A Word is not enough: the impossible challenge of translating the Bible

Translating the Bible is a sacrilege, an act of those who reveal God’s pudenda, to shame the Law. It is a bloody act, like cannibals: a challenge. Whoever continues to say that the Bible is a text like any other, a florilege of fantastic tales and sapiential phantasmagoria, is a foolish man, worthy of a nail who harpoons his tongue on the palate. One does not enter the shrine of the Word while remaining unscathed: the Bible skinns you to the last sob; often rejects you, vomits you or fulfills you, annihilating you.

For the most part, it is around the translation of the Bible that a civilization is inaugurated: Jerome is our grammar and the disappearance of the Vulgate from the rite it goes in parallel with the sunset of the West; the Bible translated by Martin Luther founds German literature; the King James, the Bible of James, a monument of the Anglican Church, published in 1611, has Shakespearean purple reverberations (even found in Jane Campion’s film The Power of the Dog). The translation by Giovanni Diodati, the zenith of Italian Protestantism, published in Geneva, “an example of language and style”, recognizes “an aesthetic value to revealed truth … it recovers in the beauty of language the meaning of the Bible as the only text necessary for life of men “(Michele Ranchetti). According to Diodati, exegetical talent is not enough to translate the Bible: lyrical genius is needed. And courage: to enter the sacred text means to succumb to it. The Diodati version of 1617 was put on the Index; translating the Bible as well as a gesture of love for God is an act of war against the Church. Again in 1820 Pius VII inscribed the translation of the New Testament by Antonio Martini, Metropolitan Archbishop of Florence, among the forbidden books; in 1943, with the encyclical letter Divino Afflante Spiritu, Pius XII opens to the “importance of textual criticism”, stimulates new biblical translations, despite the yoke of the Magisterium.

One wonders, with malice, if the Bible designed by Enzo Bianchi for Einaudi, a mammoth work, is not an affront to the Vatican powers. The proximity to the measures taken towards him by the Holy See, obliged to leave the community he founded, would lead us to suppose this. Perhaps! The confrontation electrifies the language. In truth, widespread irenism, more shrewd than naive “The Bible is the library that does not divide, does not separate, does not open to fundamentalisms, it asks for the affirmation of diversity, plurality and therefore of dialogue”, and generic proclamations ” The Italian panorama of biblical translations is still unsatisfactory »: yet, Giancarlo Gaeta translated the Gospels for Einaudi in 2006 they give the work a vague, ambiguous, abstract value. The populist, sorry, popular mission, then “My wish is that this work … can help bring the greatest number of people closer to the inexhaustible source of the word of God” dies on the price: the Bible according to Bianchi (pp. CXCVIII +3722) is almost unapproachable, costs 240 euros, stowed in a furnishing box rather than for consultation. In any case, Bianchi, of the biblical canon, only translated the Song of Songs: modest version (“I am tanned but fascinating” screams revenge, not even the Shulammita was any Kim Kardashian; better the CEI, at this point: “Bruna I am but beautiful “), without risk, finally useless. To draw lyrical and spiritual substance it is good to turn to the translations of two poets, Andrea Temporelli (Raffaelli, 2010) and Andrea Ponso (ilSaggiatore, 2018; among other things, with rich apparatuses).

Rather, the strength of the Einaudian Bible lies in the curators: Mario Cucca, Federico Giuntoli, Ludwig Monti. Young, tenacious, Catholics (the first is a Capuchin, the second a priest, the third monk in Bose). At first glance, the translation of John’s Gospel, entrusted to Roberto Vignolo, seems persuasive. The Bible is a well. For this, a new translation, as a pretext for reading, is excellent. However, the profound meaning of this Bible is not understood. The Edizioni San Paolo, to say, have created the very new version of the Bible, then evolved into the New version of the Bible from the Ancient Texts (still in progress): the individual biblical texts are proposed in effective translation, with in-depth commentary (which is inevitably missing in the titanic volume Einaudi) and popular price. According to Bianchi, the Einaudi Bible, more than anything else at Christmas time, risks remaining in the swamp of good intentions, devoid of risks, enterprising, even radical choices. I am thinking, for example, of the Gospel published in 1947 by Neri Pozza, introduced by Don Giuseppe De Luca, with the imprimatur of the then Cardinal Roncalli, by four writers, Nicola Lisi, Corrado Alvaro, Diego Valeri and Massimo Bontempelli. It was an episodic, rhapsodic occasion in which literature slipped through the maze of biblical studies. Usually, writers are refractory to the sacred text for ideology, and anomalous translations remain in an eccentric (Emilio Villa), gnostic (Guido Ceronetti), fashionable (Erri De Luca) area. In other countries this is not the case: the versions of the poets are canon, therefore scandal (TS Eliot and WH Auden dedicated themselves to liturgical poetry, David Gascoyne to the apocalyptic; Jean Grosjean translated Genesis, the prophets, the Apocalypse into French ). The version of Genesis according to Gian Ruggero Manzoni (writer and poet alien to the usual circuits, privateer, excellent) moves from this point of view, which will be published by De Piante in the new year, at the end of January. The narrative, alchemical passage is felt right away, and deserves jolts (“In the beginning everything was without profile and lifeless and the dark covered the abyss of every form, while the light of the Demiurge swirled over all the waters At which the Demiurge murmured to himself: May my light be light for the whole, so the light flared up on the obscene of darkness “). The intent of the publishing house is happily crazy: to entrust the translation, book by book, of the Bible to poets, writers, inspired by it. A text for everyone, as Enzo Bianchi would say, but which leaves no way out, wounds with fire and sword, causes injuries and divisions. In the iniquitous era, of the debauched, it is a bonfire.

As for the ethics of translating, for the appropriate philological armory, just read St. Paul, Letter to the Corinthians, chapter 12. According to the Apostle translation, “the interpretation of tongues”, is a charisma. It is a gift of the Spirit. You have to be excitable and excited to access the gift. The Bible does not ask for scholars, but for enthusiasts.

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