LITERATURE
Translator, artist shed new light on sacred texts
Here, from the same publisher and officially published a week apart, are two of the most important books of 2009. Willis Barnstone’s “Restored New Testament” is the Samson attempt of one great scholar and translator to knock down ancient pillars of error, injustice and persecution. In that endeavor alone, it may be the most important book of the year.
Barnstone, in his magnificent, indeed historic, new translation of the New Testament — into both poetry and prose — incorporates a new chronology of the texts everyone knows from the King James version, as well as previously banished Gnostic gospels, and intends nothing less than a secular reformation through new translation — a “restoration of openness” in blood-drenched Western conflict.
He is in no confusion about what he is doing. But it is the voice of one of the great translators of his time — indeed himself a great writer and poet at the age of 81 — that tells us about it. “Reformations in religion and politics bring change and historically have been resisted or imposed by a sword. We are smart enough to pace the moon but not the earth. The moon has an open transparent society for her rare visitors. Her vast sun-mirror casts light freely and aimlessly on seas and lovers. But on earth where religions everywhere evolve, evolutions still dye streets and paths of all continents with blood, and eternally in the divisive names of sect, ethnicity and politics. More than ever we need to tear up lists of new and old infidels to be slaughtered. It is time to restore or invent a guiltless Eden to a noisy planet.”
Which is where Robert Crumb—R. Crumb for publication’s sake — comes in: The erratic and hairy Eden-quest of the ’60s counter-culture for whom Crumb was the underground comix artist extraordinaire, the combination Homer, Daumier and cackling bathroom graffiti scribbler of a new movement in American art and narrative.
So his stated goals for his “Book of Genesis Illustrated” are less apocalyptic than Barnstone’s. Writes Crumb: “If my visual, literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis offends or outrages some readers, which seems inevitable considering that the text is revered by many people, all I can say in my defense is that I approached this as a straight illustration job with no intention to ridicule. Or make visual jokes. That said, I know you can’t please everybody.”
On the other hand, he was bound to delight those of us who, sight unseen, thought of a Robert Crumb version of the Book of Genesis as one of the truly wonderful publishing ideas of 2009, win, lose or draw. To have the streetcorner Daumier of Haight-Ashbury drawing the figures of the Old Testament sans razors and depilatories but in all their monumental flesh (Crumb is an even more glandular artist than Rembrandt or Rubens) seemed to many of us a match made in some A&R suburb of heaven (wherever that might be).
Anyone assuming that Crumb, in his gloriously demented way, would toss it off or approach it with anything other than his own kind of reverence is resoundingly mistaken. He steeped himself in translation and commentary, enough to write in his introduction, of scriptural scholars “who perceive in [the stories] lost meanings, and intentions, things that had been altered by the increasingly entrenched priests and the triumph of patriarchy over an ancient and even more dimly remembered matriarchy.”
What makes the very idea of an illustrated R. Crumb rendering of Genesis so irresistible is that the Old Testament in general and Genesis in particular are, in their original primal states, altogether shockingly different from just about everything they are presumed to be. Who better than the ur-dauber of freakdom to deal with it?
Take, almost at random, the story of Lot, after he and his family have fled God’s rain of fire and brimstone on Sodom and Gomorrah — those “cities on the plain”—only to have his wife turned into a pillar of salt for looking back.
Whereupon, we have what Crumb, with some understatement, calls “the bizarre story of Lot and his two daughters” who are “concerned that there are no men around to mate with them and to carry on their family’s lineage. The older one initiates a scheme, suggesting they sleep with their own father, first getting him drunk. The plan succeeds, and both sisters have sons by their father. This is not so shocking in the context of matrilineal descent, in which the father is less significant than the mother. Later on in the Torah, under the laws of Moses, such incestuous behavior was forbidden.” (Hence, of course, the understandable shock and loathing at Mackenzie Phillips’ tales of father John of the Mamas and the Papas, for one obvious example.)
That’s Crumb the amateur biblical scholar writing commentary. Look at his illustrations, though, and you see it’s all up his carnal and neo-primitive alley, thereby emphasizing just how “bizarre” this tale out of Genesis now seems to us.
An amazing book in its way, but not a potential world-changer as Barnstone’s new translation of the New Testament seems intended to be.
Not only are my scholarly resources woefully inadequate for a full consideration of every issue leading from Barnstone’s text but so too are the current resources of space. You can be sure that such are their significance and implication that there will be commentaries and forums more appropriate to deal with them elsewhere.
Paramount among the things that Barnstone’s seismically bold new translation is doing is replacing familiar names with original Hebrew and Aramaic ones to insist that it is about “the life and death of a rabbi named Yeshua,” whose Judaism must never be overlooked for a second.
That’s because, writes Barnstone, “the foundation of anti-Semitism was and remains in the New Testament.” Changes from the Hebrew and Aramaic names “are inaccurate to the texts as we have them and actually reinforce a more significant misconception, which is that Yeshua and family and followers were somehow not Jews, that Jesus was not a rabbi preaching in the temples (though in the Greek gospels he is addressed as ‘rabbi’ frequently). By a tradition of using largely Greek names for the Hebrew and Aramaic names of the New Testament figures, those who represent what is sometimes called ‘primitive Christianity’ lose their Jewish identity in a grand identity theft, thereby making it possible for Christians to hate Jews, yet not hate Yeshua as a Jew, nor his mother Miryam and father Josef, nor all his followers.. . The disappearance of Yeshua’s Jewish identity dumbfounds common sense and history.”
In other words, the poisoned tree of anti-Semitism — and all of its putrid fruit, from the apocalyptic horror of the Holocaust to the coastal trivia of Mel Gibson’s DWI bust — are just the bloom of mistranslation.
One, then, to be stopped by Barnstone’s amazing book under the rubric of finding “a chastely modern literary version of a major world text.”
Whose very beginning to Barnstone, heretically, was the prologue to the Gospel According to John (whom Barnstone also calls Yohanan) whose beauty surpasses — and therefore survives — all language:
“In the beginning was the word/and the word was with God/ And God was the word/ The word was in the beginning with God./ Through it everything came about/ And without it not a thing came about/What came to be in the word was life/ And the life was the light of the people/ And the light in the darkness shines/And the darkness would not apprehend it.”
Which makes the universe one vast incomprehensible poem, in search of a poet as good and chaste as Willis Barnstone.
Jeff Simon is The News’ Arts and Books editor.
Restored New Testament:
A New Translation, With Commentary, including the Gnostic Gospels Thomas, Mary and Judas By Willis Barnstone
Norton 1,485 pages, $49.95
The Book of Genesis Illustrated By R. Crumb Norton 224 unnumbered pages, $24.95
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