ZOHAR TRANSLATION WATCH: Somehow I missed this Chicago Tribune article on Daniel Matt's ongoing new translation of the Zohar, but it's reprinted by the Fort Wayne News Sentinel. It is very long and not only tells about the project, it gives a fascinating profile of Margot Pritzker, its patron, and a good overview of the scholarly study of the Zohar. A definite Read It All.

Heiress sponsors scholar translating ancient Jewish text

BY RON GROSSMAN

Chicago Tribune

CHICAGO - (KRT) - Every weekday morning, Daniel Matt turns on his computer, stares at the tree-lined slopes outside his study window and waits for the words to come with which to describe the indescribable.

It is a routine he is pledged to maintain for the next 15 years or so, thanks to what has to be every scholar's dream come true: a wealthy patron, Margot Pritzker, who has freed him from the grunt work of the academic life. He has no more blue books to grade, and he no longer sits through endless faculty meetings at the Graduate Theological Union, whose campus lies just below Matt's home in the hills of Berkeley, Calif.

Now his sole responsibility is to convey the insights of a medieval Jewish mystic who wrestled with a truly heavyweight problem, a paradox that has troubled believers of many faiths: How can the limited human intellect possibly grasp the infinite nature of God?

Even the automobile parked in Matt's driveway bears witness to his single-minded focus on the question. Its license plate reads ZOHAR.

That is the title of a sprawling, multivolume work by long-ago author Moses ben Shem Tov de Leon, whose doctrines shaped Kabbalah, Judaism's mystical tradition. Such are the vagaries of history that a knockoff version of Moses de Leon's ideas is currently faddish in Hollywood, with Madonna and Dolly Parton announcing themselves disciples of Kabbalah.

Yet though the range of its influence runs from the pious to the trendy, there was no adequate English translation of the Zohar before Matt's long-awaited version. The first two volumes have just been published to choruses of scholarly praise. "Masterful," gushed Elie Wiesel. "Superbly fashioned," added Harold Bloom, America's veritable dean of literary studies.

Still, when the cheering dies down, that will leave Matt with 10 volumes to go. "On a good day," he says, "I can do 20 lines."

[...]

Taking the rabbi's suggestion to heart, Pritzker not only studied alongside her son, she kept at it afterward. She learned Hebrew and, over the years, she and Poupko worked through the Torah and read Midrash, the ancient rabbis' biblical commentaries.

"One day, Margot asked if there was a mystical tradition in Judaism and could we study some," recalls Poupko, whose current title is Judaic scholar, Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago. "I said yes, but there's a problem."

The problem was that the Zohar wasn't written in Hebrew but Aramaic, a related but distinct Semitic language from antiquity. By general consensus, the existing English version, more a paraphrase than a translation, didn't begin to capture Moses de Leon's voice. Wooden where it should be poetic, that earlier version was marred by a prudish toning-down of the sensual images he employed to convey his understanding of the Almighty.

For instance, Matt's translation renders one such passage with language intended to preserve the erotic quality of the Zohar's word picture:

"When He flings and streams seed, He does not woo the female, since She abides with Him."

The earlier version, made in England in the 1930s and known as the Soncino edition, says merely:

"When the seed flows forward, He does not court the Female."

Pritzker resolved to sponsor a fresh translation of the Zohar that was more faithful to the spirit of the original. Poupko consulted scholars in the field and the nearly universal verdict was that Matt was the only one for the job.

"He has the voice of a poet, the soul of a mystic and the intellect of a computer geek," Poupko says. The latter virtue enables Matt to toggle back and forth as he translates, comparing obscure terms in the Zohar with a huge database of Jewish religious literature he has downloaded.

[...]