From Moses to Musa.(influence of Bible in literature)

In a brutal antithesis, worthy of some ancient Gnostic, Franz Kafka wrote, "The Bible, sanctum; the world, sputum." In this formulation, the world is something spewed out, a vile off-scouring--quite literally, a "shit-hole" (Scheisstum)--a matrix of infected matter, over against which stands, as its polar opposite, the Word, pristine and incontaminate. Of course, the tuberculosis from which Kafka suffered all his life, and which killed him in the end, gives the second half of his dictum a certain savage poignancy. The distance between sputum and sanctum, only accentuated by the assonance, must be immeasurable; and yet, if this is so, where are we to live? The cruelty of the paradox is not that it disparages the world in favor of the Bible, but that it leaves us no in-between we might comfortably inhabit. Even so, as any attentive reader of Kafka knows, the Bible stands in a subtle continuum with that world of his whose sordid processes and meticulous strictures are as perplexing as anything to be found in Leviticus. On the evidence of his later journals, Kafka often dwelt, if only in daydream, in the land of Canaan; in more prophetic moments, he even saw himself as a latter-day Moses. Moses was permitted to behold, but not to enter, that region of milk and honey; like Moses, Kafka could spy beneath the spittle-lineaments of this fallen world a dimension of existence that moved to the sway of other laws, palpable though hidden from us.

I note this at the outset of a discussion of translation because Katka's dichotomy seems to me to go to the heart of the enterprise, particularly when a sacred text is involved. In the case of the Bible, translation is unusually thorny (though certain of the same problems vex the translator of the Koran). The meanings of ancient words, questions of textual accuracy, the very weight of centuries of previous commentary and analysis--all these, and other problems, complicate the task enormously; these are the same hurdles that the translator of Gilgamesh or Pindar or Lucretius or Kalidasa must somehow leap. But the translator of scripture confronts another order of difficulty.

The difficulty is succinctly exposed in a remark by the historian David Daniel in his superb 2003 study, The Bible in English: Its History and Influence, where he states bluntly that "a religion is a revelation of God or it is nothing." If the Bible is just a collection of good yarns or a repository of quaint prescriptions, why should we read it rather than, say, The Decameron or The Arabian Nights or The Stories of O. Henry? The standard answer, of course, is that most of our common heritage, and especially our literature, is incomprehensible without a knowledge of the Bible. True enough--and yet, this cannot really suffice as a reason for immersion in the scriptures. To hunt down the biblical references in "Lycidas" or Moby-Dick, while a worthy project, strikes me not only as a diminishment of the Bible but also as a misapprehension of the whole point of reading classic literature. The English and American authors inspired by the Bible from Langland and Chaucer onwards were not composing acrostics for graduate students; they were themselves possessed by scripture in ways we can hardly now comprehend. The force of a biblical allusion lies in the fact that it has been assimilated into the text and is apprehended instinctually by the reader; its impact depends on spontaneous recognition of its source. When Milton speaks of "the pilot of the Galilean lake," it helps me to know the New Testament source of the phrase; the power of the phrase, however, comes not from mere textual recognition but from the more-than-literary authority the words possess.

Moreover, the Bible is enmeshed with the world of human experience in a way that makes it ultimately quite unlike mere literary masterpieces, however it may incidentally resemble them. It teems with exempla who have a strange extra-textual autonomy of their own. For anyone brought up on the Bible, the world quite often seems peopled by Jobs and Josephs, Rebeccas and Ruths and Rachels, and even the occasional Moses. As a child I for one was constantly being admonished by reference to Elijah and the bear or the Prodigal Son, and our neighbors were often apparelled in biblical disguises that would have astonished them; there was more than one long-suffering Jacob or duped Esau and even, in the person of a blowsy good-time girl, a "whore of Babylon." My wretched piggy bank was "the widow's mite" or worse, "the buried talent," and even the scruffy donkey in the petting zoo could in a flash reveal himself "Balaam's ass." Such exempla were not drawn only from the Bible. I got to know quite a few Micawbers and Uriah Heeps as well, not to mention a full array of Snopeses (this was still ...