Brief introduction and aphoristic epilogue aside, this learned and important book contains three large sections: I: Problems and Parables, II: History: The Bible as Paradigm of Translation, and III. Theory (the subject's history, from the Greeks out, then a longish explication of Benjamin's "Translator's Task...," and, i.a., semiotics a laJakobson, Barthes, Eco, Riffaterre, and Derrida, among others). The title adverts to translation's formal and aesthetic aspects, such as prosody, translatability, fidelity and methodology, equivalence and difference, diction, and syntax (6). Barnstone (= B.) has authored literary studies of ecstacy, Biblical apocrypha, and of Sappho and Greek poetry, as well as translations from Greek, Spanish, and Chinese. In this monography, B. writes engagingly of the "enigma of originality," the "stigma of [mere] translation," and of the Renaissance translator as "radical artist and intellectual, bringing in and ordering the past, altering national traditions of writing and thought" (11, 13). For ready reference, readers may want to glance at "Fifteen Quick Looks at the Philosophy of Literalism" (30-32), "Thirteen Quick Looks at Sacred Originals" (81-82); "Eighteen Quick Looks at the Translator's Dictionaries, or A Guide to Guides of Truth and Error" (114-116), and "An ABC of Translating Poetry" (265-271). * * * Part One (3-131) is something of a user-unfriendly hodgepodge, bounding by moments from pithy insight to self-indulgent though lyrical rant, which often infuriates with its uselessness, e.g., "Translation begins with rapture" and "Horace thought literalists were slaves, Cicero called them fools. Quintilian said to the translator, invent" (32); or, the "translator is a courier of God...an angel who [serves] others as a go-between" (126-127). B. covers what he calls the "three fundamental areas of translation theory and practice: register, structure, and authorship" (25). In the first area he considers literalism, middle ground, and license; under structure come concerns like the degree of source text in the translation; with authorship, or dominant voice, he categorizes retaining the target language voice or yielding to the voice of the translator. In defense of meaningful communication in translation and of textual re-creation in another language, B. cites perhaps the most amusing and unforgettable example in the book--the Eskimo Bible phrase "Seal of God" for "Lamb of God" ("there are no lambs trotting on the ice meadows of the Arctic where the Eskimos live" (41). Let me try to pick out a few highlights from the remainder of the first part. Quoting Nabokov on the subject of untranslatability, B. scores with his assertion that "some degree of translatability, whatever the languages and problems, is always possible" (49). As if a preview of Part Two, B. provides a special study of one particular biblical work in translation, a Psalter --the Bay Psalm Book--the first American book to be printed (Cambridge, Massachusetts, dating from 1620), which promotes "intralingual rewording" rather than interlingual translation (57). In another sub-section (62-83), the manipulative transformation of the Jewish messiah into the Christian figure of Christ is studied, along with the early development of the Hebrew texts for the Old Testament, then Aramaic (oral) background, and early Greek texts of the New Testament. Translation, asserts B., is a "double art": Since no art, except the art of being God, is entirely self-sufficient and self-created, art depends on a context, which we call source, background, canon, and most commonly, tradition. The artist translates that source--intralingually, interlingually, or inter- semiotically (to use Jakobson's essential description)--from [sic, i.e., into?] his own or her own language, another language, or another sign system (word into song, novel into film, and so on). This is the double art. (88) Sardonic remarks about the "bad odor" of translators and translations--they are not "original" or "creative" because they depend on a source--recall the low status granted by certain ungrateful and obtuse contemporary critics--like "literalist thugs" or "translation police" (122)--to the 12th century French romancers who adapted classical Latin texts into a fledgling Anglo- Norman narrative form. Surely, Arthurian romancer Chrétien de Troyes' eminence and appeal would be lessened if we had to hand his directly-related source materials, whether Celtic, Latin, or oral. B. writes: Given the bad atmosphere over the precinct of translation, there is an anxiety-ridden conflict between originality and translation in which the paternal source of a translation must be killed or at least concealed in order to grant the translated child the dignity of originality. Hence the aim of the child is self-disguisement so that the translated self can pass as self-created and original, with minimal reference to tradition and its modeling force. The source should be buried. If the burial is complete, with nothing showing, then the shadow of translation is forgotten. Bloom's central thesis of anxiety of influence and his maps of misreading apply to every aspect of the translation syndrome of denial. (95) It seems the French medieval romancers fit in well here. The anonymous poet of the Roman d'Eneas (ca. 1160) virtually buries his source and, for all intents and purposes, creates a brand new narrative, especially when viewed against the work's ideological or colonializing background. He wants his text to be a "Story of Aeneas," never more than that. It will become clear that he uses modern-day strategies for his interpretive adaptation from the Latin. Once we understand his aesthetic goal--to create a 12th c. summa of secular Classical tradition and learning, a fusion of Virgil, Ovid, and especially Servius' commentary (among others), we begin to sense a vindication in all that he does with Virgil's epic text. * * * B. artfully passes in review (96 et ss.) adaptations from French and Italian sources by Chaucer, imitations of Sappho by Catullus, free rendering of Chinese poetry by Ezra Pound, among others, then concludes that good translation avoids reproduction: "...the commercial copier receives no praise or individual fame.... There is never replication, synonymy, nor re- creation without difference" (106). A section on translation errors, mistakes, and howlers leads B. to argue that "infidelity to quality" is "the most grievous error" among "petty language crimes" (123). Indeed, Johann von Herder defends the bold re-creator/adaptor's license to experiment artistically, which may shock those "censors of the raised eyebrow" (122). * * * Part Two (135-216) starts at the Tower of Babel allegory and traces back elements of the Old Testament, recalling analogues from Egyptian and Sumerian myths. The prolix chapter on the Hebrew Bible classifies the Torah (aka, Pentateuch in Greek), its four recensions or scribes, the Old Palestinian Targum, the Jerusalem Targum, and the Babylonian Targum. B. wants to persuade us here that ...the notion of translation by interpretation may appear to be radical, but it is actually perfectly normal and has always occurred when literature falls under the shadow of doctrine and dogma. In fact, interpretative annotation always has a strategy of translation--of altering surface meaning into the annotator's ideology. (163) The Greek Septuagint dictates fifteen pages of closely argued detail, the essence of which is its romantic apocryphal story, told by Josephus, Philo, and Aristeas: The name...meaning seventy (often written LXX), refers to the seventy-two scholars who, according to tradition, by order of Ptolemy II Philadelphus undertook the translation on the island of Pharos in the port of Alexandria in the third century B.C. By divine coincidence the translation was completed in seventy-two days. (166) Indeed, it is the Letter of Aristeas (second century B.C.) that B. claims marks the beginnings of translation theory's written history. Another far-reaching inquiry concerns the role of the classically-trained St. Jerome in writing/adapting the famous Vulgate Bible attributed to him. B. then leaps and lingers across Bible history, commentary, and hermeneutics, from St. Augustine to Caedmon, painting then with broad strokes the development of vernacular versions (preference is given to numerous English versions). One would have liked more annotation on such key texts as the late-twelfth and early thirteenth century Old French Bible, on the early Spanish Bibles, and on such figures as John Wyclif, Etienne Dolet, and William Tyndale. (Not to mention the need for more on the powerful historical/political significance of the vernacular in general, a real omission here.) Like that of Jerome, the celebrated King James version is a "revision of revisions," prepared not by seventy-two but this time by forty-seven scholars working at Oxford, Cambridge, and Westminster--to supersede the Calvinist Geneva Bible (used by Shakespeare) (211-215). In its preface, one reads "'Translation is that openeth the window, to let in the light.'" (216) * * * B. addresses both the linguistic and the philosophical theories of translation in Part Three, which covers theory. In his sketch of translation theory before the twentieth century, it becomes apparent that a) B. does not seem to realize Virgil imitated both of Homer's epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey for his Roman version; b) the medieval thinker Jean Scot Eriugena, among several others knew Greek quite well, and c) Augustine's sign theory did indeed have an "...impact on medieval letters" (221). He builds his case for what might be called reification of Nachleben (my paraphrase of Benjamin) by referring to the Lattimore, Fitzgerald, and Fagles versions of Homer, contending that the unfinished or inconstant or indefinite nature of translation results in a need to redo it, to reread and re-create, [which] leads paradoxically not only to its Survival but to what... Walter Benjamin calls the eternal afterlife of a work of art through translation. (231) Benjamin's classic essay, Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers(first translated in 1969) sets itself "the messianic purpose of finding through translation the universal language and the memory of God." (242) Benjamin believed pure and perfect speech could be uncovered by humans, a reine Sprache, but such a Kabbalistic, paradoxical, or even quizzical game suggests that a translation "fulfills an original work's life"--it is but a stage in the continued vitality of the original work (243). The German thinker sees language as a heap of fragments of a broken vessel which, reassembled in a work of art or a translation, reveal inner Platonic integrity and, one might say in today's technological jargon, synergy. But I can think of at least two major Old French exceptions to Benjamin's corollary, that once a work is translated "it can no longer be displaced by a secondary rendering" (246), namely Benoît de Sainte-Maure's Old French Troy romance and the Ovide moralisé, each of which enjoyed a long and glorious fate at the hands of later adapters and re-interpreters. It is a pleasure to observe (and report on) B.'s conclusion that expectations of perfect reproduction are tantamount to totalitarian wet dreams; and that the "interpreting creator" (261-262) will discover, through imaginative re-creation, that alchemy of the word and offer his/her culture an "original gift." * * * If self-preservation and the propagation of our species comprise primary biological directives for human beings, then perhaps their obverse encompasses the maintenance of political empires and the destruction of that very bios we are presumably destined to preserve--or at least husband, as Genesis puts it. Near the top of such hierarchies sit translation and interpretation. If the doctor does not know exactly how many cc's of medication to inject, or when, or at what intervals, the patient may die--all because a translator/interpreter missed a negative, slipped up in typing the numbers, or misconstrued a simple term, like "blood pressure." Correct and literal translation may save a life--as I have learned from personal experience. On the other hand, outside of the scientific arena, some humans like to think great works of poetry or literature get transposed into pretty English by magic. For a confirmation of this observation, the reader may take a look at the new CD-ROM claiming to contain the "Library of the Future," or the so-called Gutenberg Project of on-line "English language texts." The translator's "out of copyright" name is nowhere or rarely mentioned, as if Sophocles or Plato or Dante or Cervantes composed their masterpieces in English. In a work as accomplished and with a bibliography as complete as the one provided, it is a little surprising to find some items overlooked, like Douglas Robinson's brilliant Translator's Turn, which merits no attention; it is listed in the bibliography but its late appearance (1991) may explain the lacuna. For more in-depth coverage of the medieval Bible story, one may refer to this site: BMR 95.5.13 presented a review of Margaret Gibson's much anticipated Bible in the Latin West. Mona Baker has written recently that she is editing a bibliography of translation studies to appear in the European Bibliography of Resources for English Studies (EBRES), in CD-ROM and floppy disk format, among 40,000 key items "on every aspect of English Studies" (TRANSLAT subscribers' bulletin board, 13 April 1995). Though B.'s original, intelligent, and well-written plea on behalf of creative translators /interpreters takes a few chatty and sprightly twists and turns, it nevertheless targets the crucial role of his subject, for without the artistic primacy owed to enlightened translation and interpretation, humans will forever remain scatterlings from Babel's murky tower.