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Robert Alter’s Biblical Songbook

Why is Strong as Death is Love different from other books? In fact, why is this Robert Alter rendering of a part of the Torah different from other such Alter renderings? He has been doing this work for a while, after all, and this volume is more of a scattering than were the full-force hits of his Genesis and work on various Old Testament Kings. Well: this is unequivocally a work of poetry. Translation, perhaps – rendering, certainly. But poetry is first and last. Alter’s renderings are becoming for Hebrew scripture what Robert Fagles made his translating of Homer and Virgil: that sloping word, so important that we fear for clay feet – definitive. Just as Fagles broke down the hallowed idols of Chapman and Pope to deal in dirty, tangible expression, so Alter has long held it his duty to refine the Abrahamic myths right down to just that – mythology – and then build them up again, as we never bat an eyelid at people doing with Beowulf, the Tain, the Ramayana or Ovid. There is of course the problem of these stories being stuck in the gristle of a three-way Poem: International English Language Quarterly, 2016 Vol. 4, No. 2, 254–262