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I had previously read one article about Alter's work, at the washingtonpost.com. I found the paragraphs below from that article interesting. Compared with several English versions of the past decade, at least Alter apparently hasn't reduced the text to third or fourth grade level. In particular, as Alter emphasizes in his polemical introduction "The Bible in English and the Heresy of Explanation," he translates every "and" in the Hebrew. The Torah's syntax is fundamentally additive (or paratactic); it comes at you head-on, one thing after another, rather than couched in subordinate clauses and complex sentences (hypotaxis). Modern translators, in their attempt to achieve a more flowing, contemporary style, abandon this archaic bluntness, and with it the Hebrew original's somber power. Alter points to the story of Rebekah as an example of how the repetitive use of "and" can build up meaning as well as majesty: "And she came down to the spring and filled her jug and came back up. And the servant ran toward her and said, 'Pray, let me sip a bit of water from your jug.' And she said, 'Drink, my lord,' and she hurried and tipped down her jug on one hand and let him drink. And she she let him drink his fill and said, 'For your camels, too, I shall draw water until they drink their fill.' And she hurried and emptied her jug into the trough, and she ran again to the well to draw water and drew water for all his camels." As Alter observes, the crescendo of "ands" is used to convey the tireless Rebekah's heroic labor: "A camel after a long desert journey can drink as much as twenty-five gallons of water, and there are ten camels." Those "ands" give urgency and weight to her task, which otherwise we might imagine as merely a graceful gesture of hospitality by a shy milkmaid: John Constable paints the Old Testament.
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