Launch evening · 5 October · Book your seat
Back

Atelier TenouaTalk15 November 2022

Lost in translation

1h 25min

A session opened on Sofia Coppola's poster and closed on a line from Lacan: what is lost, what is gained, when the Torah changes language? From the tetragram conjugated in every tense to the first word of Genesis, an absolute untranslatable, by way of the legend of the Septuagint and the forgotten craft of the meturgeman, an inverted havruta where the room does not comment on the Shema: it translates it, and must say why. In French.

Highlights

“People translate into the text what they are. They always translate their own history.”

The havruta instruction: every translation is a self-portrait. Translated from the French

“The whole of rabbinic exegesis […] is an experience of lost in translation. […] The Hebrew text is always, in every circumstance, the object of a misunderstanding, of a misreading, because it can be read or understood otherwise than what seems written.”

The session's thesis. Translated from the French

“As if these four letters meant, in Hebrew: was, is, will be. The possibility of being simultaneously and in all tenses, which is difficult to translate. […] That is what the Eternal is: the possibility of being in all tenses.”

The tetragram, the untranslatable par excellence. Translated from the French

“He who translates the Torah literally is a liar. But, the Talmud adds, he who interprets it and adds something is a blasphemer. In short, you have the choice between lying and blaspheming. […] Whatever you do, you will be wrong, and so much the better.”

The Talmudic double bind, offered to the room as a liberation. Translated from the French

“Rabbinic translation is always a story of explosion. In a way, a story of ragam, of stoning. […] The one word becomes the two of listening. The one revelation becomes the text plus interpretation: two.”

Translating and stoning share the same Hebrew root. Translated from the French

“Jewish interpretation is never there to resolve conflicts. […] Jewish wisdom recognises, on the contrary, a definite value in what is called makhloket, disagreement, […] the plurality of interpretations, of translations, the infinite debate.”

After the joke of the Shema, standing or seated. Translated from the French

“Bereshit is the perfect anagram of shevirat alef. The breaking, the shattering of the One. […] Know this: to approach the One, know how to break it in all circumstances.”

The closing word, hidden in the Torah's first word. Translated from the French

The session

The session opens on Bill Murray in slippers and an untranslatable en abyme: "lost in translation" has no French equivalent. Hebrew's polysemy makes the demonstration: a single root yields the word, the thing, the plague and the bee, and the translator's choice steers the whole verse. The tetragram, probably a verb conjugated in all tenses rather than a noun, sets up the untranslatable par excellence, and the thesis lands: the whole of rabbinic exegesis is an experience of lost in translation, misunderstanding and misreading as the springs of Jewish interpretation and Jewish humour, jokes included. The study begins with Genesis 1:1, whose common translation is wrong twice over, and with the first word, a hapax the rabbis recut every which way: in the head, the covenant of fire. Then a history lesson no other page tells: the meturgeman, the appointed interpreter of ancient synagogues and his Talmudic rules, oral only and never louder than the reader; Chutzpit the translator; and the legend of the Septuagint, its seventy-two confined sages producing seventy-two identical translations down to the same fourteen deliberate errors: translation as threat and as heaven-willed necessity. The havruta then inverts the exercise: translate the Shema word by word, and justify every choice, for translation is a self-portrait. The room's readings own up to near-blasphemous renderings, down to the stutterer hidden in the repetition of the name. The ending climbs back up: disagreement as a value, the midrash of Jacob's deathbed where twelve languages say one God, the two Torot of Sinai, the gematria that makes the name an addition, Jeremiah's hammer shattering the rock into sparks of meaning, with a half-line echo of the previous session on Babel. And the final anagram of the first word, before Lacan: if you have understood me, I must surely have expressed myself badly.

Texts studied

←  Back to videos