ROBERT ALTER is intereviewed by the Boston Globe about his translation work on the Hebrew Bible:

Q&A with Robert Alter

By Harvey Blume | September 2, 2007

ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS OF the Hebrew Bible - most notably the King James version - have been key not only for the believers who look to them for instruction and inspiration, but to the evolving literary and cultural sensibility of the West. It's no wonder, then, that the radical approach to translating biblical texts that Robert Alter has taken - first in ``The Five Books of Moses" (2004) and now in ``The Book of Psalms" - has been greeted with responses ranging from delight to irritation.

Alter aims to reproduce the rhythmic energy of the Hebrew texts in an English that adheres as closely as possible to the meaning and style of the original. Alter's Genesis, for example, begins: ``When God began to create . . ." The word ``began" is key: Creation, for God, is a work in progress. It's a powerful reading that can easily jolt someone wedded to older versions.

As Alter explained when I called him in Berkeley, where he has taught literature since 1967, he was drawn to biblical translation almost despite himself, propelled by a sense that recent translations were badly flawed. Often, translations lacked sensitivity to English literary values, modeling themselves on the lingo of ``high-school textbooks, bureaucratic directives, and ordinary conversation." And almost always, according to Alter, translators simply failed to recognize that the Hebrew Bible, whatever its religious content, was a collection of masterpieces composed by authors who took ``writerly pleasure" in their work.

[...]