Quarrel & Quandary (9 page)

Breon Mitchell arrives to sweep all that Muirish dustiness away, and to refresh Kafka’s legacy by giving us a handier Kafka in a vocabulary close to our own—an American Kafka, in short. He has the advantage of working with a restored and more scholarly text, which edits out many of Brod’s interferences. Yet even in so minuscule a passage as the one under scrutiny, a telltale syllable, therapeutically up-to-date, jumps out: Americans may be sympathetic (“
teilnahm
”), but mainly they
care
. Other current Americanisms intrude: “you’d better believe it” (the Muirs say tamely, “you can believe that”); “without letting myself be thrown by the fact that Anna didn’t appear” (the Muirs: “without troubling my head about Anna’s absence”); “I’m so tired I’m about to drop”; “you’d have to be a serious criminal to have a commission of inquiry come down on you”;
“You’re not mad at me, are you?”; “fed up”; and so forth. There is even a talk-show “more importantly.” Mitchell’s verb contractions (“isn’t,” “didn’t”) blanket Kafka’s grave exchanges with a mist of Seinfeld dialogue. If the Muirs sometimes write like sticks, Mitchell now and then writes shtick. In both versions, the force of the original claws its way through, despite the foreign gentility of the one and the colloquial unbuttonedness of the other. Unleashed by Kafka’s indefinable genius, unreason-thwarting-reason slouches into view under a carapace of ill-fitting English.

Of the hundred theories of translation, some lyrical, some stultifyingly academic, others philologically abstruse, the speculations of three extraordinary literary figures stand out: Nabokov, Ortega y Gasset, and Walter Benjamin. Nabokov, speaking of Pushkin, demands “translations with copious footnotes, footnotes reaching up like skyscrapers.… I want such footnotes and the absolutely literal sense.” This, of course, is pugnaciously anti-literary—Nabokov’s curmudgeonly warning against the “drudge” who substitutes “easy platitudes for the breathtaking intricacies of the text.” It is, besides, a statement of denial and disbelief: no translation is ever going to work, so please don’t try. Ortega’s milder disbelief is finally tempered by aspiration. “Translation is not a duplicate of the original text,” he begins; “it is not—it shouldn’t try to be—the work itself with a different vocabulary.” And he concludes, “The simple fact is that the translation is not the work, but a path toward the work”—which suggests at least the possibility of arrival.

Benjamin withdraws altogether from these views. He will believe in the efficacy of translation as long as it is not of this earth, and only if the actual act of translation—by human hands—cannot be accomplished. A German Jew, a contemporary of Kafka, a Hitler refugee, a suicide, he is eerily close to Kafka in mind and sensibility; on occasion he expresses characteristically
Kafkan ideas. In his remarkable 1923 essay “The Task of the Translator,” he imagines a high court of language that has something in common with the invisible hierarchy of judges in
The Trial
. “The translatability of linguistic creations,” he affirms, “ought to be considered even if men should prove unable to translate them.” Here is Platonism incarnate: the non-existent ideal is perfect; whatever is attempted in the world of reality is an imperfect copy, falls short, and is useless. Translation, according to Benjamin, is debased when it delivers information, or enhances knowledge, or offers itself as a trot, or as a version of Cliffs Notes, or as a help to understanding, or as any other kind of convenience. “Translation must in large measure refrain from wanting to communicate something, from rendering the sense,” he maintains. Comprehension, elucidation, the plain import of the work—all that is the goal of the inept: “Meaning is served far better—and literature and language far worse—by the unrestrained license of bad translators.”

What is Benjamin talking about? If the object of translation is not meaning, what is it? Kafka’s formulation for literature is Benjamin’s for translation: the intent to communicate the incommunicable, to explain the inexplicable. “To some degree,” Benjamin continues, “all great texts contain their potential translation between the lines; this is true to the highest degree of sacred writings.” And yet another time: “In all language and linguistic creations there remains in addition to what can be conveyed something that cannot be communicated … that very nucleus of pure language.” Then woe to the carpentry work of real translators facing real texts! Benjamin is scrupulous and difficult, and his intimations of ideal translation cannot easily be paraphrased: they are, in brief, a longing for transcendence, a wish equivalent to the wish that the translators of the Psalmist in the King James version, say, might come again, and in our own generation. (But would they be fit for Kafka?)

Benjamin is indifferent to the exigencies of carpentry and craft. What he is insisting on is what Kafka understood by the impossibility of writing German: the unbridgeable fissure between words and the spells they cast. Always for Kafka, behind meaning there shivers an intractable darkness, or (rarely) an impenetrable radiance. And the task of the translator, as Benjamin intuits it, is not within the reach of the conscientious if old-fashioned Muirs, or the highly readable Breon Mitchell, whose
Trial
is a page-turner (and whose glistening contemporaneity may cause his work to fade faster than theirs). Both the superseded Muirs and the eminently useful Mitchell convey information, meaning, complexity, “atmosphere.” How can one ask for more, and, given the unparalleled necessity of reading Kafka in English, what, practically,
is
“more”? Our debt to the translators we have is unfathomable. But a look into Kafka’s simplest sentences—“
Wer war es? Ein Freund? Ein guter Mensch?… Waren es alle?
”—points to Benjamin’s nearly liturgical plea for “that very nucleus of pure language” which Kafka called the impossibility of writing German; and which signals also, despairingly, the impossibility of translating Kafka.

Twenty-five centuries ago (or perhaps twenty-four or twenty-three), an unnamed Hebrew poet took up an old folk tale and transformed it into a sacred hymn so sublime—and yet so shocking to conventional religion—that it agitates and exalts us even now. Scholars may place the Book of Job in the age of the Babylonian Exile, following the conquest of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar—but to readers of our own time, or of any time, the historicity of this timeless poem hardly matters. It is timeless because its author intended it so; it is timeless the way Lear on the heath is timeless (and Lear may owe much to Job). Job is a man who belongs to no known nation; despite his peerless Hebrew speech, he is plainly not a Hebrew. His religious customs are unfamiliar, yet he is no pagan: he addresses the One God of monotheism. Because he is unidentified by period or place, nothing in his situation is foreign or obsolete; his story cannot blunder into anachronism or archaism. Like almost no other primordial poem the West has inherited, the Book of Job is conceived under the aspect of the universal—if the universal is understood to be a questioning so organic to our nature that no creed or philosophy can elude it.

That is why the striking discoveries of scholars—whether through philological evidences or through the detection of
infusions from surrounding ancient cultures—will not deeply unsettle the common reader. We are driven—we common readers—to approach Job’s story with tremulous palms held upward and unladen. Not for us the burden of historical linguistics, or the torrent of clerical commentary that sweeps through the centuries, or the dusty overlay of partisan interpretation. Such a refusal of context, historical and theological, is least of all the work of willed ignorance; if we choose to turn from received instruction, it is rather because of an intrinsic knowledge—the terror, in fact, of self-knowledge. Who among us has not been tempted to ask Job’s questions? Which of us has not doubted God’s justice? What human creature ever lived in the absence of suffering? If we, ordinary clay that we are, are not equal to Job in the wild intelligence of his cries, or in the unintelligible wilderness of his anguish, we are, all the same, privy to his conundrums.

Yet what captivates the scholars may also captivate us. A faithful English translation, for instance, names God as “God,” “the Lord,” “the Holy One,” “the Almighty”—terms reverential, familiar, and nearly interchangeable in their capacity to evoke an ultimate Presence. But the author of Job, while aiming for the same effect of incalculable awe, has another resonance in mind as well: the dim tolling of some indefinable aboriginal chime, a suggestion of immeasurable antiquity. To achieve this, he is altogether sparing in his inclusion of the Tetragrammaton, the unvocalized YHVH (the root of which is “to be,” rendered as “I am that I am”), which chiefly delineates God in the Hebrew Bible (and was later approximately transliterated as Yahweh or Jehovah). Instead, he sprinkles his poem, cannily and profusely, with pre-Israelite God-names: El, Eloah, Shaddai—names so lost in the long-ago, so unembedded in usage, that the poem is inevitably swept clean of traditional pieties. Translation veils the
presence—and the intent—of these old names; and the necessary seamlessness of translation will perforce paper over the multitude of words and passages that are obscure in the original, subject to philological guesswork. Here English allows the common reader to remain untroubled by scholarly puzzles and tangles.

But how arresting to learn that Satan appears in the story of Job not as that demonic figure of later traditions whom we meet in our translation, but as
ha-Satan
, with the definite article attached, meaning “the Adversary”—the counter-arguer among the angels, who is himself one of “the sons of God.” Satan’s arrival in the tale helps date its composition. It is under Persian influence that he turns up—via Zoroastrian duality, which pits, as equal contenders, a supernatural power for Good against a supernatural power for Evil. In the Book of Job, the scholars tell us, Satan enters Scripture for the first time as a distinct personality and as an emblem of destructive forces. But note: when the tale moves out of the prose of its fablelike frame into the sovereign grandeur of its poetry, Satan evaporates; the poet, an uncompromising monotheist, recognizes no alternative to the Creator, and no opposing might. Nor does the poet acknowledge any concept of afterlife, though Pharisaic thought in the period of his writing is just beginning to introduce that idea into normative faith.

There is much more that textual scholarship discloses in its search for the Job-poet’s historical surround: for example, the abundance of words and phrases in Aramaic, a northwestern Semitic tongue closely related to Hebrew, which was rapidly becoming the lingua franca of the post-Exilic Levant. Aramaic is significantly present in other biblical books as well: in the later Psalms, in Ecclesiastes, Esther, and Chronicles—and, notably, in the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Babylonian Talmud is written in
Aramaic; it is the language that Jesus speaks. Possibly the Job-poet’s everyday speech is Aramaic—this may account for his many Aramaisms—but clearly, for the literary heightening of poetry, he is drawn to the spare beauty and noble diction of classical Hebrew (much as Milton, say, in constructing his poems of Paradise, invokes the cadences of classical Latin).

And beyond the question of language, the scholars lead us to still another enchanted garden of context and allusion: the flowering, all over the ancient Near East, of a form known as “wisdom literature.” A kind of folk-philosophy linking virtue to prudence, and pragmatically geared to the individual’s worldly success, its aim is instruction in level-headed judgment and in the achievement of rational contentment. The biblical Proverbs belong to this genre, and, in a more profoundly reflective mode, Ecclesiastes and portions of Job; but wisdom literature can also be found in Egyptian, Babylonian, Ugaritic, and Hellenistic sources. It has no overriding national roots and deals with personal rather than collective conduct, and with a commonsensical morality guided by principles of resourcefulness and discretion. A great part of the Book of Job finds its ancestry in the region’s pervasive wisdom literature (and its descendants in today’s self-improvement best-sellers). But what genuinely seizes the heart are those revolutionary passages in Job that violently contradict what all the world, yesterday and today, takes for ordinary wisdom.

However seductive they are in their insight and learning, all these scholarly excavations need not determine or deter our own reading. We, after all, have in our hands neither the Hebrew original nor a linguistic concordance. What we do have—and it is
electrifying enough—is the Book of Job as we readers of English encounter it. And if we are excluded from the sound and texture of an elevated poetry in a tongue not ours, we are also shielded from problems of structure and chronology, and from a confrontation with certain endemic philological riddles. There is riddle enough remaining—a riddle that is, besides, an elemental quest, the appeal for an answer to humankind’s primal inquiry.