Sounds

I know a very very small amount of Hebrew. My vocabulary is miniscule, and I have only the vaguest sense of the rules. So when I’m following the reading from the Torah, I have the choice between following the sounds closely or following the sense at a distance, and I generally follow the sounds closely. I imagine most shul-going American Jews know what I mean, and I expect some older Catholics know, but most people don’t pray in languages they don’t understand. It makes for an odd sense of translation, I’ll tell you that. So. I do know a very few rules. One of the ones I know is that to make a noun plural, you add -im for a masculine noun and -ot for a feminine one. Um, in Hebrew, there are only the two genders, so everything is grammatically either male or female; there is no neuter case. As an example, one piece of unleavened bread is a matzah, where two pieces are matzot. Now, there are substantial differences in pronunciation amongst various groups, so the transliterations differ; you may see packages of matzoth or matzos. For the purposes of the discussion I’m starting, I’ll use the modern Sephardic/Sabra translation that they taught me in Hebrew School (which was deliberately Zionist, which is a whole nother conversation). So imagine that the -ot suffix sounds like the grain they make Cheerios out of. The point will be the same in other dialects, but the transliterations will be different. Anyway, -im and -ot are plurals. Adjectives that apply to plural nouns are also inflected, so that you can see it becomes pretty easy to set up rhymes. Not just rhymes, of course. It’s ridiculously easy to set up a string of words that rhyme, or most of which rhyme. For instance, I was listening to Genesis 41 last week, and noticed that when the seven kine come out of the river, they are shevah (seven) parot (cows), and they are described as yaphot mar’eh (well-favored) u’vriyot (and fat). As a prefix, v’ or u’ means ‘and’, by the way. So we turn from the words parah (cow), yapheh (good looking) and baree (fat), which do not rhyme at all to the words parot, yaphot and bryot, which do. That gives the sound of the passage a certain shape. Similarly, the cattle that come after them are ra’ot mar’eh v’dakot (bad looking and thin). Then, when the dream is repeated starting in Gen 41:17, they are shevah parot bryot bashar v’yifot and shevah parot acherot ohlot acharehen dalot v’ra’ot. You see how they build up? And then, 41:20 goes like this:

Vatochalna haparot harakot v’hara’ot et shevah haparot harishonot habriot

There are nine words in the sentence, and six of them rhyme. And with the rhythm (the prefix ha- means the, in case that’s throwing you), that’s a magnificent set of sounds. And it’s the culmination of a build-up that makes this one short powerful sentence sound like a tag line, like a completion.

Now, how do we translate that into English? In the KJV, it reads “And the lean and the ill favoured kine did eat up the first seven fat kine.” That’s got some nice rhythm at the beginning, but it kind of falls off at the end. The RSV gives us “ And the thin and gaunt cows ate up the first seven fat cows,” which is no better, although it does retain the short punchiness of the Hebrew, without having any power in its rhythm or sound. The fact is that English doesn’t do that sort of thing; the idea of having six words in a short sentence that start with and end with the same sounds would be tremendously awkward and clever-clever, rather than moving. It would be foolish to try to imitate the Hebrew, but then we lose a good deal of its flavor, no matter what.

I suspect, by the way, that my fondness for the English figure polysyndeton, in which an ‘and’ list keeps the ‘and’ in between each thing comes from how well it works in Hebrew. Here’s an example from my own writing: It’s the friction between cultures that rubs off art and innovation and modernity and chopsocky movies and ska and zoot suits and gumbo and the Demoiselles of Avignon. Here’s a transliteration from the Kaddish we say several times in any service: Yeet'barakh, v' yeesh'tabach, v' yeetpa'ar, v' yeetrohmam, v' yeet'nasei, v' yeet'hadar, v' yeet'aleh, v' yeet'halal sh'mey d'kudshah. A translation, more or less, would be “Blessed, praised, glorified, exalted, extolled, mighty, upraised, and lauded be the Name of the Holy One.” Now, in English, that just sounds silly, but in Hebrew it’s got something. To get any flavor at all of the rolling sound of the Hebrew, you would have to write “Blessed, and praised, and glorified, and exalted ...”

The Latin Vulgate, by the way, has quae devoratis et consumptis prioribus for Gen 41:20, which I quite like, without knowing what it means.

Thank you,
-Vardibidian.