Robert Alter
Personal Information
Description
Wikipedia: Robert Bernard Alter (born 1935)is an American professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 1967.He published his translation of the Hebrew Bible in 2018. Biography Robert Alter earned his bachelor's degree in English (Columbia University, 1957), and his master's degree (1958) and doctorate (1962) from Harvard University in comparative literature. He started his career as a writer at Commentary Magazine, where he was for many years a contributing editor. He has written twenty-three books, and is noted most recently for his translations of sections of the Bible. He lectures on topics varying from Biblical episodes to Kafka's modernism and Hebrew literature. Biblical studies One of Alter's important contributions is the introduction of the type scene into contemporary scholarly Hebrew Bible studies. An example of a type scene is that of a man meeting a young woman at a well, whom he goes on to marry; this scene occurs twice in Genesis and once in Exodus, and, according to Alter, distortedly in 1 Samuel and in the Book of Ruth.Honors Alter has served as an active member of the Council of Scholars of the Library of Congress, and is currently president of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1966 and 1978.He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1986.He was a Senior Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem, and Old Dominion Fellow at Princeton University. He is a member of the Editorial Board of the Jewish Review of Books. Awards His book The Art of Biblical Narrative won the National Jewish Book Award for Jewish Thought.In 2009, he was the recipient of the Robert Kirsch Award (Los Angeles Times) for lifetime contribution to American letters.He was awarded an honorary Doctor of Humanities degree by Yale University in 2010.He is a Doctor Honoris Causa of Hebrew University (2015).Selected works ---Translations of the Hebrew Bible ---The David Story: A Translation with Commentary of 1 and 2 Samuel, 1999, W.W. Norton, ISBN 0-393-32077-4 ---The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary, 2004, W.W. Norton, ISBN 0-393-01955-1 ---The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary, 2007, W.W. Norton, ISBN 978-0-393-06226-7 ---The Book of Genesis, translation by Robert Alter, illustrated by R. Crumb, 2009, W.W. Norton (first edition, 1996), ISBN 0-393-06102-7 ---The Wisdom Books: Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes: A Translation with Commentary, 2010, W.W. Norton, ISBN 0-393-06812-9 ---Ancient Israel: The Former Prophets: Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings: A Translation with Commentary, 2013, W.W. Norton, ISBN 0-393-08269-5 ---Strong As Death Is Love: Song Of Songs Ruth Esther Jonah And Daniel: A Translation with Commentary, 2015, W.W. Norton, ISBN 0-393-24304-4 ---The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary, 2018, W.W. Norton, ISBN 0-393-29249-5 Other works ---Rogue's Progress: Studies in the Picaresque Novel, 1965, Harvard University Press ---Partial Magic: The Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre, 1975, University of California Press, ISBN 0-520-02755-8 ---A Lion for Love: A Critical Biography of Stendhal, in collaboration with Carol Cosman, 1979, Basic Books, ISBN 0-465-04124-8 ---The Art of Biblical Narrative, 1981, Basic Books, ISBN 0-465-00427-X ---Motives for Fiction, 1984, Harvard University Press, ISBN 978-0-674-58762-5 ---The Art of Biblical Poetry, 1985, Basic Books, ISBN 0-465-00431-8 ---The Literary Guide to the Bible Edited by Alter and Frank Kermode, 1987, Harvard University Press, ISBN 978-0-674-87531-9 ---The Invention of Hebrew Prose: Modern Fiction and the Language Revolution, 1988, University of Washington Press. ---Pleasures of Reading in an Ideological Age, 1990, W.W. Norton, ISBN 0-393-31499-5 ---Necessary Angels: Tradition and Modernity in Kafka, Benjamin, and Scholem, 1991, Harvard University Press, ISBN 978-0-674-60663-0 ---Imagined Cities: Urban Experience and the Novel, 2005, Yale University Press, ISBN 0-300-10802-8 ---Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible, 2010, Princeton University Press, ISBN 0-691-12881-2 ---The Art of Bible Translation, 2019, Princeton University Press, ISBN 978-0691181493 Wikipedia Source: Fascinating Interview with New York Times
Books
The window
Ravikovitch is Israel's leading woman poet whose work deals with extreme states of personal life: desolation, loss, estrangement, and breakdown. These themes are levened by her caustic wit and her sharp language.
Ancient Israel The Former Prophets Joshua Judges Samuel And Kings A Translation With Commentary
Canon and creativity
"In this book, one of our foremost literary critics views the much-debated question of the literary canon from an entirely new angle. Robert Alter explores the ways in which a range of iconoclastic twentieth-century authors have put to use the stories, language, and imagery of the paramount canonical text - the Hebrew Bible. Alter makes a compelling case against the prevalent, pejorative notion of the canon as a vehicle of ideological enforcement. He shows instead that canons by nature are surprisingly elastic, providing later writers with imaginative resources even when those same writers rebel against what they conceive as the constraints of the canon."--BOOK JACKET.
Genesis
Strong as death is love
"An award-winning translation brings new immediacy to these beloved books of the Bible. Read them for the first time, again. These five late biblical books offer readers a range of pleasures not usually associated with the Bible. They are artful, entertaining literary works-innovative, even startling. Women often stand center stage. Song of Songs is a celebration of young love, frankly sensuous, with no reference to God or covenant. It offers some of the most beautiful love poems of the ancient world. The story of Queen Esther's shrewd triumph is a secular entertainment that mixes farce with sly sexual comedy. The character of Ruth embodies the virtues of loyalty, love, and charity in a harmonious world. Enigma replaces harmony in Daniel, whose feverish night dreams envision the end of time. And the traditions of prophecy are recast in the tale of a fish that, on God's command, swallows Jonah and imprisons him in its dark wet innards for three days. Alter's translation restores the original power of these popular books"--
The Art of Bible Translation
In this brief book, award-winning biblical translator and acclaimed literary critic Robert Alter offers a personal and passionate account of what he learned about the art of Bible translation over the two decades he spent completing his own English version of the Hebrew Bible. Alter's literary training gave him the advantage of seeing that a translation of the Bible can convey the text's meaning only by trying to capture the powerful and subtle literary style of the biblical Hebrew, something the modern English versions don't do justice to. The Bible's style, Alter writes, "is not some sort of aesthetic embellishment of the 'message' of Scripture but the vital medium through which the biblical vision of God, human nature, history, politics, society, and moral value is conveyed." And, as the translators of the King James Version knew, the authority of the Bible is inseparable from its literary authority. For these reasons, the Bible can be brought to life in English only by re-creating its literary virtuosity, and Alter discusses the principal aspects of style in the Hebrew Bible that any translator should try to reproduce: word choice, syntax, word play and sound play, rhythm, and dialogue. In the process, he provides an illuminating and accessible introduction to biblical style that also offers insights about the art of translation far beyond the Bible.
Partial Magic
This new work by an imaginative critic of vigorous intellectual powers radically revises our understanding of the novel as a genre. Against a variety of critical stances, from Marxist and Freudian to Jamesian and Leavisite, Mr. Alter argues that "realism" is by no means the exclusive generic aim of the novel. He maintains that the novel, beginning from Cervantes with the erosion of belief in the authority of the written word, has been much more essentially playful and inquisitively philosophical than prevailing critical notions allow. Mr. Alter explores the writer's pleasure in the extravagant manipulation of narrative artifice in a line of major self-conscious novelists from the late seventeenth century to the present - Cervantes, Sterne, Diderot, Thackeray, Melville, Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Gide and Nabokov. His readings of particular masterworks of fiction are combined with a large historical overview which brings us finally to a consideration of the confusions and emerging possibilities of the contemporary period. Written in a lucid, lively, non-technical style, this book significantly expands our understanding of the novel and the ways in which it delights us and engages us most deeply. Fascinating Interview with New York Times
The art of biblical narrative
Since it was first published nearly three decades ago, "The Art of Biblical Narrative" has radically expanded the horizons of biblical scholarship by recasting the Bible as a work of literary art deserving studied criticism. Renowned critic and translator Robert Alter presents the Hebrew Bible as a cohesive literary work, one whose many authors used innovative devices such as parallelism, contrastive dialogue, and narrative tempo to tell one of the most revolutionary stories of human history: the revelation of a single god.