Conservative and Reform Jews have, however, translated the Jewish scriptures into numerous languages.
To sum things up, translation might seem impossible, but due to the curse of Babel it is necessary. And it is translation’s apparent impossibility that attracts many of the best translators and gives them the drive to do their best work. Translation is thus an art of submissive people trying to do the impossible as well as to undo man’s second fall. Translation might feel tragically hopeless at times, but it is our only hope and, I feel, should be considered more comic than tragic. As Ben Belitt wrote in Adam’s Dream, “the translator’s vocation is a comic one. . . . [one thinks] ‘I’m engaged in what I know is an impossible transaction.’ . . . Then one immediately sets about translating it, as if all were really possible; that’s comic!”* Or at least translation is absurd, as George Steiner wrote, “an endeavour to go backwards up the escalator of time and to re-enact voluntarily what was a contingent motion of spirit.”*
There are many ways in which translation is “impossible.” Steiner points out the example of extreme political situations: “when the conceptual reach and valuation of a word can be altered by political decree, language loses credibility. Translation in the ordinary sense becomes impossible. To translate a Stalinist text . . . into a nonStalinist idiom, using the same time-honoured words, is to produce a polemic gloss, a counter-statement of values.”* This is something too often ignored: the fact that words, in particular contexts, have unspoken values attached to them which do not necessarily come across in literal translation. This is true under even less extreme conditions, that is, whenever language is used dishonestly. For example, when Ronald Reagan spoke of “family values,” he was referring to a range of ideological positions that had little to do with families. A literal translation of this cynical expression into Russian would have as little meaning as a literal translation of Communist hogwash into English.
Richard Wilbur talked with me about another sort of impossibility that is associated with differing values. “It is difficult to imagine bringing over in translation, for example, the Italian word pazienza said in the way in which an Italian says it. If an American says to an American, ‘Have patience,’ it does not remotely
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