Re: nice detail, robbie...


Subject: Re: nice detail, robbie...
From: L. Manning Vines (lmanningvines@hotmail.com)
Date: Wed Jul 10 2002 - 01:02:02 EDT


will said:
<< robbie and Jim, your discussion ROCKS [. . . .] >>

Thank you. I am glad to hear a comment, especially such a positive one,
from someone else on the list. I was about to suggest to Jim that any
further discussion be taken off-list since I was beginning to feel like I
was having a private conversation without any relevance to, or interest
from, the list.

And:
<< I'd be interested to know if Bloom's ideas are taken seriously in your
circles >>

I've not yet read The Book of J, although it is participant to a mental list
of books to be sought and read before school begins again. And I'm involved
in too many circles to say with few words if Bloom's ideas are taken
seriously in them.

I believe that a major obstacle, as I would suppose he would himself admit,
is that Bloom is a literary critic but not very much of a Hebrew
philologist, so his criticism relies on the theoretically constructed
translation of someone else. And on the subject, an aphorism was presented
to me by a language teacher -- presented, of course, as an ancient proverb
from some place or other -- that I found to be funny if nothing else:
Translations are like women: the beautiful are seldom faithful and the
faithful are seldom beautiful. What that says about women notwithstanding,
it expresses something true of translations. The work of translating is the
frequently difficult task of balancing readability in one language and
accuracy to another, and the most poetic and easy-to-read translations
frequently do great violence to the original. I have not seen it, but I
have heard Rosenberg's translation lightly criticized for favoring the
lovely.

I have heard that Bloom's contribution is unjustifiably radical, that at its
most speculative it is extreme and not adequately defended. But again, I've
not read it and know only what I've been told of it. I've not known anyone
to be convinced enough of his arguments to argue for them, but neither have
I known anyone to dismiss them outright.

The multiple-source hypothesis is now almost universally acknowledged, but
there seems still to be two camps. The one side -- I'll call them the
bibliophilologists -- admits the likelihood of the work of a Redactor, but
maintains a strong claim of artistic unity and focuses on the books as any
student of literature might; and the other side -- I'll call them the
archaeophilologists -- run increasingly finer combs over the texts to
determine with more precision the details of their perceived disjointedness,
and focuses on the books as holding subtle secrets of ancient history. To
implement the tools of the reader and philologist to find the seams in such
a tightly woven fabric, it seems to me, is to use a rather blunt instrument
on very delicate work; the existence of seams can be demonstrated, and so
even their general positions, but some of the archaeophilologists make
attempts for precision that I believe the innate limits of the tools
disallow. But, of course, I more closely identify with the other camp.

In my experience, neither group seems to be very particularly taken with The
Book of J, although the bibliophilologists, I think, have shown a bit more
interest in it. I suppose I'll have more to say when I've read it.

-robbie
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