Send this to a friend Ismar Schorsch is the chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary.
Translations conceal as much as they convey.
A translator may choose to bring the original to his reader or the reader to the original. In the first case, the translation is so smooth and idiomatic that the reader soon forgets just how foreign the original actually is. In the second, the translator sacrifices the comfort of the reader in order to effect a confrontation with the character of the original. Ever since writing his doctoral dissertation at Brandeis, Fox has been captivated by the Buber-Rosenzweig translation of the Hebrew Scripture into a German that kept the reader ever mindful of the language and thought patterns of the underlying ancient text. Neither Fox nor Buber-Rosenzweig make for easy reading.