The Conference on Christianity and Literature Lifetime Achievement Award

Christianity and Literature Vol. 63, No.1 (Autumn 2013) The Conference on Christianity and Literature Lifetime Achievement Award In January 2013, at the Conference on Christianity and Literature meeting during MLA, Robert Alter was presented with our Lifetime Achievement Award. Richard E. Brantley presented the award to Professor Alter and here we include both Dr. Brantley's remarks and Robert Alter's address. Dr. Alter's talk was previouslypublished by the ACLS as its Charles Homer Haskins Prize Lecturefor 2013. A CCL Tribute to Robert Alter Emeritus Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at Berkeley, Robert Alter isthe author oftwenty-three books on such subjects as Stendhal, Kafka, Benjamin, Scholem, the picaresque novel, the theory of narrative, and various novelists' takes on urban experience. More important from CCLS point ofview are his criticism and translation of, and his commentary on, the Hebrew Bible. Just as Professor Alter received the National Jewish Book Award for Jewish Thought, so he wins CCLS Award for Lifetime Achievement. This "most accomplished Jewish humanist in America;' as Leon Wieseltier has called him, ranks among the most accomplished humanists in the world, for Robert Alter has advanced Jewish/Christian conversation about the golden realm of letters. He gives new meaning to how Blake refers to the Bible we all share-that is, as "the Great Code of Art:' Asanyone "ofa certain age"wellknows, courses in the Bibleas Literature were drowning in the alphabet soup of JEDP until Professor Alter came along, to shift biblical scholarship from source criticism to reading the 88 CCL LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD 89 whole text as it appears before us on the page. In his own words, his goal is "not to promote the Hebrew Bible,but simply to register a crucial fact about its formal status"; he adds, "If you want to read [the Bible] competently even with an intended focus on it as a set of religious documents, you have to follow closely its literary articulations:' Robert Alter understands the Scriptures as dynamic and multi-layered and shows how language that might not be literally true approximates deep truth nonetheless. Just as John Updike's fiction locates the beautiful in the mundane, the redemptive in the descriptive, so Robert Alter's Bible finds saving grace, "a momentary stay against confusion" and hence "clarification of life" (Frost's language), in the conflicts, perplexities, unfathomability, vividness, and revelatory dialogue of ever-changing character both human and divine. By giving his readers credit for literacy, Professor Alter performs the difficult but fascinating task of translation, rendering into English with no diminution of "concrete directness" the "strongly cadenced" as well as "beautifully compact" Hebrew (Alter's language). Not for Robert Alter the fashionable version of the creation account that tells plants to "Green up!" or of the Lord's Prayer that asks for "three square meals" rather than for "dailybread:' Where the Jewish Publication Society translates the psalmist's "soul" thirsting for God, Alter's image, closer to the Hebrew and rooted in the challenges of desert subsistence, is of the poet's "throat" thirsting for God. As Adam Kirsch has recently observed, Professor Alter's "ongoing translation of the Hebrew Bible into a new, more accurate and forceful English version is one of the most ambitious literary projects of this or any age:' CCL's Alan Jacobs rejoices that Robert Alter's "climb up the sheer face of the pentateuchal mount resembles some of the great monuments of humanistic scholarship more than the work of the rabbis:' Professor Alter, finally, writes commentary, and so he regards the Book he is commenting on as a master work. He presumes that "the biblical authors knew what they were doing, which in turn allows him to exert his considerable critical skills to imagine what that might have been" (Jacobs). His "commentary is as useful as the translation itself;' as when he points out that Qoheleth's words-"For the fate of the sons of men and the fate of the beasts is a single fate" (Alter's translation)-"are a direct repudiation of Genesis" (Kirsch). "Here:' as Kirsch aptly remarks, "is the Bibleitself making the same disenchanting argument" as Darwin. Thus Robert Alter can save Judaism...