Preparations for teaching have brought me into contact with two new translations: Robert Alter’s rendering of Genesis and Joe Sachs’s version of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Though the underlying texts could not be more different in style and genre, I think that the impulse behind the two translations is similar: to cut through a translation tradition that has impeded understanding, but more than that, has rendered the texts in question boring.
It is a gesture that I find profoundly attractive, a kind of “Protestant principle” of translation. Part of the appeal is probably the individualism of it, which sits well with someone like me, since I flatter myself that I have “charted my own way” without accumulating an approved pedigree. More than that, though, I think the attraction of this kind of radical retranslation is the sense that it’s not just possible to say something new about some of the most commented-upon texts in the Western tradition, but to see them again for the first time.
Genesis, for instance, is obviously one of the most familiar texts in the world to me, and yet Alter’s translation made it feel brand-new. I can’t say I’ve studied Aristotle anywhere near as closely, but the contrast between Sachs’s translation and the jargon-laden near-nonsense I struggled to work through before could not be clearer. I now want to read every translation both authors have done of their respective body of texts — which is especially striking in the case of Sachs, since I’ve previously had no particular interest in Aristotle.
Do others know of similarly iconoclastic translations of other major works?