A Literary Bible
David Rosenberg
Counterpoint, $30
The quickest way to understand the audacity and originality of what David Rosenberg is attempting in A Literary Bible, the big book of his selected translations from the Hebrew Bible, is to read the introduction to his excerpt from the book of Jeremiah. To countless generations of Bible readers, Jeremiah has been a prophet—indeed, the Hebrew prophet par excellence, his very name a synonym for warning, chastising, and exhorting. To Rosenberg, however, the person (or people) who wrote this book is primarily a poet, whose “main form is the prophet’s oracle”—much as we might say that Shakespeare’s main form was the sonnet.
At most, prophet was Jeremiah’s day job, the conventional mask he put on in order to voice his poetry more effectively. “It is hardly different today when it comes to the profession of the poet,” Rosenberg writes. “Sometimes he or she is a college professor, but we still call him or her a poet, not even a poet-professor.” He draws a comparison with the contemporary American poet John Ashbery, who has been a professor and an art critic. Still, “Ashbery wasn’t called an art critic-poet, and neither were the poets of Jeremiah called prophet-poets, as far as we know.”
To almost any reader—Jewish or non-Jewish, pious or skeptical—this redescription of Jeremiah cannot help sounding like a demotion. John Ashbery may or may not be, as Rosenberg writes, “the most eminent English-language poet alive,” but such eminence looks rather meager when compared to the distinction Jeremiah claims for himself (in the words of the New JPS translation):
The LORD put out his hand and touched my mouth, and the LORD said to me: Herewith I put My words into your mouth.
See, I appoint you this day
Over nations and kingdoms;
To uproot and to pull down,
To destroy and to overthrow,
To build and to plant.
For almost all readers until modern times, reading these lines meant taking their claim at face value. Jews, and Christians, listened to Jeremiah not because he was a good writer, but because he was chosen by God to deliver a message of the utmost urgency.
David Rosenberg knows, however, that we are living in a period when the Bible’s only claims on the attention of many readers is literary. That is why, in titling his book A Literary Bible, he is performing a clever dialectical maneuver. Yes, the title tells us, this Bible is literature, and not even canonical literature: it is a highly selective anthology of stories and verses, rendered into deliberately anachronistic, 21st-century English. Yet Rosenberg believes that literature can and should possess the same kind of moral force and spiritual insight once reserved for Scripture. For him, poetry is the only really sacred speech. It follows that to call Jeremiah a poet is actually a promotion, replacing the doubtful miracle of divine inspiration with the genuine miracle of poetic inspiration.
Here is how Rosenberg renders the famous passage from Chapter 31 of Jeremiah, in which the Lord comforts Rachel:
…these are the Lord’s words:
your voice will cease its weeping
your eyes brighten behind the tears
that dissolve into crystal-clear vision
of the children alive
returning home
from the lands of enemies
from beyond anguish to hope revived
vision is your reward
there is new life for your labor, remembrance
in the presence of children, eyes wide open
turning to the future
that is also yours
within the borders of a reality
and beyond them your descendants
are walking freely
by the strength of an unfailing imagination
an unbroken integrity
a listening dedicated
to the words that bade them live.
When Rosenberg translates Jeremiah, it is plain, he is not just translating Hebrew into English, or biblical idiom into contemporary concepts like “reality” and “imagination.” More profoundly, he is translating the concrete and pragmatic faith of the Hebrew Bible into the abstract and metaphorical faith that is all he, like many of us, can really believe in.
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