the model and trying to discover how the translated verses say it in the original Hebrew. And the other reason why it appears that way in the Nawat is because I believe that Nawat can do this; it can probably do it better than Greek, Latin or English. Which can result in a text whose impact on the listener is a closer approximation and a more delightful literary experience, given that the Hebrew text is better literature than the translations!
But if literature always makes demands on its audience, different kinds of literature may make different kinds of demands. Not that I think Genesis (the "real Genesis") makes especially heavy demands: literature doesn't need to be difficult reading (or listening) to be great literature, and there is nothing particularly difficult about this text as a text to read or, preferably, to listen to. The first demand is merely that: to listen to it. Genesis has great seductive powers and can do much if we will only go a little way towards it: we need only listen. To the words, to the sound patterns (through rhythm and repetition), to the simple progressions of phrases, clauses and sentences, and of course to the images, because in oral literature we hear images in order to see them. And last but not least, we must fit those images together into situations, landscapes and narratives, because that is the listener's job.
I have compared the word groups, verses or images that come from Genesis in quick succession to beads of a necklace, but there is no necklace provided, for unlike European languages which give you complex propositions sewn together into intricate mental macro-structures, Hebrew and Nawat take no delight in such baroque verbal architecture. They just give you the beads, one by one, and you are required to pass the string through them and add them to the necklace as you go. Compare:
JEWISH PUBLICATION SOCIETY (1985):
Meanwhile Laban had gone to shear his sheep, and Rachel stole her father's household idols. Jacob kept Laban the Aramean in the dark, not telling him that he was fleeing, and fled with all that he had. Soon he was across the Euphrates and heading toward the hill country of
On the third day, Laban was told that Jacob had fled. So he took his kinsmen with him and pursued him a distance of seven days, catching up with him in the hill country of
HEBREW > NAWAT > ENGLISH:
Yakov arose and lifted his children and his wives on the camels
he took all the animals
and all his belongings
that he had acquired in Padan-Aram
to go home to Yitzhak his father
in the land of Canaan
when Laban had gone to shear the flock
Rachel stole her father’s little gods
Yakov deceived Laban
because he didn’t warn the Aramean
that he was going to flee
Yakov fled with all that was his
he reached the river and crossed over
he put himself on the road to the mountain Gilad
they told Laban on the third day
that Yakov had fled
he took his brethren along
and went off running after him
and within seven days
he caught up
in the mountain of Gilad
I have not laid out all of Genesis in this way, although many passages are presented fully or partially in this "verse-like" format. I have been guided by the "feeling" I receive when reading the passages in question and my intuitive sense about the large-scale flow of the book's discourse. These choices are personal and reflect my own aesthetic interpretation (though frequently guided by the enhanced understanding of the text that is facilitated by the reading of enlightened commentaries). I don't consider the decision to format a part of the text one way of the other crucial for the meaning of the passages, which always closely follows the Hebrew text. I do think that my approach has the potential to enhance the readers's or listener's aesthetic appreciation and also, probably, to facilitate understanding. Sometimes poetry is more difficult to comprehend than prose, but I do not believe that this verse format places any added obstacle in the way of understanding; quite the contrary, I suspect that it makes it easier to listen to and follow, by breaking down the content into small modules or "beads" of sound and meaning of simple sense and structure rather than rolling them up into longer, syntactically complex periods.
To be continued next week, when we will look at how the nature of Biblical Hebrew grammar seems to "conspire" with this kind of remarkable expository style, which may go some way to explaining why it never sounds the same in translation.
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