Wednesday, December 16, 2015

Smelik on the Targum

AJS PERSPECTIVES: The Translation as a Bilingual Text: The Curious Case of the Targum (Willem F. Smelik).
A targum (an Aramaic translation of Scripture) is a translation that does not come alone: hardly ever is it left unattended by its parent text, the Hebrew Bible. While it may play, it is always supervised, its game subject to specific rules. A targum is not supposed to ever leave home and strike out on its own. The reasons for this peculiar and probably unique conception of translation as one part of a bilingual text are to be sought in contemporary rabbinic views on how to read and translate the Hebrew Bible.

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