Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.2979/ptx.2023.a899251
Galili Shahar
Abstract: The engagement of the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) with biblical Hebrew poetry already during the early stages of his career in the 1770s and later during the Divan period (1814–27) was associated with his study of Oriental literatures. Under the influence of his mentor and friend, Johann Gottfried Herder, Goethe devoted himself to studying and translating Hebrew and Arabic sources (mostly from the Latin), among them the Song of Songs, alongside chapters from the Qurʿan. In his late work his reflections on the Hebrew biblical poem were associated with his interpretation of Persian classical poetry, first and foremost the ghazals, the love poems by Hâfiz, while composing his work Der westöstlicher Divan . This article offers a comparative study of Goethe’s translation and interpretation of Song of Songs, discussing its major motives, the dialectic of profane love and the sacred, confusion and disorientation, drunkenness, erotic desire, and gender ambiguities. It refers to Goethe’s translation of the Hebrew poem also in conjunction with a critical, decolonial review of Weltliteratur (world literature). Goethe’s Song of Songs serves us as a map of literary interactions, in which the German, the Hebrew and the Persian are brought into conversation.
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Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.2979/ptx.2023.a899253
Julian Levinson
Abstract: This article shows how new trends in Protestant biblical hermeneutics in nineteenth-century America helped to raise the cultural status of modern-day Jews, while inspiring bold new directions in American Jewish literary culture. The interpretive framework under discussion emerged in the work of Bishop Robert Lowth and Johann Gottfried Herder, whose studies of biblical poetry became highly influential in the United States when they were both published at the height of the Second Great Awakening. By reconceptualizing biblical poetry (especially in the works of the biblical prophets) as sublime art, their approach created the possibility for valorizing the biblical tradition for its aesthetic power alongside its religious teachings. Since Jews were commonly seen as continuous with biblical Israel, this approach meant that Jews could be seen as heirs to a glorious literary tradition, a point that American Jewish poets, such as Emma Lazarus, emphasized when they launched their own poetic experiments modeled on the biblical prophets.
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Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.2979/ptx.2023.a899248
Laura S. Lieber
Abstract: In this article, I will examine how liturgical poets creatively reworked biblical quotations and allusions in service of their own poetic and liturgical ambitions through analysis of a late antique composition attributed to Eleazar Haqallir (Qallir) (late sixth/early seventh century), “What Man Lives and Does not See Death?” This poem, which takes its opening line from Psalm 89:49, was composed for an occasion when the Torah reading began with Deuteronomy 33:1, Moses’s poetic blessing of the Israelites before his death. Qallir’s composition transforms the biblical episode into a miniature, multivoiced drama, one that draws on an extensive body of postbiblical exegetical tradition. First, it depicts Moses’s vigorous arguments with God and various heavenly intercessors as he seeks to avert his fate; upon conceding that he cannot escape mortality, it describes how Moses is mourned by not only the Israelites but all creation. The final portion of the piyyut transitions from a depiction of funerary ritual (in the biblical past) to the recitation of the Qedushah (in the liturgical present). With its complex, multivocal narrative, this composition illustrates how liturgical poets reworked biblical poetry—in this case, Deuteronomy 32–33 and Psalm 90—by reading it through the lens of postbiblical narrative traditions while also leveraging the performative-ritual context in which the poems were experienced. This poem’s reuse of traditional material reflects the aesthetic conventions of the poetic craft and performative practices of dramatic delivery in late antiquity.
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Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.2979/ptx.2023.a899250
Yosefa Raz
Abstract: The subject of this article is the reception history of biblical genres, or the metapoetics of genre-making. It argues that the seemingly fixed presentations of the genres of biblical poetry in the twentieth century—as in Robert Alter’s classic guide to biblical Hebrew poetry—emerge from an eighteenth-century encounter: the English exegete Robert Lowth’s dramatic attempt to fit Greek and Roman generic models to the Hebrew text. Lowth’s resulting genres, or what he called the “species” of biblical poetry, were shaped both by the parallels he discovered between classical and Hebrew traditions, and by the small and large aberrations he faced in his process of translation. The article focuses on the characterization of a poetic form that never existed: the ancient Hebrew ode. Although, in this case, Lowth fails in his biblical scholarship, his Hebrew ode demonstrates the spirit of his creative project. By fitting Hebrew poetry to neoclassical models, Lowth subtly transformed neoclassical categories and possibilities, opening up new imaginative expanses within the lyrical mode and preparing the way for a more flexible, complex, and emotionally sophisticated Romantic lyric.
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Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.2979/ptx.2023.a899249
Raphael Magarik
Abstract: Modern scholarship tends to investigate biblical poetry in an exhaustive, disciplined fashion and thus defines parallelism in an apolitical way. Returning to the premodern period, more partial conceptions of parallelism can newly open the question of the form’s politics. I argue that Spenser shapes the episode of the Egalitarian Giant in The Faerie Queene around his conception of biblical parallelism, which involves a recourse to literary balance to transcend political tensions within scripture. In The Faerie Queene , we see an early employment of a literary approach to Scripture to contain political conflict; Spenser’s conception of parallelism testifies both to biblical poetry’s fractious, radical possibilities to disrupt the social order and to the emergence of a more detached, disciplined, and aestheticized approach to that poetry.
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Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.2979/ptx.2023.a899247
Elaine T. James, Steven Weitzman
The Ideas of Biblical PoetryAesthetics and Literary History Elaine T. James and Steven Weitzman While the study of biblical poetry has a venerable history of scholarship, at least since Robert Lowth’s De Sacra Poesi Hebraeorum Praelectiones Academicae Oxonii Habitae (1753), the modern literary study of the Bible since the 1980s has had much more to say about biblical prose, focusing much of its energy on analyzing narratives in works like Genesis and 1–2 Samuel. In 2007, for example, Prooftexts published a special issue dedicated to the legacy of Robert Alter and the literary study of the Bible. The essays in that volume dealt almost exclusively with what Alter had termed “the art of biblical narrative.” In the years since 2007, however, there has been a distinct rise in interest in the study of biblical poetry among scholars committed to the aesthetic turn championed by Alter and others, although they have taken research in new directions. This special issue of Prooftexts seeks to advance this conversation by calling attention to research that probes the historically contextualized ideas of biblical poetry—how biblical poetry has been received as poetry in different periods. Philip Sidney’s sophisticated and pithy Defence of Poesie, published posthumously in 1595, offers one example of a thinker grappling with ideas about poetry through the lens of biblical aesthetics. For Sidney, the valor and possibility of poetry [End Page 1] is modeled by the Bible itself, which, he noted, “hath whole parts in it poetical.”1 We point to this example because it represents a turning point in literary study and anticipates the influential work of both Lowth and Johann Gottfried Herder, forerunner of German Romanticism, two centuries and more later.2 Within the intellectual stream of European Romanticism and the rise of the university in the early modern period, these scholars brought Sidney’s passing observations into full critical examination. Lowth shed light on parallelism, a common technique in Psalms and other biblical poetic texts that he regarded as the central formal dimension of Israelite poetry. Herder pioneered a comparative approach that situated the question of poetry in a larger intellectual project of understanding the unique contributions of traditional cultures; this insight, along with his development of a philosophy of language and interpretation, led to the rise of new fields of study: linguistics, cultural anthropology, and ethnomusicology, among others. The combined influence of their scholarship elevated biblical poetry to the status of literary transcendence, a model of how to express intense emotion and the experience of the sublime. In the aesthetic turn, biblical poetry found a distinctive place in the intellectual history of poetry. The effort to understand the aesthetic dimensions of biblical poetry continued into the late twentieth century, and the subject served as something of a cultural flashpoint in the heyday of American liter
《圣经》诗歌美学与文学史研究《圣经》诗歌美学与文学史研究《圣经》诗歌美学与文学史的研究历史悠久，至少从罗伯特·洛斯(Robert Lowth)于1753年出版的《论圣经》(De Sacra Poesi Hebraeorum Praelectiones Academicae Oxonii Habitae)开始，但自20世纪80年代以来，对《圣经》的现代文学研究更多地涉及《圣经》散文，将大部分精力集中在《创世纪》和《撒母耳记1-2》等作品的叙事分析上。例如，2007年，Prooftexts出版了一期特刊，专门讨论罗伯特·阿尔特的遗产和圣经文学研究。这本书里的文章几乎都是关于阿尔特所谓的“圣经叙事艺术”的。然而，自2007年以来，致力于Alter等人倡导的美学转向的学者对圣经诗歌研究的兴趣明显上升，尽管他们已经将研究方向转向了新的方向。这期《校对》特刊试图通过引起人们对《圣经》诗歌的历史语境化思想的研究的关注来推进这一对话——《圣经》诗歌在不同时期是如何被当作诗歌接受的。菲利普•西德尼(Philip Sidney)于1595年死后出版的《为诗辩护》(Defence of Poesie)精辟而精辟，是一位思想家通过《圣经》美学的视角思考诗歌思想的一个例子。对西德尼来说，诗歌的勇气和可能性是由《圣经》本身塑造的，他指出，《圣经》“包含了全部的诗意”。我们指出这个例子，是因为它代表了文学研究的一个转折点，并预示了两个多世纪后洛斯和德国浪漫主义先驱约翰·戈特弗里德·赫德(Johann Gottfried Herder)有影响力的作品在近代早期欧洲浪漫主义思潮和大学兴起的背景下，这些学者对西德尼的偶然观察进行了全面的批判性考察。洛斯阐明了平行，这是诗篇和其他圣经诗歌文本中常见的一种技巧，他认为这是以色列诗歌的中心形式维度。赫尔德开创了一种比较方法，将诗歌问题置于一个更大的理解传统文化独特贡献的智力项目中;这一见解，连同他对语言和阐释哲学的发展，导致了语言学、文化人类学和民族音乐学等新研究领域的兴起。他们学术的共同影响将圣经诗歌提升到文学超越的地位，是如何表达强烈情感和崇高体验的典范。在审美转向中，圣经诗歌在诗歌思想史上占有独特的地位。对《圣经》诗歌美学维度的理解一直持续到20世纪后期，在美国文学批评的全盛时期，这一主题在某种程度上成为了文化的导火索。1981年，《校对》杂志出版了第一期，詹姆斯·库格尔出版了《圣经诗歌的思想:平行及其历史》。阿尔特本人在《圣经叙事的艺术》之后，于1985年出版了《圣经诗歌的艺术》，不久之后，又与弗兰克·克莫德合编了《圣经文学指南》(1987年)。这一系列快速连续的卷证明了对圣经的文学方法的制度化，这些学者支持这种方法来反对长期以来以现代圣经学术为特征的历史批评当然，有必要记住，这个爆发点只是复杂历史中的一个时刻。Hermann Gunkel, Luis Alonso Schökel和Michael Patrick O 'Connor等圣经学者也都在争论《圣经》包含或就是诗歌的概念，并对正式描述和古代以色列文化中语言艺术的意义给予了深刻的承诺这样的作品提醒读者圣经诗歌研究的多样化和不可预测的路径，并为西德尼的观点提供了一个普遍的肯定，即承认圣经中的文学作品是诗歌是有用的，但仍然需要辩护。但尤其是阿尔特和库格尔，前者是比较文学学者，后者是……
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Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.2979/ptx.2023.a899252
Lilach Naishtat Bornstein
Abstract: Coleridge wrote a translation of the first ten verses of the Song of Deborah in September 1798, while on a boat overseas on the way to Germany, in what was his first-ever voyage outside of England. This article offers a close reading of this manuscript, which has not yet been examined thoroughly by scholars, and suggests what lay behind Coleridge’s choice to translate it at this specific moment in his life and career. The Song of Deborah in fact continued to fascinate the poet throughout his life, especially in relation to the innovative Romantic poetics he developed together with William Wordsworth. Translating the Song of Deborah was Coleridge’s first experience with translating Hebrew. As such, it provides early evidence of his grasp of Hebrew, as well as his understanding of the act of translating, both of which he was to develop further later in life. The text in question thus constituted an experimental exercise for Coleridge during a transitional period in his career, in which it is clear that he was playing with the tonal qualities of the Hebrew words and their multiplicity of meanings, including intra- and interlinguistic ones, as well as aspects of the language’s polyphony and its use of tautological repetition.
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Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.2979/ptx.2023.a899254
Sean Burt
Abstract: Alicia Suskin Ostriker is the author of a wide range of literary and critical works, including several books of poetry and criticism of English-language poetry. This article argues that Ostriker’s work as a poet and literary scholar informs her engagement with biblical literature, particularly biblical poetry. In her formative work on twentieth-century English-language women’s poetry, she articulates how women’s poetry voices embodied identities and creates spaces of intimacy that can break down ideologically constructed barriers. Her creative, poetic biblical criticism mutually informs her interest in the ability of women’s poetry to transform and revise male-dominated mythologies. For Ostriker, the poetry of the Bible provides a resource located within Jewish tradition that can transform it from the inside. As a reader and creative inheritor of the literary heritage of the Bible who is carefully attuned to its literary power, Ostriker’s work reading and revisioning the Bible creates a feminist countertheology grounded in the aesthetic, material possibilities of poetic language.
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Pub Date : 2022-10-01DOI: 10.2979/prooftexts.39.3.03
B. Pollock
Abstract:At first glance, it seems obvious that the secret with which Franz Rosenzweig is occupied in his 1928 essay “Secret of the Form of Biblical Narratives” is the inexplicit form through which the Bible transmits the meaning of its narratives. But the claim put forward in this article is that the role of intertextual allusions in determining the Bible’s meaning—concealed from those not privy to this literary device—is neither the only nor the most consequential secret to which Rosenzweig wishes to draw his readers’ attention in his essay. The more far-reaching secret Rosenzweig seeks to convey involves the redemptive role readers of the Bible are intended to play when they bring their respective acts of biblical interpretation into conversation with one another.
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