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In Search of Ovidian Hebrew: A Philological Study of a Lesser Known Modern Hebrew Translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses

Summary

This philological study looks at Yehoshua Friedman (1885–1934), who in the late 1920s produced the first substantial rendering of Ovid's Metamorphoses into modern Hebrew. The work is little read today. The author first places Friedman in the history of Hebrew's revival as a spoken language and of Jewish engagement with the Latin classics. He then examines the character and metre of the verse. The core of the paper is a close linguistic and stylistic reading of three passages from the Apollo and Daphne episode, set against the Latin original. The main claim is that Friedman did not simply reuse a ready-made biblical register. He built a new Ovidian idiom on a biblical foundation and saved rarer biblical features for moments he wanted to stress. He also drew on medieval Hebrew wordplay and scriptural allusion. The paper argues that this makes the translation an inventive and lasting contribution, and evidence that early neo-Hebrew literature could match the Western canon.

Key points

  • The case studies cover Met. I, 456–465, 481–482 and 545–552. The Latin is cited from Tarrant's 2004 Oxford Classical Texts edition.
  • Some biblical features are Friedman's normal style: pronominal suffixes attached to nouns and verbs, and a loose handling of verb tenses. Others appear only sparingly as deliberate highlights, namely V-S-O order, pausal forms and consecutive tenses.
  • Friedman uses pausal forms to mark dramatic or emotional exchanges. He lengthens some lines to fit biblical parallelism, notably vv. 463–464, and occasionally uses inner rhyme that mirrors Latin assonance.
  • Two examples of his inventiveness:
    • He renders the elusive Latin numen with an image of the gods' hand resting on rivers.
    • He quotes Jeremiah at the moment of Daphne's transformation.
  • An early predecessor was Shabtai Marini of Padua, who rendered the Daphne tale into Hebrew from Anguillaria's 1561 Italian version.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Separating a translator's default stylistic features from rare, marked ones shows that a feature's rarity in a given text is itself a signal of emphasis. — For Mova (frames): Measure each construction's baseline frequency in a text, then flag unusual word order or archaic forms as candidate emphasis or speech-act cues in prag.
  • I2. An untranslatable abstract term (numen) is carried over as a concrete descriptive image rather than a single dictionary equivalent. — For Mova (back): When the meta-world holds a concept with no target-language lexeme, generation can build a descriptive phrase from the concept's properties instead of failing or forcing a near-synonym.
  • I3. The translator expands a line to make room for a structural device (parallelism), accepting length changes in exchange for preserved effect. — For Mova (back): The text → graph → text compressor could allow controlled expansion when a rhetorical structure recorded in the graph needs extra slots to be expressed.
  • I4. Placing a well-known scriptural quotation at a key event links two textual worlds, so recognising it requires knowledge of the source canon. — For Mova (world): Add a small index of canonical phrases (e.g., biblical or proverbial) to compiled knowledge so that allusions in fables and tales can be detected and explained.
  • I5. Arguments rest on a few carefully chosen passages read word by word against the original, rather than broad sampling. — For Mova (learn): Keep a tiny, hand-annotated set of aligned passages as an explainable sanity check alongside large silver-data evaluations.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.14712/24646830.2022.11

@inproceedings{borusek2022search,
  title = {{In Search of Ovidian Hebrew: A Philological Study of a Lesser Known Modern Hebrew Translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses}},
  author = {Borýsek, Martin},
  booktitle = {Acta Universitatis Carolinae Philologica 2021},
  year = {2022},
  doi = {10.14712/24646830.2022.11},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.14712/24646830.2022.11}
}

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