James Kugel vs. Robert Alter: The Cage Match of the Century

Boy, is that title exaggerated. But it got your attention.

James Davila has a puff piece on James Kugel over on his blog. It’s his way of pumping Kugel’s latest book. I am impressed that when Kugel taught intro to the Bible at Harvard, 900 students enrolled in his course. More than enrolled in the most popular intro to Economics course. The event prompted the Harvard Crimson to announce, “God beats Mammon.” Now that doesn’t happen every day.

But I struggle with Kugel’s scholarship because of a book he wrote entitled The Idea of Biblical Poetry (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1981; repr. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1998). The book is packed with insights, but he also makes outrageous claims. Kugel’s more uproarious assertions were rebutted by Adele Berlin, Robert Alter, and many others. But I’m afraid they continue to inflict damage on the study of ancient Hebrew poetry. Ros Clarke comments in the same vein.

 

The most ridiculous claim Kugel made is that there is no such thing as poetry in the Hebrew Bible. But he seems to have changed his mind, since he went on to write a book entitled The Great Poems of the Bible: A Reader’s Companion with New Translations (New York: Free Press, 1999).

In this post, I review Psalm 51:3-5 as translated by Kugel in his Great Poems and by Robert Alter in his The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary (New York: Norton, 2007).

Kugel and Alter have sparred publicly in the past. I won’t go into that. My point is that both are excellent interpreters and translators of the Hebrew Bible. My purpose is to compare their respective translations of Ps 51, beginning with verses 3-5.

Here is the Hebrew:

 חָנֵּנִי אֱלֹהִים כְּחַסְדֶּךָ

כְּרֹב רַחֲמֶיךָ

מְחֵה פְשָׁעָי

 

הַרְבֵּה כַּבְּסֵנִי מֵעֲוֹנִי

וּמֵחַטָּאתִי טַהֲרֵנִי

 

כִּי־פְשָׁעַי אֲנִי אֵדָע

וְחַטָּאתִי נֶגְדִּי תָמִיד

 Ps 51:3-5 is a 1:(1:1) strophe.

51:3 is not quadripartite, as NRSV and the JPS Hebrew-English Tanakh have it (though a quadripartite division works well enough in English translation). It is bipartite, with the second half-line divisible into two parts. The line-type is 3:(2:2). The punctuation in Kugel’s translation makes this transparent (see below).

The scansion of 51:4-5 is uncontroversial.

Ps 51 in its current form scans as a 22 line poem. My own guess: 51:17-18 + 20-21 are a later addition to an original 18-line poem. These questions, for the moment, are best left to one side. In the following, I reformat Kugel and Alter’s translations to conform to the scansion proposed above.

Kugel’s Translation

 
Be generous, God, in Your kindness;

in your great mercy,

erase what I did.

 

Wash me clean of my misdeed,

purify me of my sin.

 

For I know that I did wrong.

My sin is always on my mind.

 

Alter’s Translation

 
Grant me grace, God, as befits Your kindness,

with Your great mercy

wipe away my crimes.

 

Thoroughly wash my transgressions away

and cleanse me from my offense.

 

For my crimes I know,

and my offense is before me always.

 
Psalm 51:3

A temptation to which many translators fall prey is to over-translate a word or clause based on the sense it has in context. Most translations of Ps 51:3 do that by rendering by ‘Have mercy on me’ (traditional, NRSV; NAB; NJB).

חנני אלהים does introduce a prayer for mercy, but חנן does not mean ‘have mercy.’ It means ‘show favor,’ ‘grant grace.’ The psalmist’s request is deliberately generic at the first. It becomes more specific, already in the next half-line.

According to many texts, God’s defining characteristic is to show favor (go here for details). It is a glorious concept, but one that runs counter to a common perception of realty. The psalmist nevertheless has need of God to show him favor, and therefore prays as he does.

Alter’s translation ‘grant me grace’ hews closely to the Hebrew, though admittedly, Kugel’s ‘be generous’ is suggestive.

Kugel, 0.5; Alter, 1; traditional, NRSV, 0.

Both Kugel and Alter translate חסד by ‘kindness.’ This is correct, as is NAB’s ‘goodness,’ whereas ‘faithfulness’ (NJPSV), ‘steadfast love’ (traditional, NRSV), and ‘faithful love’ (REB, NJB) miss the mark somewhat. God is not obligated to forgive anyone. Furthermore, the covenant as understood in the Torah contemplates the death penalty, not forgiveness, in the case of things like murder and adultery. The psalmist asks God to respond to his offense out of kindness, not out of faithfulness to a precedent promise. חסד is often used in the sense of a boon receivable from a superior which an inferior could never repay no matter what he did. This is the sense here.

Kugel and Alter, 1; traditional, NRSV, 0.

Kugel’s ‘in Your kindness / in Your great mercy,’ while not exactly literal, conserves the prepositional parallelism and hews to the compactness of expression of the original. Alter’s ‘as befits Your kindness / with Your great mercy’ is more exact as a translation in the first component, but obscures the parallelism of prepositions and is less successful in translating a sense of the original’s concision. NRSV and company’s ‘according to your steadfast love / according to your abundant mercy’ is bloated and vastly inferior as a representation of the Hebrew, but of course, it is musical in its own way.

Kugel, 1; Alter, 0.5; traditional, NRSV, 0.

Kugel’s ‘erase what I did’ has a nice ring to it. But the Hebrew poet wrote something else. Alter’s ‘wipe away my crimes’ is on the mark. It sparkles because ‘crimes’ is a concept that has civil and political uses in English, just as פשעים has in Hebrew. ‘Transgressions’ (traditional, NRSV) is a nice translation in some ways, but is not used in secular contexts. ‘Misdeeds’ (REB) and ‘offenses’ (NJB) are right on.

Kugel, 0; Alter, 1; traditional, NRSV, 0.5.

 I would translate 51:3 as follows:

 
Favor me, God, in your goodness,

in your great mercy

         erase my crimes.

Psalm 51:4

Kugel’s translation of 51:4, ‘Wash me clean of my misdeed / purify me of my sin,’ is hard to improve on. Alter’s alternative is bloated and inexact in comparison. Traditional, NRSV, is only slightly better.

Kugel 3; Alter 0; traditional, NRSV, 1.

 Psalm 51:5

 Kugel’s translation of 51:5 is unnecessarily inexact. Alter’s ‘For my crimes I know, / and my offense is before me always’ sparkles like a diamond. Traditional, NRSV, reads like a prayer from a Christian prayerbook, which, of course, it is.

Kugel, 0; Alter, 3; traditional, NRSV, 0.

 
Final Score This Round

 
                 Alter, 6.5; Kugel, 5.5; traditional, NRSV, 1.5.

Comments

[Ros]

Interesting analysis, John. And thanks for the link to my comments. I'd just add that, for me, Alter's translation flows better and makes more use of English poetic devices than Kugel's.