Robert Alter - In His Own Words: Understanding Alter from His Lectures

To that end, I have selected a few of his lectures or interviews given to a very wide number of diverse audiences and with simple-to-complex explanations.

How did he create this new field? Why did he pursue it? Importantly, what is the Big Picture of his translations? How does he see the Hebrew Bible?

Alters lectures are a good introduction to his complex books and academic publications. When speaking, Alter often introduces his work with simple, entertaining storytelling, suited to the venue. My selection is intended to show the diversity of his readers and to make it easier to understand his books.

[MS: See the new interview where Alter explains how seeing the Bible as a "literature" expands its messages and opens the Bible up to larger audiences. It's embraced by believers of many communities.]

Many resources are linked on the Resources Page in the Robert Alter MS Sefaria Collection.

JJ Kimche - Researcher; Translator; Editor; Archivist; Educator; PhD Candidate at Harvard University

JJ Kimche - Researcher; Translator; Editor; Archivist; Educator; PhD Candidate at Harvard University

"FAVOURITE PODCAST CONVERSATION – THE 'ALTER REBBE' Recently, on the PODCAST OF JEWISH IDEAS, I had the rare honour and privilege of an in-depth conversation with Professor Robert Alter.

For those who don't know, Robert Alter is a national treasure of the Jewish people. One of the greatest living authorities on Hebrew and Jewish writings, his works have enlightened scholars and laymen alike for over half a century.

In 2018, he finally published his magnum opus – an astonishing translation and commentary of the entire Hebrew Bible. The words usually trotted out on such occasions (‘genius’, ‘monumental’, ‘spectacular’) hardly do justice to Alter’s edition of the bible. When all is said and done, it may well stand as the greatest single achievement within the field of Jewish studies during the twenty-first century.

Above all, he was a WONDERFUL interlocutor – patient, convivial, heartwarming, intriguing, and intellectually dazzling.

I invite you all to listen to this wonderful dialogue. Although unlikely, I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. 😀

#translation #Jewish #bible #podcast #history #religion

https://lnkd.in/eA5mw-BQ"

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"Irving, TX (Feb. 11, 2022) — Robert Alter, professor of the Graduate School and Emeritus Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley, will be the featured speaker of the University of Dallas’ 2022.... Alter, who has taught at Berkeley since 1967, will deliver an address on the topic “The Challenge of Translating the Bible” ....

"Alter’s completed translation of the Hebrew Bible with commentary was published in 2018 in a three-volume set. In 2019, he published The Art of Bible Translation, adding to his other publications over the past three decades, which have included Necessary Angels: Tradition and Modernity in Kafka, Benjamin, and Scholem (1991), Imagined Cities (2005), Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible (2010), and Nabokov and the Real World (2021). Alter has published 28 books in all, including two prize-winning volumes on biblical narrative and poetry and award-winning translations of Genesis and the Five Books of Moses. He has written extensively on the literary aspects of the Bible.

Alter also has written widely on the European novel from the 18th century to the present, on American fiction and on modern Hebrew literature and has devoted book-length studies to Fielding, Stendhal and the self-reflexive tradition of the novel. His books have been translated into 10 different languages.

Alter is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society and the Council of Scholars of the Library of Congress. He is past president of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. He has twice been a Guggenheim fellow and has been a senior fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities as well as a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem and Old Dominion Fellow at Princeton University.

In 2009, Alter received the Robert Kirsch Award from the Los Angeles Times for lifetime contributions to American letters, in 2013 the Charles Homer Haskins Prize for career achievement from the American Council of Learned Societies, and in 2019 an award for literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has honorary degrees from Yale University, Northwestern University, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and three other institutions."]

https://youtu.be/K3eoA3IvEiA. Non-academic review. Easy intro. He reads from Alter’s Introduction. Topics: Heresy of explaining away the Bible. Translation of Seed vs Progeny. (Seed conveys an image of plants growing.) Use of "and". Examples from Genesis 24. Praise for KJB.

Spindel Lecture at Bowdoin University -

February 2021 formal; College level; translation techniques, chant of mourning; polysyllabic words.

Translating the Bible

From a reader comment: "Many enlightening statements, including this one at 1:03:35: “Maybe many of us…tend to assume that as time goes by and culture changes and we all become modern people, things get more sophisticated, things get more subtle, more complicated. And this, it really started even before my bible translation when I started working on biblical narrative, I came to realize especially getting up close sentence by sentence to the ancient narratives that these people were every bit as smart as we are, and they developed subtle and sophisticated ways of representing the world that we scarcely would have imagined.”

Mar 18, 2019, Informal interview with Alter; Over one hour.

"Should the events in the book of Jonah be taken as history? Did they really happen, or is it a parable? And are those even the right questions to be asking? How do we approach translating and interpreting Jonah, or any Old Testament book? To discuss these questions and more, the guys sit down with Dr. Robert Alter."

Rutgers University

March 2012 ( ten years ago)

2020

13 minutes - "Cadence creates a sense of harmony" like the harmony of the Heavens.

American Council of Learned Societies 2013 Prize (47 minutes) Personal recollections; Rape of Tamar; King David; Contrasts to modern novels. "I love teaching literature and I love teaching the Bible." Great literature has eternal appeal. Berkeley's unique atmosphere. Israeli writers as personal friends, like Yehudah Amichi and David Grossman. From Albany NY, played football, ran track, an athlete. Never revises.

University of California

Is it illegitimate to refer to the Bible as a literature and a religious text in both narrative and poetry? Alter: You must understand the literary form of the Bible in order to understand its religious messages.

Biblical scholar Robert Alter argues that the distinctive organizing literary conventions and techniques of the Bible have been lost. He shows how a recovery of these conventions enables us to see more sharply what is going on in the Bible.