An ear for Isaiah - The Jewish Chronicle

According to the sages, one of the tragedies we commemorated in the recent Fast of Tevet was the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, begun in the second century BCE. One can see why the rabbis rued it; the translation of almah, a “young woman”, into the Greek word for “virgin”, came to be seized on by christological interpreters as a prediction of the Virgin Birth.

But while reading the Tanach in the original might be preferable, many of us would be lost without translation. We encounter our sacred texts mostly second-hand, refracted through the lens of another language.

And so we entrust our experience of the text to intermediaries — like Jessica Sacks, in-house translator at the Jerusalem-based Koren Publishers and one of the team responsible for the new translation of the Tanach into English published by Koren a few months ago. Originally from London, the niece of Lord Sacks, who has a first in English from Cambridge University and a master’s in Hebrew literature from the Hebrew University, translated some of the best-known biblical books, the five Megillot, Jonah and Isaiah.

The Koren Tanach sought not only to produce an accurate version of the Hebrew but, as she told the Limmud Festival last week, also to convey some of its literary qualities — “the colour of the narrative, the beauty of the poetry”, which was, she added, “a big ask”.

The books of the Bible are written in a number of different genres, but “usually translations have a very single voice throughout the Tanach,” she explained. “We wanted to see if we could do something different.”

She recalled the moment when, studying Hebrew in her gap year on kibbutz, where “it suddenly clicks, you can read the text without that little voice in your head translating it”.

She was reading a passage of Isaiah familiar to her — the prophecy of consolation, which opens “Comfort, comfort My people” — when she heard “that rhythm, that music, the flow of the original language and “it took away my breath.

“I have always read translations of this… and the translations were beautiful but how did they let me not know this music was there, this poetry was there? How did they not give me an inkling? That was the moment when I thought ‘One day I would love to translate this’.”

But while the task of translating a poetic text is testing, as she explained to her audience, the toughest challenges are not always where we might think them to be. There are words which appear only once in the Tanach whose precise meaning may be difficult to pin down.

But it is a seemingly simple phrase like ben adam, “a human being”, literally “son of man”, that can pose more questions. She and her colleagues “spent days” researching it. “There is more than one way to say ‘human’. You can say ‘person’, ‘man,’ ‘mankind’ etc.”

The compiler of a dictionary can list the various options. But a translator has to make her pick, aware of different connotations. “You have to choose the right word for the context, the right register.”

When the Hebrew is difficult, some translations try to convey that by making the English difficult too. Koren did not follow that line. “Because we are a religious translator and our main aim is to give people a religious experience, the policy we took was not ideological but pragmatic. If the text is difficult, we’ll just do the best we can” — which is to “translate into the clearest English we can.”

However, there are passages where the words may be simple yet the meaning remains cryptic, like the vision of the watchman from Isaiah 21: 12. “What news does night bring, watchman? / Watch, what news of night?” Who is the watchman, for example?

And when the watchman answers, “Morning comes — and also night?” what does that mean? Is it some allusion to messianic redemption, the day that “is neither day nor night”, according to the Haggadah poem.

“Because there is no way to say what this means with any kind of certainty, it is full of possibility,” she said.

“I want my English to be absolutely clear so that if you’re not understanding, you’ll know that it is not because I’m fluffing the English but because there is a mystery in the Hebrew and I want to give you that mystery as clean as I can.”

Translators also have to judge when to use more than one word to capture the Hebrew. Shortly after the vision of the watchmen, there is a scene of “nomads on the trail from Dedan”. The Hebrew has just two words, she uses a phrase. The single word for “nomads on the trail” would have been “caravans”, but she explained, “The idea that people would envision a caravan holiday in Wales I could not countenance in this context.”

For these are people in flight, at a time when the conquering Assyrians were causing upheaveal in the Middle East. For “they have fled the sword, /the drawn sword, / the taut bow,/ the dead weight of war.” The Hebrew is spare yet emotive and her translation, using short, monosyllabic, words matches the sparseness of the original.

Sometimes people don’t realise, she said, but “some of the most powerful poetry in Isaiah is describing other peoples and what they went through”.

Those who use the Koren Sacks machzorim for festivals will already be familiar with some of her work in the translations of the Megillot. At the launch of the Shavuot machzor, her uncle Jonathan remarked on her “beautiful” rendering of Ruth. When the Koren Sacks Chumash appears in a couple of years, with many haftarot from Isaiah, more will come to appreciate her skill.

FROM THE KOREN TANAKH

A voice speaks: “Call out!

I say “What shall I call?”

All life is nothing more than grass,

and all its love, green shoots upon the land.

And grass dries up; shoots wither,

when the LORD’s breath blows over them

and yes, this people is but grass.

Grass dries up, and shoots will wither,

But the word of our God stands firm; always.

Isaiah 40: 6 to 8

READ MORE The new Sacks Torah translation