c. 1996 Religion News Service
BERKELEY, Calif. _ Having made his reputation as a translator of sacred texts, Stephen Mitchell usually has no trouble expressing himself.
But as he recounts the inception of an upcoming Bill Moyers series on the Book of Genesis _ in which Mitchell participates _ there’s a moment when he gets a little tongue-tied.
Moyers got the idea for the series, Mitchell explains, after sitting in on the Genesis Seminar, a monthly roundtable discussion held in New York at”the Jewish Theological Ser- … uh … s-s …” Mitchell, 53, pauses to gather himself.”I don’t want to say cemetery,”he says with a laugh, but”seminary.” It’s the sort of slip that, if not exactly Freudian, may hold some meaning.
For Mitchell is a latter-day transcendentalist whose maverick career as a translator has sometimes put him at odds with established religious and literary traditions.
Born into a secular, Reform Jewish family, Mitchell became a Zen Buddhist and has practiced meditation for the last 23 years. But Mitchell has also carried on a long love affair with Jesus, the ancient Chinese mystic Lao-Tzu and Ramana Maharshi, a 20th century Vedantic Hindu teacher.
In a score of books published over the last 17 years, Mitchell has translated the Book of Job, the Psalms, Taoist and Buddhist scripture. He has even offered his own version of the Synoptic Gospels, which he somewhat presumptuously entitled”The Gospel According to Jesus”(HarperCollins).
Like Walt Whitman and H.D. Thoreau, Mitchell belongs to no sect or school, but carries his conscience as a writer, along with his soul, in the shelter of the palms he joins in meditation.”The only authority is your own inner authority,”Mitchell says.”Mostly what I have seen around authority, or structures of authority, has been unhealthy. … All I do is works that call me or interest me and that I’m in love with. Invariably, when I’m satisfied with something, there’s a great resonance through many people in the culture.” And though he is well-known to many nontraditional believers, Mitchell reaches a far wider audience this week, when the premiere episode of the 10-part Moyers series begins airing on PBS stations Wednesday (Oct. 16).
The series is the culmination of a tsunami of popular interest in Genesis that has flooded bookstores with new commentaries and translations of the Bible’s first book. The series brings together some of the brightest lights in Hebrew Bible scholarship for fast-paced discussions on the continuing relevance of the book’s ancient stories.
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Besides Mitchell, five other panelists in the series have published new translations or commentaries.
Robert Alter has published,”Genesis: Translation and Commentary”(Norton). Everett Fox’s book,”The Five Books of Moses”(Schocken), is excerpted on the Moyers series in dramatic readings by actors Alfre Woodard and Mandy Patinkin.
Naomi H. Rosenblatt, a psychotherapist and lecturer who holds a Bible study class for senators on Capitol Hill, published”Wrestling with Angels: What Genesis Teaches Us about our Spiritual Identity, Sexuality and Personal Relationships”(Delta). Rabbi Burton Visotzky, who moderates the Jewish Theological Seminary’s Genesis Seminar, published”The Genesis of Ethics: How the Tormented Family of Genesis Leads us to Moral Development”(Crown).
Karen Armstrong has a new commentary,”In the Beginning: A New Interpretation of Genesis”(Knopf). And Avivah Zornberg’s new Genesis book is called”Genesis: The Beginning of Desire”(Doubleday).
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Mitchell says Moyers practically commissioned him to translate Genesis in 1994, after the two began talking about Mitchell’s participation in the series. HarperCollins released Mitchell’s translation this month as”Genesis: A New Translation of the Classic Biblical Stories.””It’s a powerful book,”Mitchell says of Genesis,”a central book to our culture.”However, unlike Mitchell’s other translations, Genesis was not written in verse and”doesn’t have the kind of developed and mature religious consciousness that attracts me.”Without the invitation (from Moyers),”he says,”I just wouldn’t have done it.” Mitchell’s rendering of Genesis offers the only version in English that presents Genesis as the collection of disparate ancient stories, once orally transmitted, which later redactors, beginning in the 8th century B.C., tried to weave into a single text, often with confusing results.
Thus, Mitchell offers versions from different sources of the”Creation”and”Flood”stories, as well as the classic stories of the”Tower of Babel,”the”Covenant with Abraham,”the”Binding of Isaac,”and”Jacob Wrestles with the Angel.” Two habits distinguish Mitchell as a translator.
First, besides an accurate rendering of meaning, Mitchell aims to elucidate an author’s tone. For Mitchell, tone is the primordial substance of a poetic text that is often snuffed out in translation.”Tone is the life rhythm of a mind,”Mitchell writes in the introduction to the Genesis translation.”Reading a translation that renders a great writer’s words without re-creating their tone is like listening to a computer play Mozart.” Secondly, Mitchell often interprets texts, with little apology, through the lens of his Zen practice and his wide readings in the sacred texts of the world’s religions. The ecumenical approach to translation seems to free Mitchell to play at discovering meaning, even when that strays him into what some might consider unorthodox renderings.
Mitchell’s translation of Genesis marks a radical departure from more conventional committee translations that is bound to prove unsettling to some.”The God of Genesis is a human creation, not the God at the center of the universe,”Mitchell writes in the introduction to his book.”Whenever God is presented as a character, that presentation is partial, therefore false. God is not a character in a story. God is the whole story.” Mitchell’s evolution as a religious and literary scholar followed a circuitous route, which went far beyond the”typically superficial Reform Jewish education”he received in Brooklyn, where he was reared.
His formal Judaism”stopped pretty much at my Bar Mitzvah,”Mitchell says. He attended synagogue only on the High Holy Days,”and like millions of other Jewish kids, was bored out of my gourd and longed to be out in the street playing.” Mitchell’s interfaith sensibilities were awakened when he was nine and enrolled in a Protestant country day school. At first, he resisted gentile culture. But soon Mitchell found himself feeling guilty about”being attracted to Jesus.””I felt that I was in some way being disloyal to my family,”Mitchell recalls. His solution was to strike a boyish bargain with himself: Give in to the affinity, he told himself, but refrain from the apostasy of saying the Lord’s Prayer in Tuesday chapel with the rest of his classmates.”The bargain collapsed”when Mitchell’s fifth-grade teacher noticed the boy’s silence.”Her name was Mrs. Cummins,”Mitchell recalls,”I was in love with her.”When he entrusted her with the dilemma, Cummins responded in good missionary fashion:”`Oh, but the words of Jesus are for all people.'”With that answer, Mitchell says,”something opened in my heart. It was a kind of permission. That was the only religious experience I had in my childhood,”Mitchell says, but it was a strong one.” Mitchell, who now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, might still have followed in his father’s footsteps and become a doctor.
But in 1963, Mitchell, as an undergraduate, spent his junior year in Paris. There he met the first love of his adult life, another American student named Christie. Their relationship lasted two years, Mitchell says. But when it”blew up in my face,”while he was doing doctoral studies in comparative literature at Yale, Mitchell was plunged into despair.
The breakup inaugurated for Mitchell a decade of searching out the meaning of his suffering. The quest led him to the Book of Job, an ancient biblical tale of a once-wealthy man _ now bankrupted, bereft and afflicted _ who comes to terms with his suffering by undertaking a protracted, sometimes blasphemous, argument with God.
Mitchell spent six years translating the text before”I woke up to the fact that _ however profound and magnificent the words on the page were _ I was only going to understand it by meeting the answer in the flesh.” Mitchell met”the answer”in Providence, R.I., in 1973, in the person of a Korean Zen Master named Seung Sahn. After two years of intensive meditation training, Mitchell experienced a flash of enlightenment,”an opening where I found myself in the center of the whirlwind”that opened to Job toward the end of the book Mitchell was translating.”Everything was absolutely clear and there was no doubt left in my mind at all,”Mitchell says,”not one billionth of a percent.” In 1979, amid much follow-up work on his Zen”opening,”Mitchell published the Job translation, which he appropriately entitled”Into the Whirlwind: A Translation of the Book of Job.” (STORY CAN END HERE. OPTIONAL MATERIAL FOLLOWS)
Mitchell spent the next five years translating several books by German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, including a volume of”Selected Poetry.”In 1987, he worked with Berkeley translator Chana Bloch on the”Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai.”A year later, he edited an adaptation of the Tao Te Ching of Lao-Tzu. In 1990, Mitchell published”Parables and Portraits,”a volume of his own poetry. He has also edited two anthologies of sacred poetry _”The Enlightened Heart”and”The Enlightened Mind”_ as well as an edition of Walt Whitman’s epic masterpiece”Song of Myself”(Shambhala).
The next three book projects, however, will take Mitchell away from translation and into more of his own literary enterprise.
One planned book,”In the Beginning,”is a collection of poems on themes that grew out of his translation of Genesis. After that, Mitchell plans a work of”autobiographical, theological Zen fiction”entitled”Meetings with the Archangel.” Finally Mitchell says he is working with businessman and consultant James A. Autry on a version of the Tao Te Ching for the busy executive. Autry will take the book on his consulting workshops _ though Mitchell’s work will end with the text.”I know nothing about business,”Mitchell says.”I’ve only had one job in my life, when I was a kid of 17 for two months as a copy boy on the New York Times.” While Mitchell plans no departures from his literary work, he hints that his days as a translator may be numbered.”When something presents itself to me, it’s always because it’s the right time and that’s what I need to put my energy into,”Mitchell says.”Genesis may be, for all I know, the last translation project that I have because it’s time for other things to happen.”Of course, I’ve said that before.”
MJP END AQUINO
