THE BIBLE AS TRANSLATED TEXT

Translation was, and remains, one of the most powerful and effective means of literary appropriation. The transaction involved is rarely, if ever, a wholly innocent one, however; nor does it take place between cultural equals. Moreover, even if we disregard the technical problems caused by the fact that languages never have direct linguistic equivalencies, translation also changes the totality of a work simply by the fact of appropriating it into a new context. Meaning is never complete; never impermeable. To translate is not to put a ready-made and finalised meaning into new words, but to put a meaning as vulnerable as it is variable into well-used words that already have their own history and are already charged with an existing and alien cultural freight of which the native speakers are themselves often unconscious. The more powerfully associative the connotations of a word in one direction, the more possible it is to close off other connotations. ‘It is not so much our judgements as our prejudices that constitute our being’, writes Gadamer on the universal problem of hermeneutics: ‘prejudices, in the literal sense of the word constitute the initial directedness of our whole ability to experience’ If that is true of an individual, it is no less true of a language and its associated culture.

For Europe the Bible has always been a translated book.