What is it about?
The text is Buber's theoretical and historical defense of the approach he and Rosenzweig took to translating the Hebrew Bible, based on the assumptions that (a) the Bible was meant to be shouted to the amassed Israelite multitudes, (b) if you shout a text you tend to have to stop more often for breath, (c) a translation intended to reproduce that shoutability must render it in short breath-units, called "cola" (Buber called his method "colametric").
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Why is it important?
This is a classic text, similar to Henri Meschonnic's call for the "mouthable" translation of the Hebrew Bible into French, but several decades earlier.
Perspectives
I first translated passages from this text for The Translator's Turn, and was so taken by it that I decided to translate the whole thing, and the result was published here; but after it came out I started thinking that I really should have translated it colametrically, and so I later retranslated the whole thing, marking the cola (breath-units) with poetry-style line-breaks. What I found, to my surprise, was that this strategy allowed me to translate Buber very literally--his own method as well--and still make sense of the odd syntax.
Professor Douglas J. Robinson
Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Martin Buber: On the Diction of a German Translation of the Scripture, Translation and Literature, September 1993, Edinburgh University Press,
DOI: 10.3366/tal.1993.2.2.105.
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