Translation Talk with Everett Fox

Professor Everett Fox and I discuss the art of translation, Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, and the similarities between translation and music or theater. This interview is the first part of a series of interviews with translators for https://bibletranslation.substack.com.

0:25 Rembrandt reads Psalm 77
04:01 Everett Fox's history with Biblical Hebrew
07:23 Who is Franz Rosenzweig?
09:58 Rosenzweig's "hieros gamos"/divine marriage
12:07 Differences between Everett Fox's early and recent translations
15:29 Escaping the King James Version
19:43 On the importance of Names
23:01 Thorny problems
29:13 Where to break the lines?
31:05 There is only bad
32:18 Lydia Davis translating Proust vs. Everett Fox translating Bible
36:46 Brevity and Power
37:56 What's your favorite story?
44:58 What would you say to Buber and Rosenzweig if they were alive today?
46:55 How to learn Biblical Hebrew?
50:10 Writing about translation
54:14 The Problem of the Tetragrammaton
58:13 Schocken Books and the uncanny 70 years

Everett Fox is a scholar and translator of the Hebrew Bible. A graduate of Brandeis University, he is currently the Allen M. Glick Professor of Judaic and Biblical Studies and director of the program in Jewish Studies at Clark University. He has translated two volumes of the Hebrew Bible: the Books of Moses and the Early Prophets.

Donald Antenen is translating Genesis from the Hebrew into English verse at https://bibletranslation.substack.com. He studied classical languages at the University of Pennsylvania and the liberal arts at St. John's College in Annapolis. He lives in Bellingham, Washington.

More Translation Talk interviews:
Chris Andrews -    • Translation Talk with Chris Andrews  
Matthew Dean -    • Translation Talk with Matthew Dean  
Michael Carasik -    • Translation Talk with Michael Carasik