Robert Alter Translates the Psalms: The Importance of Prosody

This is the third installment of a review of Robert Alter, The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary (New York: Norton, 2007). As noted in the first installment, Alter’s translation marks an improvement over previous translations in instance after specific instance.

Alter’s translation of Ps 6:1-4 was the object of study in the last installment. Here, Ps 1:1-2 is the focus of attention. Topics of discussion include prosody, chiasm, syntactic inversion, and translation issues.

You have to have a strong love for Hebrew and the Psalms to appreciate these posts. The first rule of pedagogy says that an effective presentation is more important than substance, and I keep ignoring that rule, don’t I? The way to make someone remember what you want to say is to wrap it in things like mystery, food, sex, and blood. Just ask the prophet Ezekiel, or any ordinary human being on the planet.

If that’s what you’re lookin’ for, wait for the next post. In memory of Rick Mansfield and Lingamish, former bloggers who must have temporarily got a life to judge from the paucity of recent posts on their respective sites, I’ve arranged all on my own for a Bible version cage match between …

James Kugel vs. Robert Alter

 There will be blood on the floor, I guarantee it. Those versed in Bible scholar trivia are already licking their chops imagining the spectacle. The bone of contention (excuse the mixed metaphor): Psalm 51.

 In preparation for that epic battle, I invite you below the fold for a re-reading, up close and personal, of a number of Psalms passages you thought you knew, but soon will know better, after exploring them in light of Alter’s translation of them.

Psalm 1:1-2

 

אַשְׁרֵי הָאִישׁ אֲשֶׁר

לֹא הָלַךְ

בַּעֲצַת רְשָׁעִים

 

וּבְדֶרֶךְ חַטָּאִים

לֹא עָמָד

 

וּבְמוֹשַׁב לֵצִים

לֹא יָשָׁב

 

כִּי אִם

בְּתוֹרַת יהוה חֶפְצֹו

 

וּבְתוֹרָתֹו יֶהְגֶּה

יוֹמָם וָלָיְלָה

 

Alter’s Translation

 

Happy the man who has not walked in the wicked’s counsel,

      nor in the way of offenders has stood,

           nor in the session of scoffers has sat.

But the Lord’s teaching is his desire,

      and His teaching he murmurs day and night.

 

My Translation

 

Happy the man

            who does not walk

                    in the counsel of evil men,

and does not stand

                    in the way of offenders,

and does not sit

                    in the company of naysayers.

 

On the contrary,

his pleasure is in the Lord’s direction;

he calls his direction to mind

                        day and night.

Psalm 1:1-2

 

The Importance of Prosody

I lay out the Hebrew and my translation in accordance with a working hypothesis that concerns the lineation of ancient Hebrew poetry. On this hypothesis, ancient Hebrew verse is characterized by “pulses” or “versets” of two to three beats occurring in “packets” of twos and threes, called “lines.” Lines on their part occur in “clusters” of twos and threes, called “strophes.”

This understanding of the prosody of ancient Hebrew verse shares a number of the assumptions that rule Alter’s approach to the prosody of ancient Hebrew prosody. Both of us, in accordance with a well-established school of thought, understand ancient Hebrew verse in terms of what prosodists call “strong-stress” meter. Both of us likewise are well-aware that ancient Hebrew poetry does not hew to a monotonous meter like the iambic pentameter familiar to students of English poetry.

But a line, from Alter’s point of view, contains 4 to 8 beats if dyadic; 6 to 12 if triadic. A line, on my hypothesis, is subject to less variation by half. If dyadic, it has a 4 to 6 beat range. If triadic, a 6 to 9 beat range.

In short, you can drive a Hummer through Alter’s definition. The text model I work with allows right of way to smaller vehicles only.

On what grounds does Alter decide to segment a text into – I continue the metaphor – stretch limousines of up to eight seats, as opposed to four, five, and six-seaters, if dyadic; and stretch vans of up to twelve seats, as opposed to six to nine-seaters, if triadic? He does not say.

Alter is not against dividing the text into short lines composed of short versets. Take Ps 69:4-5, for example:

 

יָגַעְתִּי בְקָרְאִי

נִחַר גְּרוֹנִי

 

כָּלוּ עֵינַי

מְיַחֵל לֵאלֹהָי

 

רַבּוּ מִשַּׂעֲרוֹת רֹאשִׁי

שֹׂנְאַי חִנָּם

 

עָצְמוּ מַצְמִיתַי

אֹיְבַי שֶׁקֶר

 

אֲשֶׁר לֹא־גָזַלְתִּי

אָז אָשִׁיב׃

I format the Hebrew in accordance with the lineation of Alter’s translation:

 

My eyes fail

       from hoping for my God.

More numerous than the hairs of my head

       are my unprovoked foes.

My destroyers grow strong,

       my lying foes.

What I have not stolen,

       should I then give back?

                                            Psalm 69:4-5

 In my view, the lineation is without error. Enjambment and interlinear parallelisms characterize the whole, but this is to be expected. In Lam 3, an important text for comparative purposes because the acrostic structure gives away the lineation, enjambment and interlinear parallelisms recur with similar regularity.

Ps 137:1-4 is another example of a text Alter divides into compact versets. Once again, Alter’s lineation is impeccable:

עַל נַהֲרוֹת בָּבֶל

שָׁם יָשַׁבְנוּ גַּם־בָּכִינוּ

בְּזָכְרֵנוּ אֶת־צִיּוֹן

 

עַל־עֲרָבִים בְּתוֹכָהּ

תָּלִינוּ כִּנֹּרוֹתֵינוּ

 

כִּי־שָׁם שְׁאֵלוּנוּ שׁוֹבֵינוּ

דִּבְרֵי שִׁיר

 

וְתוֹלָלֵינוּ שִׂמְחָה

שִׁירוּ־לָנוּ מִשִּׁיר צִיּוֹן

 

אֵיךְ נָשִׁיר אֶת־שִׁיר־יהוה

עַל אַדְמַת נֵכָר

 
By Babylon’s streams

       there we sat, oh we wept,

              when we recalled Zion.

On the poplars there

       we hung up our lyres.

For there our captors had asked of us

       words of song,

and our plunderers – rejoicing:

       “Sing us from Zion’s songs.”

How can we sing a song of the Lord

       on foreign soil?

                                                     Psalm 137:1-4

 On this division, enjambment and interlinear parallelisms recur with regularity.

But, in the case of Psalm 1:1-2, Alter opts for long lines. His first line, triadic, is a 15 seat stretch limousine (a seat = a strong stress)! If one opts for short lines, against which there are no obvious arguments, the interlinear parallelisms which run through the subunit are more palpable. Admittedly, my scansion of כי אם at the beginning of 1:2 as a distinct verset is audacious, but my basic point is that a subdivision of 1:1-2 into compact versets is not out of the question. The result, in fact, is a more ordered whole.

Interesting things fall out if one tests the possibility that compact versets characterize ancient Hebrew verse. A new kind of triadic line makes it appearance: the (2:2):3 line (and variations thereof). This is hardly revolutionary. It is a straightforward re-analysis of the “Siebenter” (“sevener”) of the classical German school of ancient Hebrew prosody. More significantly, 4:4 lines (and variations) are re-analyzed as pairs of lines, 2:2, followed by 2:2.

In consequence of the above, it can be shown that a length rule was operative in the composition of ancient Hebrew verse. Poems turn out to contain a set number of lines: 12, 18, 22, 28, and 36, and combinations thereof. Are you from Missouri, the “Show Me” state, and you are not taking my word for an answer? Elsewhere on this blog, you will find numerous worked examples which accord with the length rule: Isa 1:2-20; 5:1-7; 40:1-11; Lam 1; Nahum 1:2-13; Pss 2, 6, 46, 104, 111-112, 137; Song of Songs 1:2-14.

Syntactic Inversion, Topic-Fronting, and the Trope of Chiasm

Psalm 1:1-2 in the Hebrew is characterized by syntactic inversions. As I put it in the first installment in this series:

[I]n ancient Hebrew poetry, inversion occurs for two distinct reasons. Sometimes, as in ancient Hebrew prose, inversion serves to front an element of a clause or other construction in order to mark the element as the topic-in-context. Other elements of the construction are simultaneously down-ranked to the status of background information. On other occasions, inversion has another function. It is a poetic trope known as chiasm, whose function is to more tightly knit together two adjacent versets, lines, or larger prosodic units. In the latter case, a change in topic is not being signaled.

In Psalm 1:1-2, in my view, both kinds of inversion are attested. In 1:1, there is a double chiasm. In 1:2, there is a double topic-fronting. In 1:1, inversion has binding force and serves the knit the whole more closely together. In 1:2, inversion functions across the 1:1-2 subunit and serves on the pragmatic level to contrast alternative sources of direction: the counsel of evil men vs. the Lord’s direction.

My translation of תורה by direction is a bit unusual. Passages like Ps 25:12; 29:11; 86:11; and 119:35 suggests that the meaning ירה has in the Hiphil, ‘direct,’ is activated in the noun תורה in contexts which contain elements capable of triggering a construal in that sense.

In 1:1, the double chiasm has no contrastive function. Indeed, the chiasms of 1:1, if reproduced in English as Alter does, do not mislead the reader into thinking that simultaneous fronting one element and downgrading of another is going on. It just comes across unusual word order of the kind of poetry often contains. On the other hand, the contrast marked by topic-fronting across 1:1-2 as a whole does not stand out so as clearly. In fact, I would argue that the tight internal weave of 1:1, signaled by a double chiasm in the original, is best signaled in English by a concordant syntactic order of its parts.

Translation Issues

Alter consistently translates חטאים with ‘offenders,’ a marked improvement over the traditional ‘sinners,’ which has, unlike the Hebrew, a wholly religious cast in the English language. On similar grounds, I avoid translating as ‘the wicked,’ substituting ‘evil men’ in this instance. The sequence ‘evil men’/ ‘offenders’ / ‘naysayers’ moves from the generic to the more specific. Alter translates the last term,לצים , with ‘scoffers,’ which has the advantage of literalness. ‘Naysayers,’ my translation, is an attempt to bring out the kind of scoffers referred to. They are, it seems to me, to be thought of as those quoted in Ps 3:3; 10:11, 13; 12:5; 14:1; etc.

הגה in ancient Hebrew does not, in my view, mean ‘murmur,’ though a long tradition of lexicography, on which Alter apparently depends, thinks otherwise. Attention to the paradigmatic contexts in which the verb occurs rules a meaning like ‘murmur’ out. A lion הגה’s in ancient Hebrew (‘roar,’ Isa 31:4). So does a dove (‘coo,’ Is 34:14; Ps 59:11); raging nations (‘babble,’ Ps 2:1); the praise-filled worshipper (‘recite,’ Ps 35:28); the enunciator of deceit (‘prattle,’ Job 27:4) and the enunciator of wisdom (‘recite,’ Ps 37:30). So does someone who ‘recites’ from the Torah day and night (Ps 1:2). A common semantic denominator of recursivity is discernible across the various paradigmatic contexts. Indistinct and low-volume acoustic expression are not marked by this verb.

It is not obvious how to convey הגה by a single verb in English. My translation ‘call to mind’ in 1:2 is a cop-out, though similar to the translation choices made by the ancient versions (e.g. ‘meditate’). ‘His teaching is on his lips day and night’ is an alternative translation in context, also non-literal, which captures features of the sense of the original with greater saliency.

Comments

[Peter Nathan]

John I appreciate your prosody of Ps 1.1-2 The triad of actions v 1. really encompasses the total behaviour of the individual, but is lost to most readers unless it is set out as you have done.

[Bob MacDonald]

John, I appreciate that you have put forth your rationale for not observing the chiasm. I can't agree since this is an important psalm for seeing what is evident all over the psalter. Walk, stand, sit are evident in whatever order they arrive at the door. The important thing is, in this case, I think, to close the half-portal before opening the other half. I also think that your use of continuing present is better than the past tense though I cannot justify it except that one seems to be able to get away with anything in translating Hebrew verb forms. I like offender - good, but I prefer scornful. I recall the oneupmanship we used to practise when we were young with some grief and I don't want to sit in such a seat. Here, then is another trial at translating the first verse.

Happy the man who
does not walk
in the advice of the wicked
and in the way of offence
does not stand
and in the seat of the superior does not sit

verse 1 and 2 are French doors - they look forward to a second structural view - ci im, ci im, with the rhyming tree (c`ts), and chaff (cmts) - verse 2 must not simply be a but to the first half door, but also open to the room..
In my first trial, I used 'in this case' to introduce both - not sure this will fly

In this case, in the teaching of YHWH is his delight, and in his teaching he meditates day and night...

my wife suggested tree and debris for the later rhyme - it loses the fruit metaphor - but I think this is less of a loss in a city environment where chaff is not understood anyway.

[JohnFH]

Very good observations, Bob.

With your French doors explanation in mind, the chiasm becomes luminous and if reproduced in English would carry meaning.

Thanks again.

[Peter Kirk]

Alter's translation, Bob's and yours, John, have all fallen straight into the yawning trap for translators in this first verse, that in English "stand in the way of" is an idiom which has a meaning "hinder" almost precisely opposite to the intended meaning of the Hebrew. If your (plural) translation philosophy has no way of dealing with this kind of situation, idioms with widely varying meaning, beyond saying "learn what the phrase means in Hebrew, not in English", then it is so hollow that you might as well give up translating and simply transliterate.

[JohnFH]

I would reply, Peter, that literally no one would understand "stand in the way of" as meaning "hinder" in this context.

Language is a more flexible thing than you seem to assume.

Note that NLV, a translation that shares your translation philosophy, retains the idiom "stand in the way of." So did NIV, and so does TNIV, though it supplements it.

[Ros]

Hmm. I agree that no one would think 'stand in the way of' meant 'hinder' here. BUT I do think it's a sufficiently common English idiom that, for me at least, when I read it, I have to pause, remember that it should be taken in a different sense here, and then move on. It does obstruct my experience of the poetry. I'm not sure I have any better alternative to suggest. Path?

Interesting discussion though - we had a fun class last week discussing the poetic analysis of Ps 1:1. I think we were supposed to do Pss 1-2 but I kept thinking of more possibilities to discuss. We barely even touched on the chiasm/fronting/inversion issues. More thought needed!

[JohnFH]

Ros,

your remark about having to pause eloquently makes the case for idiomatic translations like TEV, CEV, and others like them.

Of course, it also worth pointing out that poetry sometimes deliberately requires of its readers a degree of effort that prose does not. There are many texts in the Bible, poetry and prose, that were not effortless to understand even for their intended recipients. With someone like Paul, one wonders sometimes whether he even understood everything he was saying. In a sense, translations that are effortless to read completely misrepresent the situation.

But of course, Ps 1:1 is effortless to read in the original. NJPSV, NRSV, REB, and NAB do fine work in a presenting a translation that is equally effortless to understand, but do so at the cost of eliminating the "walk, stand, sit" sequence, which, as I try to show, carries over into Ps 1:2 if torah is taken in the sense of "direction."

[Peter Kirk]

John, I cannot accept your "literally no one". I have enough experience of people totally misunderstanding the simplest Bible passages to realise that there are enough stupid people out there that someone will fall for every possible misunderstanding. Perhaps you don't agree simply because most of your experience is among academics who are usually not quite so stupid, or at least cleverer in covering up or explaining away their stupidity.

[JohnFH]

Peter, I stand corrected. Your point about the clever stupidity of academics is also well-taken.

But, while I should probably just agree with you that people's reception of a translation, any translation, tends to hover around the level of total depravity, I'll take the Franciscan point of view for a change.

People when they read the Bible more often than not understand it just fine, perhaps not the fine details, but the basic thrust. Even bad translations cannot thwart that.

Common grace: it's underrated.

[Ros]

Yes, they do understand the bad translations just fine, as you say. But I think you're aiming a little higher than that here, aren't you?

[JohnFH]

That's right, Ros. Perhaps the best imaginable translation of Ps 1:1-2 into English has yet to be proposed.

[Language Translator]

There are churches I know that they consider the Bible as the written word of God. KJV is considered as the closest to its original text. However NIV is popular and they say its the closest to KJV. No matter what others think, whether it's the Word of God or just a mere traslation, the Bible is still THE Holy book and experts must do their best with the guidance of God to deliver the message with accuracy.

[Robin Harris]

For Psalm 1;

Happy the man

who does not walk

in the counsel of evil men,

and does not stand

in the way of offenders,

and does not sit

in the company of naysayers

We could try this:

Blessed is the man
that hath not walked
in the counsel of the ungodly

and hath not sat
in the seat of the scornful
etc.

That is of course the version in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. So I found your commentary very interesting and expands in my mind on the importance of prosody in Anglican chant, which at on time I accompanied twice a week.