Wednesday, July 19, 2006
Translations
I've got two Tol books out of the library at the moment; Leo Tolstoy's Redemption and J RR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Rings. I think I've read LOTR every year since I was 13 or 14. If my thoughts of becoming a Biblical Studies lecturer don't work out, I could always teach Tolkien and his worlds...
And almost everything I'm reading at the moment is in translation. Along with Tolstoy, I've got a book by Haruki Murakami (The Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World), and I've started Marcel Proust's mammoth In Search of Lost Time. I can tell what a lot of work has gone into each translation...then checking the front of LOTR I understand the publishers don't intend to have an authoritative and error-free version for another couple of hundred years.
All in all, it's inspired me to push back into studying Hebrew since I'm not going to really understand those epics, poems and one-liners without a good grasp of it.
Tags: geekery, books, bible
