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3 the translation of silence and the silence of translation: the fabric of metaphor Saadya’s and Rosenzweig’s determination to revive Hebrew’s imagi­ nation, showing its mute traces in a foreign narrative, set in motion a concern for uncovering a language beyond language and thereby revealing a divine message to which the words of scripture could only point. The ultimate fallibility of human understanding associated with language’s imprecision demanded that the biblical narrative needed interpretation, translation, and clarification. The tension between what the Torah really meant and what it literally said had long been commented upon in rabbinic circles;1 however, in the aftermath of Saadya and the contact with rationalist Islamic theology (kalam), the need increasingly arose to reconcile the biblical narrative with the demands of reason. This reconciliation, as we shall see in the present chapter, took the form of translation. This project was not so much interested in translating Hebrew literally into a foreign language but exegetically into a new set of conceptual idioms. The literal level of scripture—using the precedent set by Islamic and Arabophone rationalism—was opened up by employing various linguistic tropes, the most important of which is the subject of this chapter, metaphor (Ar. istAara).2 The Bible’s problematic language (e.g., that dealing with God’s corporeality) now became the catalyst for a series of translative reflections on what constituted the true meaning of scripture. If something in the Torah conflicted with reason, it had to be translated into something that did not. This form of translation, much more piecemeal than the projects discussed in the previous chapter, nevertheless reveals a great deal about both the motivation and processes at work in this larger activity. Since translation cannot take place without individual units, I here focus on one set of these units in the hope that they might reveal something of the philosophical translation of Scripture. There reverberate a series of tensions at the heart of this chapter that turn on the dialectic between language’s transparency and opaqueness, its revelation and concealment. If the Torah bespeaks God’s message, why 42 the invention of jewish identity does its language need to be translated into other idioms? If its language, including but not limited to its various anthropomorphisms, is potentially embarrassing to the philosopher, does this have any effect on the text’s deeper message? The widening of the gap between language and what resides behind it potentially destabilizes the Torah and makes its “real” message into a nontext within a text whose actual words have the potential to mislead and curtail proper understanding. The activity of translation now becomes the primary means by which one gets at this nontext—or alternatively urtext—bypassing the fragility of language and moving beyond the materiality of words to the formal presence of silence, toward the fullness of nonlanguage. These various tensions are connected to the talmudic dictum that the “Torah speaks in the language of humans.”3 This phrase is revealing because it both sounds the Torah’s uniqueness and grounds the biblical narrative in the quotidian. If the Bible is indeed a text like any other, then it can be understood using contemporaneous forms of literary criticism and poetics that are often supplied by the larger non-­ Jewish cultures in which Jews found themselves. Yet if the Bible does speak in human language, it must nevertheless be signified as more beautiful than anything in the field of non-­ Jewish literary or artistic production. Why? Again we are confronted with the notion that something must reside behind the language in which the Torah communicates, something that is discernible in the text’s silence. If, as argued in the previous chapter, translation is intertwined with the distortive glances of desire and memory, we need also be aware that translative activity emerges from the ultimate fragility of being human and the linguistic and ontological uncertainty that flows from this: words open onto non-­ Words; linguistic text gives way to the silence of the Text. But the linguistic boundaries separating these forms are anything but clear, and movement between them is fraught with uncertainty. What facilitates this motion is translation: the tacit acknowledgment that translation must always be incomplete; that translation proves to be a fleeting­ attempt to harness the ambiguities of one language into those of another; and that it paradoxically shatters one language only to begin the process of crystallization in another. Perhaps it is in this initial shattering that...

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