from the INTRODUCTION

II

The great Russian poet Boris Pasternak identified the central issue in the art of translation when he said, “The average translator gets the literal meaning right but misses the tone; and tone is everything.” This is just as true of prose as of poetry. Tone is the life-rhythm of a mind. Reading a translation that renders a great writer’s words without re-creating their tone is like listening to a computer play Mozart.

My method in establishing the tone of this Genesis was to listen to the Hebrew with one ear and with the other ear to hear into existence an equivalent English. In the process I had to filter out the sound of the King James Version, insofar as that is possible. English-speaking readers usually think of biblical language as Elizabethan: magniloquent, orotund, liturgical, archaic, full of thees and thous and untos and thereofs and prays. But ancient Hebrew, especially ancient Hebrew prose, is in many ways the opposite of that. Its dignity comes from its supreme simplicity. It is a language of concision and powerful earthiness, austere in its vocabulary, straightforward in its syntax, spare with its adjectives and adverbs — a language that pulses with the energy of elemental human truths.

My job was to re-create this massive dignity and simplicity in an English that felt like it was mine. Dignity is not, I think, a quality you can aim at; it is a function of a writer’s sincerity, and it arises on its own in a translation if you have listened deeply enough to the original text and have at the same time been faithful to the genius of the English language. Simplicity is a bit easier to talk about. It doesn’t only mean using as few words as possible. It is also a matter of finding a language that sounds completely natural, unliterary, in some sense unwritten: the words of a voice telling ancient stories without adornment and without self-consciousness. This biblical style is a creation of the highest literary intuition and tact. No other Western classic has anything like it. It is worlds away from the exquisitely precise, elaborated, gorgeous language of the Homeric poems, the other great texts at the source of Western culture.

The translation of prose, almost as much as of poetry, requires an ear finely attuned to the sound of words. It is fatal when a contemporary Genesis confuses the natural with the vulgar or imitates the cadences of the King James Version. Stiff formality is one extreme, vulgar breeziness the other; in Dryden’s terms, you must be neither on stilts nor too low. But finding the right tone is not a question of testing the levels of diction the way Goldilocks tested the mattresses, of finding the midpoint between high and low. You can’t measure tone with a ruler or a compass. You have to find the sound of the genuine.

It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place.
It has to face the men of the time and to meet
The women of the time.

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