Translation is a metaphysical act: an incomprehensible set of words becomes comprehensible, or nearly so. In Sunday school I thought John the Baptist ate the succulent pods of Robinia pseudoacacia (black locust), which I and my friends fancied. What he ate was grasshoppers. My one contribution to biblical scholarship is to have convinced Reynolds Price to translate akridas as “grasshoppers” in his A Palpable God (the New English Bible still has “locusts”). But translation is also, strictly speaking, impossible. Ancient Hebrew is rich in untranslatable puns on the order of Homer’s—Helen in the Odyssey refuses to say Troy (Ilion, in Greek); she calls it that kakoilion city, “dreadful.” T.E. Lawrence managed to get around this by having Helen say “that destroyed city.” The Prophets were similarly skillful with this kind of pun, as was Jesus when he changed Simon’s name to Peter—“Rock” in Greek—and told the assembled that “upon this rock” He would build His church (the pun also works in Aramaic, which Jesus may have been speaking).
There are other difficulties. In its original text as well as in translations, the Bible is the most evolved of books. Scholars tell us that the Hebrew text is basically two texts intertwined, giving us, in the final result, two variant Ten Commandments handed down on two different mountains, two deaths of King Saul. Moses gets two fathers, and stories repeat themselves in “doublets.” David gets to re-kill a giant who isn’t Goliath. Scholars have teased these interwoven texts apart. In one, God is called Yahweh; in the other, El. Scholars have further identified two other strands woven into the fabric: a priestly addition of rituals and a “deuteronomical” one of laws. Even if every one of these theories is wrong, the Bible remains a collection of books, rather than a book. The word “bible” is from the Greek biblia, plural of biblion, “a little book.” It is an archive of a thousand years of writing.
For most American Christians, however, the Bible is a book written by God, in English. The text is prophetic, instructional, and devotional. Baptists believe that it is “inerrant” (a nice tit-for-tat response by Protestants to papal infallibility). A logical mind can find itself in a bog. Why are we not told about the other creation of humankind (the one that Cain married into)? If Noah sacrificed two of all the animals, and had taken on two of each (Genesis 6:19), how were there any left? But in the very next chapter, God specifies that Noah take with him seven pairs, male and female, of the clean animals, with the unclean ones (non-cud-chewers) still two. So Mr. and Mrs. Pig were on board but escaped the holocaust on Mount Ararat. Still, how do you slaughter and burn two elephants? Two Tyrannosaurus rex?
King James’s translators were working at a time when unicorns were believable. They understood allegory, fable, and myth. The text they were translating was from a different epoch. Only John Layfield had traveled (to Puerto Rico); beyond the mullioned windows of their Oxford and Cambridge rooms the Nile and Jordan, Jericho and Jerusalem, lay in an unimaginably distant past in which shepherd kings talked with God, the shadows of sundials moved backward at a prophet’s command, and Solomon sat between golden walls with a thousand wives.
Seven hundred years before, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle had dutifully recorded dragons swimming through the air in Northumbria. The Renaissance in England was as superstitious as it was religious: the Irish had tails, Jews poisoned wells, the king’s touch cured scrofula. Miracles and impossibilities in the English Bible enhanced its credibility.
Tyndale was burned alive for translating ekklesia as “congregation” (rather than “church”) and presbyteros as “elder” (rather than “priest”)—throwing open the way for Baptists to worship God in cellars and for Presbyterians to sing hymns in darkest Scotland. The hierarchy in Rome feared that placing the Bible in the hands of weavers and grocers would fragment the Church into a chaos of amateur theologians, wild enthusiasts, and illiterate exegetes. They were right: Protestant sects have chosen a menu of virtues, vices, and fixations from the Bible. (I know of a congregation in South Carolina that does not wear neckties, citing Isaiah’s putdown of gaudy apparel that the King James Version calls “tyres,” archaic English for “attire.” “Tyre” and “tie” sound the same on a South Carolina tongue.)
What Bobrick shows in his careful narrative of the Bible’s slow and turbulent translation into English is the heroic, bloody, and awesome progress of the Reformation that ironically begot even more terribly oppressive societies (Calvin burned heretics, Puritans hanged witches, Anglicans drowned Baptists) while leading to deism and republican government. “One could almost say,” he writes, “that the modern democratic state owed its origins in part to a defiance of Catholic dogma, but ended by adopting one of its fundamental tenets in the secular sphere”—that is, we have given to law, with its traditions and precedents, the authority once enjoyed by the Church. A cynic can remark that we have returned to the Old Testament, with its proscriptions and prescriptions, its judges and councils of elders.
What we know is that, at the beginning of the third millennium after the birth of a baby named Joshua (“Yeshua” in Hebrew, spelled “Iesous” in Greek, “Jesus” in Latin), the Bible continues to be printed in millions of copies. An article in the February 2001 issue of Bible Review cites a recent Gallup poll: 65 percent of American readers believe that the Bible answers “all or most of the basic questions of life” (though a third of this 65 percent admit that they’ve never read it). This article also revealed that a number of Bible readers consider “the Book of Joseph” to be their favorite, and that 12 percent think Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife.
Walt Whitman and Henry Mencken, agnostics both, wore out several copies. English and American literature from Chaucer onward assumes that its readers know the Bible. We all quote it, constantly, unknowingly. It is like the flag: a sacred totem. There are many accounts by Civil War and First World War veterans of “lucky” pocket copies stopping bullets. It occupies a strangely awkward place in our culture: an unread book that many pious people believe is too hard to understand, an oracle (the belief that passages chosen at random have prophetic power lasts into our time), a text necessary for getting into heaven. Our presidents are sworn into office by placing their left hand on it, though it forbids oath-taking. George Washington, at his inauguration, kissed it, and it was noted that the pages he happened to kiss are those in which Joseph reminds the Israelites that God will bring them “unto the land which he swore to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.” Parts of it may be older than the Iliad and the Odyssey, both of which it rivals in narrative.
GUNNAR AND NIKOLAI
I
And, yes, the sailboat on a tack for Tisvilde under a tall blue sky piled high with summer clouds was, oh my, slotting through the Baltic at a speed which the calm day and rigged mainsail and jib could in no wise account for.
At the tiller, it was soon easy to see, sat a boy named Nikolai, fetching and trim. He took a beeline for the beach, into the rocky sand of which he crunched his prow, to the amazement of a hundred staring sunbathers. Deftly lowering his sails with nonchalant ease, he folded them into smaller and smaller triangles, until they were no bigger than handkerchiefs. Then, with a snap here and a snap there, as if he were closing the sections of a folding ruler, whistling a melody by Luigi Boccherini as he worked, he collapsed the boat, mast, rigging, hull, keel, rudder and all, into a handful of sticks and cords. These he doubled over again and again, tucked them in with a napkin’s worth of sails, and stuffed the lot into the zippered pocket of his windbreaker. His chart and compass he shoved into the pocket of his smitch of white pants. He rolled and squared his shoulders.
Indifferent to the astonished bathers, one of whom was having some species of fit, and to jumping and hooting children begging him to do it again, he strode with all the aplomb of his twelve years up the beach and across the road into the dark cool of the Troll Wood.
Søren Kierkegaard, most melancholy of Danes, used to walk here, a gnome among gnomes. An eagle in a spruce gazed at Nikolai with golden feral eyes, in acknowledgment of which he put both hands a
gainst a mountain pine, the tree friendly to spruce. Without one near, it would not grow. The eagle rolled a hunch into its shoulders, and Nikolai hugged the mountain pine.
A glance at the interplanetary mariner’s chronometer on his left wrist alerted him to his appointment somewhere near Gray Brothers. So, with meadows and farms flickering past, he ran fifty kilometres in three seconds, slowing to a walk along Strøget.
A shoal of skateboarders flowed around him from the back as he passed a Peruvian gourd band, three games of chess that had been going on since the fourteenth century, and four fresh babies in a pram, each with a cone of ice cream.
The address was in an alley, once a very old street. The number was repeated on a wooden gate, which opened onto the place, one of the places, he’d been looking for all of his life.
Another was a cabin in Norway, deep in spruce and mountain pine near a steep fjord, where he could live like Robinson Crusoe, exactly as he pleased. A room of his very own, in Gray Brothers, free to come and go, to have friends in to spend the night and share hamburgers and polsers in the middle of the floor. A coffee plantation in Kenya. A lighthouse on a rock in the Orkneys, gulls blown past his windows, bleak dawns over a black sea, secure by a neat fire.
But this was just as good, a courtyard with a tree and rows and beds of flowers, a sculptor’s studio with a pitched glass roof.
Along a pomp of dahlias in a line, rust mustard brick and yellow, he walked with a steady casualness to the blue door. A wicker basket beside it, for the mail. A stone jug with sweet williams. His mother was keen on botany, so he knew the names of flowers, weeds, and trees. And maybe an angel with nothing better to do would see him through this.
A card fixed to the door with a drawing pin: Gunnar Rung, the name Mama had said. He was about to push the doorbell when the door opened, wrecking his cool.
—Hello, he said in as deep a voice as he could manage, I’m Nikolai Bjerg.
The man who opened the door was tall, in jeans with a true fit and an Icelandic sweater, and was much younger than Nikolai had expected. His eyes were as friendly as those of a large dog.
—You’re on time, he said. Gunnar Rung here. Come in and let’s see you.
Books, drawings on the walls, tables, an unfamiliar kind of furniture. And beyond, through wide double doors slid open, under a glass roof, a tall block of squared rock that must have been hauled in from an alley in back. Nikolai looked at as much as he could, all of it wonderfully strange and likable, with quick glances at Gunnar, who was goodlooking and had wads of rich brown curls, almost not Danish, and hands as big as a sailor’s.
—It’s an Ariel I have a commission for, Gunnar said walking around Nikolai, looking at him through framing hands. Your mother thought you might do, and would like posing. Have you ever posed before? It’s not easy, and can be tedious and boring. There’s also a King Matt I’m to do, a boy who’s king of an unimaginable Poland, and you might also be him. We’ll have to see how you and I get along. What about some coffee? Do you drink it?
—Sometimes. I mean, yes.
Coffee! Gunnar was treating him like a grown-up, so don’t trash it.
—You can undress while I’m putting the coffee on. Won’t take a minute.
—Everything? Nikolai asked, instantly regretting the question, unbuckling a scout’s belt of green webbing, offering his charmingest and toothiest smile.
—That’s the way the stone is to be, without a stitch.
Eyebrows bravely up, Nikolai backed out of his short denim pants and knelt to untie his gym shoes. Briefs and thick white socks he pulled off together. Then his jersey over his head.
—Two sugars? There’s real cream. You’ll get over blushing. Good knees, good toes.
—Sorry. Didn’t think I’d blush. The statue will be the same size as me? Hey! Good coffee, you know.
—Life size, oh yes. Keep turning around. Raise your free hand and stretch. Do you think you can keep to a schedule for posing?
—Sure. Why not? I really didn’t think I’d go shy. Being naked’s fun. My grandma and grandpa, Mama’s mama and daddy, are Kropotkinites, and I’m boss in my own pants. My folks are as broad-minded green as they come, no barbed wire anywhere, good Danish liberals, to the point of being fussy. You know what I mean?
A mischievously knowing smile from Gunnar.
—Park your cup, there, and stand on your toes, arms over your head. Legs out more, each side. We can’t do a Thorvaldsen nor yet an Eric Gill. I’m what they call a neoclassicist, a realist, and out of it. What’s being boss in your own pants mean?
—A licensed devil, according to Mama. Liberal points for what boys do anyway, says Papa. Who’s King Matt?
—Another character in a book, by a Polish doctor. Actually the work will be of a boy carrying Matt’s flag. At an awful moment. I’ll tell you all about it while we’re working. You can read the book.
Eyes askew, Nikolai ran his tongue across the plump tilt of his upper lip. While we’re working.
—You have kids? I guess they’re too little to pose.
—No, and no wife, either, just Samantha, whom you’ll meet. Arms out. Twist around to the right. You’re going to do, you know? You’re Ariel, all right.
2
Nikolai sat on his clothes piled in a chair. Coffee break.
—Why was Ariel naked?
—He was a spirit of the air. Like an angel.
Nikolai thought about this, guppying his coffee and sprucing the fit of his foreskin.
—Angels wear lots of clothes. Bible clothes. Steen and Stoffer are neat today, did you see? I’ll bet this Ariel you’re copying me for had pure thoughts and never a hard on, right? There was a Steen and Stoffer where Steen sees monkeys in the zoo jacking off and he says O gross! And his mom and pop are suddenly interested in showing him the cockatoos and toucans. Parents.
—What a face, Gunnar said, running his fingers over his cast of Bourdelle’s study of Herakles. The model was Doyen-Parigot, military bloke. Physical fitness enthusiast. Used to arrive on his horse at Bourdelle’s in full soldierly fig.
—Looks like an opossum, wouldn’t you say?
Punktum punktum,
komma, streg!
Sddan tegnes
Nikolaj!
Arme, ben,
og move stor.
Sådan kom han
til vor jord.
—Killed at Verdun. You make Edith glance heavenward when you twitch your piddler. Christian Brother from the Faeroes she is, you know. Though I once had a girl model who played with herself as liberally as you, and as unconcerned for convention, and Edith rather took to leaning around the door to see, in passing.
—What’s Verdun? You know Mikkel, the redhead kid, my pal, with terminal freckles and chipmunk teeth? His dad is all for his doing it every day. Says it keeps him happy.
—Verdun was a terrible battle in the First World War. It Mikkel’s daddy Ulf Tidselfnug? Break’s over: back at it.
—Do you know him? He prints books. It’s fun to go to Mikkel’s, where, if we stay in his room, we can do anything we want to, and Mikkel’s always answering the door in nothing but a T-shirt and wrunkled socks. His mom says that if he turns himself into an idiot how would you notice?
—O pure innocent Danish youth!
Questioning eyes.
—Teasing the model, Samantha said, is Gunnar’s way of relating. You’ll get used to it. Besides, you can tease him back. Gunnar’s jealous, anyway.
TREE HOUSE
—How old is this Gunnar?
—He’s had a rabbit, a Belgian hare I think it is, in a show, and a naked girl holding one leg by the ankle in another. He did those at the Academy, and then he was in Paris for a year. He was seventeen when he went to the Academy, that’s four years, and Paris was just a couple of years back, so he’s like twenty-four, yuss? Outsized whacker in his jeans.
—The bint’s there all the time?
—Oh no, very busy girl, Samantha. She comes and goes. Spends
the night a lot, too, I think.
4
—Brancusi’s Torso of a Boy, there. My Ariel is to be as pure as that, but with all of you there, representational, as the critics say, thugs, the lot of them.
Nikolai tugged his foreskin into a snugger fit.
—It leks, and it doesn’t, you know?
—The thighs make it a boy, and the hips the same girth as the chest. But further than that, in style, you can’t go. Gaudier, here, had the genius of the age. Killed in the First World War, only 24. That’s his bust of the poet Pound, and that’s his Red Dancer.
—Real brainy is what I’m getting a reputation for, even at home. Would Brancusi have used a model, some French soccer player? He could at least have put in a navel. I’ll have my pecker and toms, won’t I, as Ariel?
—Shakespeare would insist. He liked well-designed boys and approved of nature.
—I’ll bet. Did Brancusi?
—Brancusi’s private life in unknown. I think he simply worked, sawing and polishing and chiselling. He did his own cooking. There was a white dog named Polar.
—What would an Ariel by him have looked like?
5
Commandant Nikolai Doyen-Parigot rode his white charger Washington among Peugeots and Citroëns to Antoine Bourdelle’s studio. Tying Washington to a parking meter, he strode inside. Bourdelle was in his smock. A boy was mixing modelling clay in a tub. Amidst life-size casts of Greek statues Nikolai Doyen-Parigot took off his uniform, handing it piece by piece, epauletted coat and sword and spurred boots and snowy white shirt and suspenders and wool socks slightly redolent of horse and long underwear, to a respectful but blushing concierge.
Herakles with the head of Apollo.
Thick curly hair matted his chest. His dick was as big as his charger’s and his balls were like two oranges in a cloth sack. His wife went around in a happy daze because of them, as did several lucky young actresses and dancers. Restocking the regiment for the next generation he called it.
The Death of Picasso Page 18