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2 the forgetting of history and the memory of translation The task of translating the Bible was as much a salvific act as it was one of scholarship. The struggle with temporality and the attempt to confront the ontological hiatus between pure and mundane languages resides at the heart of virtually all the translation projects discussed in this study. In the present chapter the focus switches from purely theoretical concerns to ones of history or, perhaps better, to a-­ history and toward the distortive glances of memory that emerge from the confrontation between past, present, and future. Here history and the historical record again slide into the background; only now they do so not because they take a back seat to theorizing as they did in the previous chapter, but because the past, shed of its specificities, becomes implicated in the formation of authenticity . No longer understood as an unfolding series of events in a narrative setting, the past takes on a set of meanings as projected from a future. From the manifold intersections of imagined pasts, presents, and futures the world opens up in moments of vision and its projection becomes the perceived ground of unconcealment. To forget the Hebrew of the Bible was tantamount to a loss of memory and all the national fragmentation that this implied. Translating the Bible into contemporaneous idioms, if done properly, could both save the antiquity of the Hebrew and yet also forever change the contours of a host language . The originary moment of Hebraic revelation could only be mediated paradoxically through another language. It was the semantics and grammar of these other languages that pointed to the traces of the former . The end result is that the originary moment of revelation came to be imagined as a rupture into the quotidian of the present. All this, as I argue in this chapter, was facilitated by the translative act. This functioned as an ongoing modern revelation in which the memory of the past was foregrounded against present concerns that would anticipate a future perfect. In this chapter I provide an in-­ depth analysis of the two thinkers who bookend this study: Saadya Gaon and Franz Rosenzweig. If it can forgetting of history and memory of translation 19 be shown that the topic discussed here—the filiations between forgetting and memory, history and translation—exist in my termini post quem and ad quem, then I believe with confidence that the same holds true for the other thinkers in this study who inhabit the temporal periods in between. * * * Like all Jews who sought to translate the Bible into the vernacular, both Rosenzweig1 and Saadya were motivated by what they considered to be a general state of neglect of the Hebrew language among their contemporaries . This neglect was not simply a historical process concerning the rise and fall of languages but was intimately connected to the unfolding of the universe from an originary point, and the word and world’s redemptive return to this point. Although the relationship of language to ontology is perhaps most poetically and articulately described by Rosenzweig, its clearest archival record remains Saadya’s Commentary to the Sefer Yezirah, a text that is foundational to all of Saadya’s translative and commentarial activity . Both framed this neglect in terms of forgetting—a forgetting of language , a forgetting of being, and a forgetting of all the religious obligations that flowed from such activity. This forgetting was linked to the erasure of both cultural and scriptural memory. Language was not just connected to communication and social entertainment, but interwoven with a perceived authenticity, the Jewish ability to be both home and not home, to be in time and beyond time. The ontological filiations between word and world witnessed in Rosenzweig’s and Saadya’s theories of translation were ultimately grounded in precisely these twin notions of authenticity and memory of a past that would be future. Authenticity and memory, however , were increasingly encroached upon by the claims of German Idealism and Karaism on the level of philosophy, by Bildung and Arabiyya on the level of cultural aesthetics, and by German and Arabic on the level of language. The flip side of this forgetting was seen to be a youthful romance with another language and all the poetic and rhapsodic infatuations that such a romance entailed. The perceived musicality in the adopted language became falsely associated with tone-­ deafness in the originary one. In order to counteract this, each sought to fabricate harmonic and linguistic...

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