■ The Possibility of Translation

In his essay “Theories of Modern Bible Translation,” Greenstein argues that the very possibility of translation and the translation style depend on the translator’s philosophy of language. He identifies two contrastive positions. At one pole is the Nietzschean understanding of language, which maintains that “the structures of language constrict the processes of perception and thought.”^{Footnote 2} According to this view, language, in shaping (or, negatively stated, constricting) perception and thought, itself becomes constitutive of the thing perceived and thought, so that translation becomes difficult, if not impossible. For to translate into another language, when language has become part of the thing, necessarily involves the transformation of the thing thought or perceived into something other. At the logical, and patently wrong, extreme of this view, each individual is understood to be a speaker of an idiolect, precluding the possibility not only of translation but also of communication.^{Footnote 3} Language becomes irreducibly private and incapable of performing its social function of facilitating communication and communion among persons and communities.

The opposing view, which Greenstein associates with the linguistic theory of Noam Chomsky, affirms the possibility of communication and also of translation and holds that “the human mind universally possesses a common apparatus of thought and a common linguistic structure.”^{Footnote 4} This view can also be divided between an extreme and a moderate view. The extreme view is that “anything that can be said in one language can be said in another” with little to no loss or distortion.^{Footnote 5} The more moderate view, while maintaining that both communication and translation are possible, eschews the naive optimism of lossless translation and recognizes that something of particular languages—their tonal qualities, formal possibilities and limitations, the connotative depth and range of words, for example—shapes and becomes meaningful parts of texts, so that to translate into another language is necessarily to produce something other than the source text. While this does not swing the pendulum all the way back to the Nietzschean understanding, it does mark a significant departure from a belief in lossless translation. It is also the position Greenstein says describes the philosophies of his model Bible translators, the duo Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig and, more recently, Everett Fox. Not surprisingly, it is this moderate position that Greenstein claims for his own work. Accordingly, Greenstein believes that translation is possible but admits, “Translation is not only interpretation; it is not only distortion; it is simplification” (xxxv). That is, there exists a gap between the source text and the translation, as there is a gap between the source language and the target language.

In addition to outlining the various philosophies of language in “Theories of Bible Translation,” Greenstein also identifies two opposed translation styles with the two sides of the Chomskyan philosophy of language. Proponents of lossless translation, as compared to proponents of the moderate position, favor idiomatic (sense-for-sense) over literal (word-for-word) translations and are more content-oriented (philological) than form-oriented (literary), and more audience-oriented than author-oriented. Greenstein acknowledges that the polar opposition between the two modes “oversimplifies a variety of overlapping yet distinctive positions” and does not say that one style is superior to the other.^{Footnote 6} Rather, he notes that “[alternative modes of translation do different things and serve different functions.”^{Footnote 7} He signals that, given the particular aims of any work of translation, one may employ a mixture of styles to achieve the desired goal.

■ The Goal of Translation

A translation serves an essentially intermediary role between the language and world of the source text and the language and world of the reader. It is not, however, a neutral bridge but “tend[s] either to bring the source text to the reader in the reader's own idiom; or to bring the reader to the text and its world” (xxxvii). Greenstein, given this choice between a reader-orientation and an author-orientation, sets as the goal for his translation of Job the latter: to bring the reader to the text and its world.

One might expect that Greenstein’s orientation toward the source text, given his oppositional division of translation styles discussed above, means that his translation will be more literal (word-for-word) than idiomatic (sense-for-sense) and more literary (form-oriented) than philological (content-oriented). While this expectation generally holds true, Greenstein shatters any expectation that he will adhere to the polar opposition between the two modes of translation. On the heels of writing that he aims to bring the reader to the source text, he writes, “It [an author-orientation] is … more in keeping with my primary philological purpose: to suggest what is actually being said in accord with the earliest established meanings” (xxxvii, emphasis mine). What does this indicate about Greenstein’s translation style? In “Theories of Bible Translation,” Greenstein writes that he opposes an author orientation to a philological focus, but we can expect him to do away with theoretical binaries when it comes to the practice of translating. In short, Greenstein’s approach to translation is eclectic and practical.

This means that Greenstein, at times, acts as a philologist whose aim is to “make good sense of the text of Job” by pinning down the meaning of words and phrases and by changing the sequence of the text if necessary.^{Footnote 8} At others, Greenstein works as would a poet whose aim is to “convey something of the text’s poetics” by paying attention to the form and other aspects of the text’s literariness. Greenstein knows better than most that these two aims, one philological and the other poetic, are at odds with each other at the level of theory. His choice nevertheless to commit to both, one, indicates his awareness that a text, especially a poetic text of high literary merit, has philological and literary elements among which a translator must choose to privilege and, two, declares his intention to be practical and eclectic in his choice of the translation mode. That is to say, Greenstein’s translation is not the working out of any philosophy of language or a rigid devotion to a principle of translation but a work that, in the mind and ear of one of the foremost scholars of Job, best recreates the theological and literary genius of Job in English.

Greenstein reports that Friedrich Schleiermacher “had advised the traducer to select for special treatment those features that strike him as most expressive and significant.”^{Footnote 9} Greenstein, as Buber and Rosenzweig did before him, follows Schleiermacher’s advice.

■ The Practice of Translation

A theoretically sophisticated translator, Greenstein knows well that language functions at multiple levels and that a gifted poet can make any element of language into a meaningful part of the message. He also knows that the poet’s virtuosity, in turn, becomes the translator’s challenge. For example, how do you translate, say, into Hindi the sibilants in T. S. Eliot’s celebrated couplet from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” that perform what the words mean: “I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent sea”? Or how do you translate Shakespeare’s Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be, that is the question” into Korean without sounding elementary? Or how do you say Brot in French?^{Footnote 10} On every page of Greenstein’s translation of Job, we find erudite, often creative, solutions to many similar questions of translation. He tries to do what he had declared difficult, if not impossible: “render poetry from one language into poetry in another.”^{Footnote 11} Below are two examples that showcase the complexity of translation and Greenstein’s practical and eclectic approach to the practice of translation.

The first example is Job 3:3:

Greenstein notes that the Hebrew couplet nicely mirrors Job’s twofold “curse on the day of his birth and the night of his conception” (xxxvii). Then, he laments that many translations fail to reproduce the poetic match between form and content. The NRSV, for example, breaks up the couplet into three lines: “Let the day perish in which I was born / and the night that said, / ‘A man-child is conceived,’ ” thereby destroying the “intertwining of content and form” (xxxvii). Greenstein’s solution to the challenge of translating the form as a meaningful part of the message is to translate twice, elongating the English of the first line to create not only a couplet of equal length but also one of weight and balance. The example teaches us that a translator must attend to much more than the sense or content of the source text, including its form, sound pattern, and, as we will see, intertextual allusions. The example also showcases Greenstein’s eclectic and practical approach to translation. He provides neither a literal, word-for-word, nor an idiomatic, sense-for-sense, translation to render poetry into poetry.

Another example of the challenges of translation and Greenstein’s creativity concerns the phrase that appears in Job 3:10 and 19:17. Let us begin with Job 3:10, where (“my womb”) first appears:

The speaker is Job, which makes the reference to “my womb” enigmatic, if not impossible. Many translations, therefore, understand the phrase to be elliptical and supply “mother” to arrive at “my mother’s womb,” which makes anatomical and contextual sense but introduces an element not in the source text. Greenstein objects to this solution and notes that, if Job had meant to invoke the mother, he would have done so, just as he did earlier in Job 1:21. Furthermore, Greenstein argues that inserting “mother” “suppress[es] Job’s perspective that the womb in which he wished he could have remained was his own” (xxx). The point is that, “identifying with the fetus, Job does not know of or acknowledge that the space he inhabits belongs to another person,” namely, his mother (xxx). The womb he wished would have become his tomb is his and not his mother’s. Thus, Greenstein argues, the literal meaning accurately reflects the perspective of Job as fetus, for whom the womb does not represent the presence of a loving, protecting other but the “sense of radical loneliness” of solitary existence, of his being alone in a space that is all his own: “my womb.”^{Footnote 12} This means that the literal translation, while grating to our understanding of biology, accurately relays the meaning of the Hebrew and Job’s perspective to English readers.

The phrase appears again in Job 19:17 in a construct chain: , which literally translates to “children of my womb.” The speaker again is Job. In addition to a literal translation being almost nonsensical—again, for anatomical reasons—a range of considerations from the philological to the poetic leads Greenstein to translate the phrase idiomatically.

Philologically, Greenstein says that clearly means “my children,” since we have comparable idioms with that meaning in Hebrew and Aramaic.^{Footnote 13} This makes the idiomatic translation, “my children,” philologically correct, giving us the line “and my odor [is foul] to my children.” However, the difficulty with the correct philological translation is narratological: Job’s children are all dead, according to the prose prologue (1:13–19). Greenstein notes that some take the narrative contradiction as additional proof of the disjunction between the prose frame and the poetic core. However, Greenstein reads the book as a cohesive whole and wants to align the reading of the poetic core to the prose frame—a point to which we will return below. (It would appear that Greenstein believes either that the core was written secondarily with coordination with the frame in mind or that the same author composed both.) This is where the intertextual link between Job 3:10 and 19:17 becomes important.

The narratively difficult philological-idiomatic meaning of leads Greenstein to look back at Job’s earlier use of the same, odd phrase in 3:10 and to the realization that, understood in the same, idiosyncratic way to refer to Job’s mother’s womb, the narrative difficulty disappears. refers not to Job’s children but to the children of Job’s mother’s womb, namely, Job’s siblings. For the sake of the discussion below, let us reconstruct the philological, narrative, and literary journey that led Greenstein to this conclusion: An odd phrase taken literally, (“children of my womb”), has the philologically correct meaning: “my children”; but the narrative difficulty of the philological-idiomatic understanding leads to the discovery of an intertextual link to a part of the phrase, , in 3:10; finally, the idiosyncratic and literal meaning of in 3:10 resolves the narrative and philological conundrum of 19:17. The phrase should be understood neither literally nor philological-idiomatically but literary-idiomatically as “my siblings.” This complex literary investigation confirms for Greenstein the existence of a “nexus between ‘womb’ in 3,10 and 19,17,” which “is a kind of allusion, an internal reference, which is … typical of Job.”^{Footnote 14} Allusiveness to other parts of Job and other biblical and extrabiblical literatures, Greenstein finds, is yet another aspect of the Joban text a translator must take seriously.

Now, while the literary investigative work possibly clarifies the meaning of , it does not represent a determination about the translation of the phrase. If Greenstein is correct about the different levels of meaning of in 19:17, then three translation options suggest themselves: a literal translation (“children of my womb”), a philological-idiomatic translation (“my children”), or a literary-idiomatic translation (“my siblings”).

Let us begin with the literary-idiomatic translation, which is how Greenstein translates the phrase:

There are merits and demerits to this choice. Greenstein correctly observes that “language is … manipulated for rhetorical or artistic purposes”^{Footnote 15} throughout Job, so that Job at points appears to speak “a sort of private language” (xxxi). The difficult is one concrete example of Job’s idiolectal manner of speaking. In a concession to the extreme difficulty of understanding Job’s idiolect in this instance and the sinuous investigation necessary to recover the correct meaning, Greenstein decides to “bring the source text to the reader in the reader’s own idiom” in translating 19:17. And the benefit of the literary-idiomatic translation is that it is readily understandable to English readers and avoids the oddity of a literal translation and the narrative contradiction of a philological-idiomatic translation. The ease of reading, however, comes at a cost. The literary-idiomatic translation both spares and denies the English reader the experience of having to consider the world from Job’s perspective: What could Job possibly mean by “children of my belly”? The smoothing over of the strangeness of Job’s manner of speaking also denies the English reader the necessary trigger to spur an investigative journey. The literary-idiomatic translation concretizes into text the results of interpretation and, as a result, distorts and simplifies the source text.

The next option is the philological-idiomatic translation, “my children,” which is a not uncommon choice among translations. The philological-idiomatic translation, like the literary-idiomatic translation, also interprets, distorts, and simplifies the Hebrew. Consider, for example, that a Job who refers to “my children” in the middle of the book makes the disjuncture between the prose frame and the poetic core appear more certain than it is, since a Job who unambiguously refers to his children as living cannot be the same Job from the prose prologue. The option, however, is not without its merits. Hebrew readers of Job, on account of their fluency in the idioms of the language, would have likely (if Greenstein is correct, mis)heard a reference to Job’s children in . In fact, it may be argued that the mishearing was a part of the Joban poet’s rhetorical design: Once Hebrew readers recognize the narrative difficulty of a philological-idiomatic understanding of as “my children,” they would have been incited to undertake a search for what Job actually means, potentially leading them back to 3:10 to retrieve the idiolectal meaning for , much as Greenstein has done. The philological-idiomatic translation has the merit of allowing English readers to participate in the (mis)hearing of Hebrew readers. However, because the idiomatic “my children” lacks the ambiguating and allusive excess of the Hebrew , English readers would not have the necessary incentive to undertake the investigation.

This brings us to the literal translation, “children of my womb.” It is, in a certain sense, the lazy option that is unoptimized for any effect. I wonder, however, whether it best achieves Greenstein’s goal “to bring the reader to the text and its world.” To my ears, “children of my womb” invites the same mishearing Hebrew readers may have experienced when reading but, unlike the philological-idiomatic translation, retains the all-important excess detail, the reference to Job’s womb, which possibly can incite and guide the would-be literary investigator. Furthermore, the presence of the idiosyncratic “my womb” would function as the “nexus between ‘womb’ in 3,10 and 19,17” that points careful readers to Job 3:10 and to the solution of the mystery of 19:17. The literal translation, the likes of which one might find in student notebooks, cannot serve as the platform to lay bare the painstaking work of original literary investigation but, in this instance, may actually be more faithful to the source text and serve English readers best.

To summarize: The two examples above, the first of which illustrates Greenstein’s commitment “to convey something of the text’s poetics” and the second “to make good sense of the text of Job,” together teach us that there are multiple elements requiring translation in a text, especially a poetic text, any one of which may be translatable but the whole of which cannot be, however skilled the translator. A translator may accurately translate the meaning of a phrase (“my siblings” for ) but may have to sacrifice literary allusiveness or rhetorical intent. In another instance, a translator may render a meaningful poetic form (the couplet) but at the cost of over-translating another element (). That is, a translator may spend all his creativity and learning, but a translation remains, as Greenstein himself puts it, an interpretation, a distortion, and a simplification (xxxv).

■ The Power of Translation

To say that a translation is an interpretation, a distortion, and a simplification is to acknowledge the limits of translation. It is also to acknowledge the power of translation to transform the source text. Thus, in writing that translation is not only interpretation but also distortion and simplification, Greenstein admits simultaneously to the shortcomings of his translation of Job as well as to the transformative power he has wielded over Job. Let us look at two examples that demonstrate this point.

Greenstein, with many students of Job, including the present author, thinks that Job 42:6 is an interpretive crux of the entire book.^{Footnote 16} The challenge with the verse begins with the extreme difficulty of understanding and translating the verse in itself. The translational possibilities are dizzyingly multiple and range from selfloathing repentance (“Therefore I despise myself, / and repent in dust and ashes”)^{Footnote 17} to disgusted rejection of God (“Therefore, I feel loathing contempt and revulsion [toward you, O God]; / and I am sorry for frail man”).^{Footnote 18} And while not all proposed translations are philologically sound, a genuine diversity can be and has been defended.^{Footnote 19} Furthermore, the problem of translation feeds directly into the problem of interpretation. As Job’s final utterance in the book, at the end of the contentious poetic dialogue before the resumption of the prose frame, the verse is understood to function as a coordinating node among the several competing perspectives of the book. This means that the interpretation of the entire book of Job in part hinges on the verse, and vice versa. No surprise, then, that the diversity in the translation of the verse ramifies into an even greater diversity in the interpretation of the book.

I argued elsewhere, in developing Roman Jakobson’s linguistics toward a theory of translation, that translation consists of three interdependent steps: selection, combination, and alignment.^{Footnote 20} Selection, in the context of translation, refers to the selection of equivalents in the target language to linguistic elements in the source text. Combination refers to the combination of the selected elements into increasingly more complex linguistic units according to the linguistic code of the target language.^{Footnote 21} And alignment refers to the coordination of the selection and combination processes with the larger literary context.^{Footnote 22} Greenstein, in his brief explanation of Job 42:6 in the introduction, runs through the three steps of selection, combination, and alignment (xix–xxi), and what we witness is the oversized role his translation of the single verse comes to play for the interpretation of the entire book.

Greenstein offers a bold and yet measured translation of Job 42:6:

Greenstein’s translation may be profitably compared and contrasted with that of John Briggs Curtis, whom Greenstein mentions (xx, n. 4) and who understood Job to reject the uncaring deity of the whirlwind speeches (“Therefore, I feel loathing contempt and revulsion [toward you, O God]”) and to express pity on the lamentable human condition which Job has come to know too well (“and I am sorry for frail man”).^{Footnote 24} To begin, the sense of Greenstein’s and Curtis’s translations are a near match. However, in terms of selection, whereas Curtis selects false English equivalents to the Hebrew, often taking liberties unwarranted by the evidence,^{Footnote 25} Greenstein not only provides solid philological reasons for each difficult element of the verse (the intransitive use of , the translation of as “to take pity,” and “dust and ashes” as an idiom for lowly humanity, xix–xxi) but also selects admirably disciplined English equivalents that well match the poetics of the Hebrew. Greenstein, for example, resists the temptation to provide an object for , even if one is implied by the context. In terms of combination, the only decision of note is that Greenstein, with many others, understands the two verbs, and , as syntactically independent against the suggestion of the Masoretic accentuation. In sum, there is nothing novel about Greenstein’s translation of Job 42:6 or his philological defense of his selection and combinatory choices. What is important, in contrast to Curtis, especially, is Greenstein’s effort to align his translation to an interpretation of the entire book.

Greenstein characterizes Job’s response to God in 42:6 as “defiance, not capitulation” (xx). This characterization, as a matter of fact, is mild compared to what Job actually says: Job expresses disgust, “I am fed up,” not reasoned resistance. Now, what is Job “fed up” with? Greenstein rightly notes that is elsewhere (Job 7:16; 34:33; Ps 89:39), and so possibly also in Job 42:6, used intransitively. Even so, if not the translator, then every interpreter must provide an object for the verb.^{Footnote 26} And Greenstein appears to agree with Curtis that the (implied) object of Job’s disgust is God. As we noted, Greenstein exercises admirable restraint and follows the Hebrew in not naming the object, either in a parenthetic insertion (a technic he often uses elsewhere) or in a footnote (another often used instrument). The closest that Greenstein comes to naming God as the object of Job’s contempt is in the footnote to Job 42:2: “Job speaks of the deity in the disdainful terms that God had spoken of the builders of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:6)” (184, n. 1). Despite Greenstein’s apparent coyness, context makes it rather clear that what Job is fed up with is God who has revealed himself to be “all about power and not morality and justice” (xxi). For Greenstein, Job’s defiance is “a product of his absolute integrity” and a demonstration of his honesty to his experience of the world and God.

Now, while most readers of Job who understand Job as defiant against God in Job 42:6 look to the poetic core for support, often dismissing the prose frame as irrelevant to the conversation (so Curtis, for example), Greenstein makes the unusual and innovative decision to coordinate Job’s free-spirited rebelliousness to the prose epilogue, specifically to God’s affirmation of what Job says in 42:7–8. Whatever one’s understanding of the history of composition of Job, the alignment of the poetry and the prose sections precisely at this juncture is critical to the interpretation of the book, so Greenstein’s attempt to align them is to be lauded for not avoiding the thorny issue and for offering a creative account of their coordination.^{Footnote 27}

The key to Greenstein’s alignment is the word in Job 42:7 and 8. Two translational decisions are involved. The first, less controversial, decision is to take the substantive adverbially to refer not to the content but rather to the manner of Job’s speaking.^{Footnote 28} The second decision is to bend the usual meaning of , “what is firm, valid, right,” toward the related word to arrive at a novel translation, “in honesty,” which results in the following rendition of the verses:

In this rendition of God’s final words in the book, Greenstein has God praise Job twice “for speaking ‘in honesty’ (42:7–8), unlike his friends,” then ostensibly rewarding him for the honesty (Job 42:10–17) (xxv). This is a stunning development. God, whose two long speeches demonstrate to Job that God is “all about power and not morality and justice,” according to Greenstein, has a sudden and dramatic change of heart and commends Job, who has just confessed to being “fed up,” if not with God, then with the world of God’s creation, precisely because Job has the temerity to say that he is fed up. Temerity to speak one’s mind before a threatening God, of course, may be an extreme form of speaking in honesty. It is also shocking and unexpected in a text that is also about right relation with God. If God had wanted to affirm the high value of speaking in honesty, since Job has been speaking thusly with his friends from the moment he “opened his mouth and cursed the day (of his birth)” (Job 3:1, 12), it would have been sufficient for God to begin, and end, with such an affirmation, instead of waiting until after Job has had the chance to deny God respect (xxi).

If we more carefully examine Greenstein’s alignment between Job 42:6 and 7–8, we find that Greenstein prioritizes Job’s integrity and splits God to do so. Consider that a God who, in his speeches out of the whirlwind, treats Job in “bullying fashion” while portraying a “fundamentally amoral world” does not align well with a God who, afterward, praises and rewards Job for speaking “in honesty” (166). To put it in other terms, in order to portray Job as not only unrepentant but in fact defiant against God, Greenstein has had to portray God as repentant and as turning on a dime from being a powerful God glorying over an amoral world to a benevolent God who cares about and rewards “honesty in general and truth in God-talk in particular” (xxvi). In order for Job to hold onto his integrity and remain unrepentant, God must be made to be repentant and shown to be without integrity: God bullies Job who has spoken in honesty with his friends, only to praise him a moment later for speaking in honesty, unlike his friends. Perhaps that is the point of the book of Job, that God is fickle and amoral. If so, what is the value of the admiration for honest talk of such a God?

The downstream consequences of a defiant Job and an affirming God colors Greenstein’s evaluation of the central theme of the book. Greenstein’s effort to align the prose epilogue to Job 42:6 leads to a fork in the road, as we just saw: Portray Job as holding onto his sense of rightness and integrity, or God as fickle. Greenstein chooses the road less traveled by. This decision shapes not only the characterization of Job and God but in fact the interpretation of the entire book. Greenstein notes that God’s affirmation of Job’s manner of speaking, in retrospect, reveals “the importance of proper speech,” which “has been highlighted” throughout the book, and elevates proper speech as such to the preeminent status of “the theme of the book” (xxvi). This is an unexpected turn, because, as Greenstein admits, much of the dialogue among Job, his wife, his friends, and his God has been about justice and suffering (xxv–xxvi), even if there has also been talk about the importance of talking properly. To summarize: What we have is the translational and interpretive decisions about a single verse (Job 42:6), through permutations of alignment, inflating one theme, proper speech, to a position of preeminence above many other, arguably more important, themes in the book.

The second example of the power of translation demonstrates beyond doubt that the principle of alignment is the single most powerful tool Greenstein uses to transform the book of Job: the principle of alignment justifies the translator’s freedom to transpose blocks of texts within the book of Job. These include the transposition of Job 4:12–21 to immediately after Job 3 with attribution to Job, the rearrangement and reattribution of several passages in the third dialogue cycle among Job and his friends in Job 23–26, and the transposition of Job 28 to after Job 37 and attribution to Elihu.

As noted, the principal argument in defense of the transpositions is alignment to the context, and Greenstein is far from alone in working out and advancing such arguments. Ken Brown, for example, has recently mounted a rigorous argument, in part building on Greenstein’s earlier work on the subject, that Job 4:12–21,

Eliphaz’s harrowing night vision, was originally spoken by Job.^{Footnote 29} The argument, in part, is that the pessimism of the vision concerning the fate of all humanity, regardless of their righteousness, meshes with Job’s but not Eliphaz’s worldview. Regarding the third dialogue cycle, it has been widely argued that certain passages in the section attributed to Job (e.g., parts of Job 26) align better with one of the friends. It is worth noting that, on this issue, Greenstein is less radical than others; he attributes all of Job 27 to Job, arguing that those parts others assign to Zophar are Job’s anticipatory quotations of what Zophar would have said (117). Regarding Job 28, David Clines agrees with Greenstein that the paean to wisdom thematically and philosophically matches Elihu better than either Job or the narrator—with the difference that Clines transposes the Elihu speeches (Job 32–37) to before Job 28, not the other way around.^{Footnote 30}

Greenstein argues that the displacements outlined above came about as a result of localized accidents in handling papyrus manuscripts. Had Greenstein believed that the changes were intentional, as Brown does, for example, then he would have little justification for reverting the text to a hypothetical earlier sequence against the decision of the final redactor of the book. However, the accident explanation gives Greenstein theoretical cover for reconstructing “the correct sequence of texts” in his efforts to “make good sense of the text of Job.”^{Footnote 31} Greenstein provides a colorful analogy to explain:

There are almost always, in Job as in these papers, rhetorical or discourse features that support the rearrangement.^{Footnote 32}

The goal of reordering the text, with the student paper as with Job, is to make good sense of the text, and a paper and an ancient book reordered in this way no doubt makes good sense to the one doing the reordering. The question that remains, of course, is the degree of aptness of the analogy.

My interest in the present essay is not to debate the history of composition or transmission of the book of Job. We know that manuscript traditions were fluid and the literary history of ancient texts complex. Whether by accident or intention, the internal transpositions of the text of Job is possible, even reasonable. My goal in this essay is to reflect on the power of translation to transform the source text by means of reordering or restoring, as the case may be, the sequence of texts. As we discussed, the fundamental justification for rearranging the received text is alignment to the context. We have also seen the powerful effect alignment can have on the interpretation of characters and themes in the book. Given these observations, we are obligated further to observe that rearranging the text transforms the textual landscape to which every element of the book must be (re)aligned, with potentially dramatic interpretive downstream consequences. Greenstein rightly notes that “a new arrangement produces a new message.”^{Footnote 33} This is an understatement. A new arrangement produces a new work, not unlike an arrangement of a work of music. What we have in Greenstein’s Job: A New Translation, then, is more than a new translation. It is a new work.

■ The Work of Translation

Allow me to conclude this review essay with a comment on the work of translation as seen through a small segment of Walter Benjamin’s profoundly ambiguous “The Task of the Translator.”

A translation, being a stranger in its own language but having no other home, must affect a change either on itself or on the language in order to feel at home. The former option, which is dependent almost entirely on the work of the translator, ensures that the translation is so shaped by the conventions of the present state of the language that the translation feels as much at home as is possible at the time of its birth. Such translations tend to grow increasingly less at home as the language evolves. The latter option risks being birthed as a stranger, but with the hope that the translation will transform the language into its own image. Such translations have the potential to make home increasingly more homelike as time passes.

Walter Benjamin briefly touches on the work of translation, understood as the subjective genitive, toward the end of “The Task of the Translator.” While we usually think of the work of translation as the cool and slow activity of an expert philologist laboring in the stacks of Wurzweiler Central Library, Benjamin gives us an image more suggestive of an action-packed prisonbreak: “It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language which is exiled among alien tongues, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work. For the sake of the pure language, he breaks through decayed barriers of his own language.”^{Footnote 34} While much might be said about the rich passage, I want to focus on the notion of breaking through “decayed barriers of … [a] language.”

A translator undertakes the task of translating for two reasons: her love for a work composed in a foreign language; and the desire to share the work with others who do not have access to the foreign language, because the thing that the translator loves about the work has not come into being in her own tongue. One reason that what the translator loves in a foreign work has not come into being in her own tongue may be that the present state of the language impedes, if not prevents, its thinking and expression. If that is the case, the task of the translator, Benjamin suggests, is to give expression to what previously was difficult or impossible in her own tongue and—this is the crucial part of the work of translation—to transform the language in so doing. The gift of translation, in this view, is not only access to a foreign text or the importation of new thoughts and new expressions but the transformation of the target language itself by means of a work in the source language.

The question I would like to ask in conclusion is not whether or not Greenstein’s translation of Job “break[s] through decayed barriers” of the English language. It does, and whether or not it actually transforms the English language, time will tell. The question I would like to pose has to do with the presentation of the work of translation and what it says about the intent behind the publication of the work. A less coy way of posing the question is whether the work is being presented as a receptacle of Greenstein’s work of translation or as an event in the English language to give it the best chance itself to do the work of translation.

Three observations mark the presentation as more fitting as a receptacle for Greenstein’s work. First, the main body of the English text of Job is interrupted by the translator’s lengthy interpretive and explanatory notes. The notes provide helpful summaries of the content of the text and explanations of certain editorial decisions, such as the transposition of some text or another discussed above. These notes help make sense of the text but also impede a fresh encounter with the text of Job. They are like a lover’s loving description of her beloved to her best friend that makes it impossible for the best friend to form the wrong first impression and for herself to fall in love afresh. Second, the English text is punctuated with parenthetical insertions, usually an element not in the Hebrew meant to make the English more sensible or to reflect an important nuance of the Hebrew. An early example is the rendering of as “ ‘bless’ (curse)” (see 1:5, 11; 2:5, 9). The parenthesis represents Greenstein’s honesty as a translator—“This is not in the Hebrew”—and functions to send readers back to the Hebrew. But I wonder if the insertions make the English make more sense than the Hebrew and/or unnecessarily interrupt the text. I also wonder when it would be appropriate to allow the English text not to make sense. Third, the footnote flags constantly draw attention away from the text. The numerous footnotes testify to the challenges of the text and serve as repositories to Greenstein’s valuable insights into the text. I do not lament the footnotes nor their frequency. But I would that a more elegant solution—for example, by pairing the note to the referent by indicating the verse and word in the footnote itself without flags in the text—had been employed.

To summarize: The notes, the parenthetical insertions, and the footnote flags help make good sense of the text and highlight literary features that otherwise may have gone unnoticed. But they also distract from the text of Job. And this is a shame, because the translation is overall an excellent literary accomplishment, an event in the English language, that puts forward a bold and novel way of understanding Job, his God, and the message of the book of Job. A Job who retaliates against God in the face of a deity who appears in a storm is a new vision of human courage; and a deity who affirms honesty in speech even if it means disrespect toward God is a radical understanding of what it means to be God. And a more elegant presentation that prioritized the text of Job and made the notes fade into the background would have done better justice to Greenstein’s most accomplished translation of the book of Job.

But, I must confess, all the ornaments accomplish one feat very well: they whet the appetite for the two commentaries on Job that Greenstein is currently writing. There, no doubt, the notes will grow into satisfying essays, the parenthetical insertions into delicious excursus, and the footnotes into filling comments. I, for one, am salivating.