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Stephen Mitchell's Job: A Critique
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12047 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
12 / 1987 |
3,394 Words |
| Author
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Edwin M. Good
Edwin M. Good is chairman of the Department of Religious
Studies at Stanford University and is completing a book on
the Book of Job. |
The Italians have a great proverb that is difficult to reproduce in English: Tradittore traduttore. In too many words: "A translator is a traitor." Anyone who has tried to translate the Book of Job knows to the soul's depths the proverb's truth. Stephen Mitchell knows it twice as well as most of us, because this is ostensibly his second try at translating Job. It is not really his second try, but rather the first, somewhat revised. In 1979, Doubleday & Company published Into the Whirlwind (hereafter IW). The new book refers to IW as "an earlier version of this translation," and the differences and similarities between them are very interesting.
However, it must be emphasized that this is Stephen Mitchell's Job, not the Hebrew Bible's Job. That is at once its virtue and its fault. To his credit, Stephen Mitchell is a talented poet whole poem has strength, consistency, emotional depth, a and a propulsive rhythm. On the other had, Mitchell so extensively rewrote the Hebrew book that this poem represents his own composition. I find the Job in the Hebrew Bible, without the changes, deletions, and rearrangements that Mitchell indulged in, an even more powerfully human document than Mitchell's Job.
Stephen Mitchell's poetry
Classical Hebrew poetry is lean and terse. It does not follow regular patterns of accented and unaccented syllables like forms of English poetry, such as the sonnet with fourteen lines in iambic pentameter. The Hebrew line has important accents or stresses, but the rhythm varies and shifts so that stressed syllables may come immediately together or may be separated by several unstressed ones. Mitchell wisely does not try to reproduce the Hebrew rhythm, but writes a flexibly rhythmic verse, usually with a three-stress or four-stress line of seven to ten syllables (occasionally six or eleven). His lines are not rigid partly because he freely varies the pattern (I add accents):
He levels cliffs in an instant,
rooting them up his rage;
he knocks the earth from its platform
and shakes the pillars of the sky;
he talks to the sun - it it darkens;
he clamps a seal on the stars. (p. 27, Job 9:5-7)
Mitchell has taken some liberties with the Hebrew. I'll be picky: "He levels"
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