Franz Rosenzweig wrote in a reply to Rabbi Josef Carlebach in 1929, “I have recently put the matter to myself as follows: for the translator there is neither good nor better, only bad and less bad.” More recently, Lydia Davis wrote, “In translating, you pose yourself a question—or it is posed to you by the text; you have no satisfactory answer, though you put something down on paper, and then years later the answer may turn up. Certainly you never forget the question. I have had two literary occupations, and preoccupations, all my adult life, both evidently necessary to me, each probably enhancing the other—writing and translating. And this is one of the differences between them: in translation, you are writing, yes, but not only writing—you are also solving, or trying to solve, a set problem not of your own creation. The problem can’t be evaded, as it can in your own writing, and it may haunt you later.”1
Despite his “bad and less bad,” Rosenzweig sought the ἱερὸς γάμος, holy marriage, in translation in which “the receiving people comes forth of its own desire and in its own utterance to meet the wingbeat of the foreign work… motivated… by the whole range of a historical moment.”2 That is, the ἱερὸς γάμος is more than a proper or perfect rendering of the text; it’s such a render at the right moment.
The only translation I’ve seen that approaches at least the limited sense of holy marriage is the Septuagint translation of Genesis 3:20: καὶ ἐκάλεσεν Αδαμ τὸ ὄνομα τῆς γυναικὸς αὐτοῦ Ζωή ὅτι αὕτη μήτηρπάντων τῶν ζώντων.
וַיִּקְרָא הָֽאָדָם שֵׁם אִשְׁתּוֹ חַוָּה כִּי הִוא הָֽיְתָה אֵם כָּל־חָֽי
Adam called his wife Ζωή/חַוָּה because she is the mother of ζώντων/כָּל־חָֽי. The Hebrew name Chava comes from the word for living thing/life, Chai, and so the Greek gives her name as Zoë, which comes from the Greek participle meaning living things, ζώντων. The meaning and wordplay comes through perfectly in a holy marriage of Greek and Hebrew.
Yet today we always call her by the Latinate name, Eve.
I’m haunted by innumerable problems in translating Genesis, and I’ve never found my answers fully satisfactory. But I’m convinced that this is an age ready to receive a new translation of Genesis, if only some translator can find a way to bring it forth. If you’d like to join me as I try, please:
From the opening essay in Essays Two.
See Rosenzeig’s “Scripture and Luther,” which I learned about in Everett Fox’s “Robert Alter and the Art of Bible Translation”.