Quarrel & Quandary

by Cynthia Ozick

  Of the hundred theories of translation, some lyrical, some stultifyingly academic, others philologically abstruse, the speculations of three extraordinary literary figures stand out: Nabokov, Ortega y Gasset, and Walter Benjamin. Nabokov, speaking of Pushkin, demands “translations with copious footnotes, footnotes reaching up like skyscrapers.… I want such footnotes and the absolutely literal sense.” This, of course, is pugnaciously anti-literary—Nabokov’s curmudgeonly warning against the “drudge” who substitutes “easy platitudes for the breathtaking intricacies of the text.” It is, besides, a statement of denial and disbelief: no translation is ever going to work, so please don’t try. Ortega’s milder disbelief is finally tempered by aspiration. “Translation is not a duplicate of the original text,” he begins; “it is not—it shouldn’t try to be—the work itself with a different vocabulary.” And he concludes, “The simple fact is that the translation is not the work, but a path toward the work”—which suggests at least the possibility of arrival.

  Benjamin withdraws altogether from these views. He will believe in the efficacy of translation as long as it is not of this earth, and only if the actual act of translation—by human hands—cannot be accomplished. A German Jew, a contemporary of Kafka, a Hitler refugee, a suicide, he is eerily close to Kafka in mind and sensibility; on occasion he expresses characteristically Kafkan ideas. In his remarkable 1923 essay “The Task of the Translator,” he imagines a high court of language that has something in common with the invisible hierarchy of judges in The Trial. “The translatability of linguistic creations,” he affirms, “ought to be considered even if men should prove unable to translate them.” Here is Platonism incarnate: the non-existent ideal is perfect; whatever is attempted in the world of reality is an imperfect copy, falls short, and is useless. Translation, according to Benjamin, is debased when it delivers information, or enhances knowledge, or offers itself as a trot, or as a version of Cliffs Notes, or as a help to understanding, or as any other kind of convenience. “Translation must in large measure refrain from wanting to communicate something, from rendering the sense,” he maintains. Comprehension, elucidation, the plain import of the work—all that is the goal of the inept: “Meaning is served far better—and literature and language far worse—by the unrestrained license of bad translators.”

  What is Benjamin talking about? If the object of translation is not meaning, what is it? Kafka’s formulation for literature is Benjamin’s for translation: the intent to communicate the incommunicable, to explain the inexplicable. “To some degree,” Benjamin continues, “all great texts contain their potential translation between the lines; this is true to the highest degree of sacred writings.” And yet another time: “In all language and linguistic creations there remains in addition to what can be conveyed something that cannot be communicated … that very nucleus of pure language.” Then woe to the carpentry work of real translators facing real texts! Benjamin is scrupulous and difficult, and his intimations of ideal translation cannot easily be paraphrased: they are, in brief, a longing for transcendence, a wish equivalent to the wish that the translators of the Psalmist in the King James version, say, might come again, and in our own generation. (But would they be fit for Kafka?)

  Benjamin is indifferent to the exigencies of carpentry and craft. What he is insisting on is what Kafka understood by the impossibility of writing German: the unbridgeable fissure between words and the spells they cast. Always for Kafka, behind meaning there shivers an intractable darkness, or (rarely) an impenetrable radiance. And the task of the translator, as Benjamin intuits it, is not within the reach of the conscientious if old-fashioned Muirs, or the highly readable Breon Mitchell, whose Trial is a page-turner (and whose glistening contemporaneity may cause his work to fade faster than theirs). Both the superseded Muirs and the eminently useful Mitchell convey information, meaning, complexity, “atmosphere.” How can one ask for more, and, given the unparalleled necessity of reading Kafka in English, what, practically, is “more”? Our debt to the translators we have is unfathomable. But a look into Kafka’s simplest sentences—“Wer war es? Ein Freund? Ein guter Mensch?… Waren es alle?”—points to Benjamin’s nearly liturgical plea for “that very nucleus of pure language” which Kafka called the impossibility of writing German; and which signals also, despairingly, the impossibility of translating Kafka.

  *His three sisters, Ottla, Valli, and Elli, who survived him, perished at Auschwitz and Lodz between 1941 and 1943. And suppose Kafka had not died of tuberculosis in 1924? Of all the speculations and hypotheses about Kafka, this may be the most significant. In 1940 he would have been fifty-seven. If only he had lived that long —The Castle and other works would have been completed, and how many further masterpieces would now be in our possession! Yet what would those extra years have meant for Kafka? By 1940, the Jews of Prague were forbidden to change their addresses or leave the city. By 1941, they could not walk in the woods around Prague, or travel on trolleys, buses, and subways. Telephones were ripped out of Jewish apartments, and public telephones were off-limits to Jews. Jewish businesses were confiscated; firms threw out their Jewish employees; Jewish children were thrown out of school. And so on and so on and so on, until ghettoization, degradation, deportation, and murder. That is how it was for Ottla, Valli, and Elli, and for all of Kafka’s tedious and unliterary relatives (“The joys and sorrows of my relatives bore me to my soul,” he complained in his diary); and that is how it would have been for Kafka. The work he left behind was at first restricted to Jewish readers only, and then banned as “harmful and undesirable.” Schocken, his publisher, escaped to Tel Aviv. It remains doubtful that Kafka would have done the same.

  The Impious Impatience of Job

  The riddles of God are more satisfying

  than the solutions of men.

  —G. K. Chesterton

  1. What the Scholars Say

  Twenty-five centuries ago (or perhaps twenty-four or twenty-three), an unnamed Hebrew poet took up an old folk tale and transformed it into a sacred hymn so sublime—and yet so shocking to conventional religion—that it agitates and exalts us even now. Scholars may place the Book of Job in the age of the Babylonian Exile, following the conquest of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar—but to readers of our own time, or of any time, the historicity of this timeless poem hardly matters. It is timeless because its author intended it so; it is timeless the way Lear on the heath is timeless (and Lear may owe much to Job). Job is a man who belongs to no known nation; despite his peerless Hebrew speech, he is plainly not a Hebrew. His religious customs are unfamiliar, yet he is no pagan: he addresses the One God of monotheism. Because he is unidentified by period or place, nothing in his situation is foreign or obsolete; his story cannot blunder into anachronism or archaism. Like almost no other primordial poem the West has inherited, the Book of Job is conceived under the aspect of the universal—if the universal is understood to be a questioning so organic to our nature that no creed or philosophy can elude it.

  That is why the striking discoveries of scholars—whether through philological evidences or through the detection of infusions from surrounding ancient cultures—will not deeply unsettle the common reader. We are driven—we common readers—to approach Job’s story with tremulous palms held upward and unladen. Not for us the burden of historical linguistics, or the torrent of clerical commentary that sweeps through the centuries, or the dusty overlay of partisan interpretation. Such a refusal of context, historical and theological, is least of all the work of willed ignorance; if we choose to turn from received instruction, it is rather because of an intrinsic knowledge—the terror, in fact, of self-knowledge. Who among us has not been tempted to ask Job’s questions? Which of us has not doubted God’s justice? What human creature ever lived in the absence of suffering? If we, ordinary clay that we are, are not equal to Job in the wild intelligence of his cries, or in the unintelligible wilderness of his anguish, we are, all the same, privy to his conundrums.

  Yet what captivates th
e scholars may also captivate us. A faithful English translation, for instance, names God as “God,” “the Lord,” “the Holy One,” “the Almighty”—terms reverential, familiar, and nearly interchangeable in their capacity to evoke an ultimate Presence. But the author of Job, while aiming for the same effect of incalculable awe, has another resonance in mind as well: the dim tolling of some indefinable aboriginal chime, a suggestion of immeasurable antiquity. To achieve this, he is altogether sparing in his inclusion of the Tetragrammaton, the unvocalized YHVH (the root of which is “to be,” rendered as “I am that I am”), which chiefly delineates God in the Hebrew Bible (and was later approximately transliterated as Yahweh or Jehovah). Instead, he sprinkles his poem, cannily and profusely, with pre-Israelite God-names: El, Eloah, Shaddai—names so lost in the long-ago, so unembedded in usage, that the poem is inevitably swept clean of traditional pieties. Translation veils the presence—and the intent—of these old names; and the necessary seamlessness of translation will perforce paper over the multitude of words and passages that are obscure in the original, subject to philological guesswork. Here English allows the common reader to remain untroubled by scholarly puzzles and tangles.

  But how arresting to learn that Satan appears in the story of Job not as that demonic figure of later traditions whom we meet in our translation, but as ha-Satan, with the definite article attached, meaning “the Adversary”—the counter-arguer among the angels, who is himself one of “the sons of God.” Satan’s arrival in the tale helps date its composition. It is under Persian influence that he turns up—via Zoroastrian duality, which pits, as equal contenders, a supernatural power for Good against a supernatural power for Evil. In the Book of Job, the scholars tell us, Satan enters Scripture for the first time as a distinct personality and as an emblem of destructive forces. But note: when the tale moves out of the prose of its fablelike frame into the sovereign grandeur of its poetry, Satan evaporates; the poet, an uncompromising monotheist, recognizes no alternative to the Creator, and no opposing might. Nor does the poet acknowledge any concept of afterlife, though Pharisaic thought in the period of his writing is just beginning to introduce that idea into normative faith.

  There is much more that textual scholarship discloses in its search for the Job-poet’s historical surround: for example, the abundance of words and phrases in Aramaic, a northwestern Semitic tongue closely related to Hebrew, which was rapidly becoming the lingua franca of the post-Exilic Levant. Aramaic is significantly present in other biblical books as well: in the later Psalms, in Ecclesiastes, Esther, and Chronicles—and, notably, in the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Babylonian Talmud is written in Aramaic; it is the language that Jesus speaks. Possibly the Job-poet’s everyday speech is Aramaic—this may account for his many Aramaisms—but clearly, for the literary heightening of poetry, he is drawn to the spare beauty and noble diction of classical Hebrew (much as Milton, say, in constructing his poems of Paradise, invokes the cadences of classical Latin).

  And beyond the question of language, the scholars lead us to still another enchanted garden of context and allusion: the flowering, all over the ancient Near East, of a form known as “wisdom literature.” A kind of folk-philosophy linking virtue to prudence, and pragmatically geared to the individual’s worldly success, its aim is instruction in level-headed judgment and in the achievement of rational contentment. The biblical Proverbs belong to this genre, and, in a more profoundly reflective mode, Ecclesiastes and portions of Job; but wisdom literature can also be found in Egyptian, Babylonian, Ugaritic, and Hellenistic sources. It has no overriding national roots and deals with personal rather than collective conduct, and with a commonsensical morality guided by principles of resourcefulness and discretion. A great part of the Book of Job finds its ancestry in the region’s pervasive wisdom literature (and its descendants in today’s self-improvement best-sellers). But what genuinely seizes the heart are those revolutionary passages in Job that violently contradict what all the world, yesterday and today, takes for ordinary wisdom.

  2. What the Reader Sees

  However seductive they are in their insight and learning, all these scholarly excavations need not determine or deter our own reading. We, after all, have in our hands neither the Hebrew original nor a linguistic concordance. What we do have—and it is electrifying enough—is the Book of Job as we readers of English encounter it. And if we are excluded from the sound and texture of an elevated poetry in a tongue not ours, we are also shielded from problems of structure and chronology, and from a confrontation with certain endemic philological riddles. There is riddle enough remaining—a riddle that is, besides, an elemental quest, the appeal for an answer to humankind’s primal inquiry.

  So there is something to be said for novice readers who come to Job’s demands and plaints unaccoutered: we will perceive God’s world exactly as Job himself perceives it. Or put it that Job’s bewilderment will be ours, and our kinship to his travail fully unveiled, only if we are willing to absent ourselves from the accretion of centuries of metaphysics, exegesis, theological polemics. Of the classical Jewish and Christian theologians (Saadia Gaon, Rashi, ibn Ezra, Maimonides, Gersonides, Gregory, Aquinas, Calvin), each wrote from a viewpoint dictated by his particular religious perspective. But for us to be as (philosophically) naked as Job will mean to be naked of bias, dogma, tradition. It will mean to imagine Job solely as he is set forth by his own words in his own story.

  His story, because it is mostly in dialogue, reads as a kind of drama. There is no proscenium; there is no scenery. But there is the dazzling spiral of words—extraordinary words, Shakespearean words; and there are the six players, who alternately cajole, console, contradict, contend, satirize, fulminate, remonstrate, accuse, deny, trumpet, succumb. Sometimes we are reminded of Antigone, sometimes of Oedipus (Greek plays that are contemporaneous with Job), sometimes of Othello. The subject is innocence and power; virtue and injustice; the Creator and His Creation; or what philosophy has long designated as theodicy, the Problem of Evil. And the more we throw off sectarian sophistries—the more we attend humbly to the drama as it plays itself out—the more clearly we will see Job as he emerges from the venerable thicket of theodicy into the heat of our own urgency. Or call it our daily breath.

  3. Job’s Story

  Job’s story—his fate, his sentence—begins in heaven, with Satan as prosecuting attorney. Job, Satan presses, must be put to trial. Look at him: a man of high estate, an aristocrat, robust and in his prime, the father of sons and daughters, respected, affluent, conscientious, charitable, virtuous, God-fearing. God-fearing? How effortless to be always praising God when you are living in such ease! Look at him: how he worries about his lucky children and their feasting, days at a time—was there too much wine, did they slide into blasphemy? On their account he brings sacred offerings in propitiation. His possessions are lordly, but he succors the poor and turns no one away; his hand is lavish. Yet look at him—how easy to be righteous when you are carefree and rich! Strip him of his wealth, wipe out his family, afflict him with disease, and then see what becomes of his virtue and his piety!

  So God is persuaded to test Job. Invasion, fire, tornado, destruction, and the cruelest loss of all: the death of his children. Nothing is left. Odious lesions creep over every patch of Job’s skin. Tormented, he sits in the embers of what was once his domain and scratches himself with a bit of shattered bowl. His wife despairs: after all this, he still declines to curse God! She means for him to dismiss God as worthless to his life, and to dismiss his ruined life as worthless. But now a trio of gentlemen from neighboring lands arrives—a condolence call from Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, Job’s distinguished old friends. The three weep and are mute—Job’s broken figure appalls: pitiable, desolate, dusted with ash, scraped, torn.

  All the foregoing is told in the plain prose of a folk tale: a blameless man’s undoing through the conniving of a mischievous sprite. A prose epilogue will ultimately restore Job to his good fortune, and, in the arbitrary style
of a fable, will even double it; but between the two halves of this simple narrative of loss and restitution the coloration of legend falls away, and a majesty of outcry floods speech after speech. And then Job’s rage ascends—a rage against the loathsomeness of “wisdom.”

  When the horrified visitors regain their voices, it is they who appear to embody reasonableness, logic, and prudence, while Job—introduced in the prologue as a man of steadfast faith who will never affront the Almighty—rails like a blasphemer against an unjust God. The three listen courteously as Job bewails the day he was born, a day that “did not shut the doors of my mother’s womb, nor hide trouble from my eyes.” In response to which, Eliphaz begins his first attempt at solace: “Can mortal man be righteous before God? Can a man be pure before his Maker?… Behold, happy is the man whom God reproves; therefore despise not the chastening of the Almighty.” Here is an early and not altogether brutal hint of what awaits Job in the severer discourse of his consolers: the logic of punishment, the dogma of requital. If a man suffers, it must be because of some impiety he has committed. Can Job claim that he is utterly without sin? And is not God a merciful God, “for He wounds, but binds up; He smites, but His hands heal”? In the end, Eliphaz reassures Job, all will be well.