“It would be an interesting process,” the U.C. Berkeley professor of Hebrew and comparative literature said earlier this month.
“But you wouldn’t get Notre Dame de Paris.”
Alter sees similarities to biblical scholarship that focuses almost exclusively on dividing the Bible into strands purportedly written by different authors over several centuries.
“The question is: What use is it to you as a reader of Genesis as a book? I think it’s of limited use…You’re left with dangling threads instead of a real book,” said the author of a new work called “Genesis: Translation and Commentary.”
In his book, Alter sidesteps the now-standard practice of attributing chunks of the Bible to the Yahwist, Elohist or Priestly sources. Instead, he concentrates on what he considers a more important undertaking — creating a translation of the Bible’s first book that makes the “literal literary.”
“I asked myself: `Is it possible to fashion an English style for representing the Bible…that has a certain eloquence and poise as literary English and at the same time mirrors a lot of the significant literary effects of the Hebrew?'” he said. “I figured it probably won’t work, but I’ll try it. It worked better than I thought.”
His translation, which took 1-1/2 years to complete, came out as a $25 Norton hardback last month. San Francisco’s Arion Press is also publishing 200 copies of a handmade edition at $850 each.
Alter relaxes on a sofa in his Berkeley Hills home, with its view of the bay. He has curly, graying hair and pale-blue eyes. His calm voice and gentle mannerisms exude a rare confidence.
The 61-year-old professor speaks with an authority backed by years of solid scholarship. He has been teaching at U.C. Berkeley for nearly three decades and serves as president of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics.
His 16 previous books have included “The Art of Biblical Narrative” and “The Art of Biblical Poetry.” He was co-editor of “The Literary Guide to the Bible.” His next major project is a series of lectures for Yale on the Bible and 20th-century authors.
In recent days, he’s been interviewed by reporters from Newsweek and National Public Radio. He also appears on the Nov. 10 and 17 segments of Bill Moyers’ Genesis series on PBS.
Alter isn’t without competition. Sonoma translator and poet Stephen Mitchell has just published a version of Genesis, though his book focuses heavily on dividing the narrative into strands. Last year, Judaic scholar Everett Fox shook up the biblical world with his earthy translation of the Torah.
But Alter is willing to argue that his translation outshines others produced in the past century. It incorporates modern archaeological evidence that has helped illuminate the text. At the same time, it tries to avoid many of the literary flaws he sees in other works.
“The overwhelming trend of 20th century translation is…to make it sound like idiomatic, modern English,” he said. “The idea is to make it very idiomatic, almost colloquial.”
He resists the modernization in part because the ancient text itself used fairly formal Hebrew, Alter said, not “the language of the streets.”
Alter actually looks back to the 1600s for inspiration. Even though the King James Bible has “some real howlers” of mistakes in its translation, Alter calls it “a wonderful literary achievement.”
In his introduction, Alter offers a passage about Noah to illustrate differences among translations.
Here is the King James version of Genesis 7:13-14:
“In the selfsame day entered Noah, and Shem, and Ham, and Japheth, the sons of Noah, and Noah’s wife, and the three wives of his sons with them, into the ark; They, and every beast after its kind, and all the cattle after their kind, and every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind, and every fowl after his kind, every bird of every sort.”
Here is Everett Fox’s version:
“On that very day came Noah, and Shem, Ham, and Yefet, Noah’s sons, Noah’s wife and his three sons’ wives with them, into the Ark, they and all the wildlife after their kind, all herd-animals after their kind, all crawling things that crawl upon the earth after their kind, all fowl after their kind, all chirping-things, all winged-things.”
And Alter’s:
“That very day, Noah and Shem and Ham and Japheth, the sons of Noah, and Noah’s wife, and the three wives of his sons together with them, came into the ark, they as well as beasts of each kind and cattle of each kind and each kind of crawling thing that crawls on earth and each kind of bird, each winged thing.”
Comparing his translation to the others, Alter writes that he preserves “more of the phonetic compactness of the Hebrew” and avoids “glaring lapses” of the rhythm.
“Biblical prose is sort of wonderfully rhythmic,” he said. “If you subtract the rhythm, you lose the melody.”