The Italians have a great proverb that is difficult to reproduce in English: Tradittore traduttore. In too many words: "A translator is a traitor." Anyone who has tried to translate the Book of Job knows to the soul's depths the proverb's truth. Stephen Mitchell knows it twice as well as most of us, because this is ostensibly his second try at translating Job. It is not really his second try, but rather the first, somewhat revised. In 1979, Doubleday & Company published Into the Whirlwind (hereafter IW). The new book refers to IW as "an earlier version of this translation," and the differences and similarities between them are very interesting.
However, it must be emphasized that this is Stephen Mitchell's Job, not the Hebrew Bible's Job. That is at once its virtue and its fault. To his credit, Stephen Mitchell is a talented poet whole poem has strength, consistency, emotional depth, a and a propulsive rhythm. On the other had, Mitchell so extensively rewrote the Hebrew book that this poem represents his own composition. I find the Job in the Hebrew Bible, without the changes, deletions, and rearrangements that Mitchell indulged in, an even more powerfully human document than Mitchell's Job.
Stephen Mitchell's poetry
Classical Hebrew poetry is lean and terse. It does not follow regular patterns of accented and unaccented syllables like forms of English poetry, such as the sonnet with fourteen lines in iambic pentameter. The Hebrew line has important accents or stresses, but the rhythm varies and shifts so that stressed syllables may come immediately together or may be separated by several unstressed ones. Mitchell wisely does not try to reproduce the Hebrew rhythm, but writes a flexibly rhythmic verse, usually with a three-stress or four-stress line of seven to ten syllables (occasionally six or eleven). His lines are not rigid partly because he freely varies the pattern (I add accents):
He levels cliffs in an instant,
rooting them up his rage;
he knocks the earth from its platform
and shakes the pillars of the sky;
he talks to the sun - it it darkens;
he clamps a seal on the stars. (p. 27, Job 9:5-7)
Mitchell has taken some liberties with the Hebrew. I'll be picky: "He levels" in Hebrew is not a present-tense verb, but the form representing a hymnic style, which in this poem, is quite ironic. "In an instant" is a highly interpretive rendering of "and they [the mountains] don't know." "Rage" is perhaps a bit strong for the standard Hebrew noun for "anger," but the alliteration in "rooting" and "rage" echoes an alliteration of p-sounds in Hebrew. "Knocks" is not quite what the Hebrew says, which is more like "shakes" (again in the hymnic form), and "platform" proposes a dubious cosmology. The Hebrew clearly refers to the "earth's" pillars, not the sky's, and Mitchell has made "shakes" the deity's action, where in Hebrew it is the pillars that "shudder."
I can neither accuse Mitchell of excessive literalism nor condemn his liberties. I am tempted to go on quoting the nice lines and vivid images that fill the poetry. Mitchell is a good poet exactly because his
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