The gospel according to Stephen Mitchell, the preeminent translator
of ourtime, is sometimes dangerous, often shocking-and always
personal.
The breadth of his knowledge is astonishing--sprawling across
centuries and cultures. More than a messenger, Stephen Mitchell is a
magician who brings our greatest spiritual teachers to life. He reads
French, Greek, Latin, German, and Hebrew. His latest translation,
Genesis, was inspired by Bill Moyers's invitation to participate in the
10-part PBS series Genesis: A Living Conversation, in which noted writers
and scholars discuss the meanings that the stories of Genesis have for us
today.
The other day, we had a delightful animated lunch with Mitchell. In
essence, we wanted to know what this 53-year-old man had learned from
translating the classics.
PT: You've recreated stories about the most primordial issues of
life: creation, temptation, compassion, betrayal. How do we know when
we're reading a good translation?
SM: Samuel Johnson said that a good translation reads like a great
piece of literature in the language into which it's been translated. It
has to capture the spirit of the original. The center of anything
genuine--from translation to marriage to our spiritual life--is intimacy.
Old Chinese stories will say of an enlightened master, "And then he
became intimate." Not intimate with anything, just intimate. And that's
what it's like for me to be dwelling with these gorgeous presences. I
literally fall in love [with my subjects], from Jesus to Job to the poet
Rilke. When I translate, I find tone as important as content. And in the
stories of Genesis, it was a delight to recreate the gritty, powerful
music of the original Hebrew.
PT: How old are these stories?
SM: Nobody really knows.
They were composed, some of them from ancient folk material, by a
number of different writers. Many of them are much older than the date
they were written down, because for centuries they were preserved orally
Some of them parallel stories from other cultures that appeared thousands
of years earlier, like the story of a great flood. And yet oral
traditions tend to be very conservative. Often holy texts are memorized
from childhood on. For instance, the traditional test for a 13-year-old
student of the Talmud was this: take a pin and stick it through one word
on one page and tell what word the pin went through on the next twenty
pages. That meant the student had to know the text photographically as
well as by heart.
PT: Some of the stories in Genesis are very disturbing.
SM: Even the greatest stories of Homer don't plumb the same depths
as the weird and dark stories of Genesis. Yet they're marvelous because
they're like mirrors. Take the story of Adam and Eve and the serpent.
When I read this aloud to a group of people, I can almost see flames
coming out of women's ears when Eve eats the apple and Adam denounces
her. It's really a very dangerous little story--like a Kafka
parable--where men blame women for all the miseries of humanity And
that's how it's been interpreted by both Jews and Christians.
PT: So what's really going on?
SM: The story is much more complex. The serpent is a symbol of
wisdom in many cultures, because it sheds its skin and thus is born
again. In India, the serpent represents the energy stored at the base of
the spine, known as kundalini. When this energy rises it can be a
potentially great and painful awakening of consciousness. So it's
interesting that the antagonist in the story takes the form of a serpent,
and that the serpent tells the truth.
Then you have a God who plants a forbidden tree right in the middle
of the garden, like a parent placing a cookie jar in front of children.
And he says, "If you eat from this tree, you'll die." But that's a lie.
Adam and Eve don't die.
PT: So God is bullshitting.
SM: He's not telling the truth.
PT: In a way, he lies to Abraham, too.
SM: People have been trying to rationalize God's lies for thousands
of years. These stories are very powerful and are at the root of our
culture. But you have to realize that the God of Genesis is a human
creation, not the God at the center of the universe. Whenever God is
presented as a character, that presentation is partial, and therefore
false. Ultimately, God is not a character in a story. God is the whole
story.
PT: In your introduction to Genesis, you draw a fascinating and
even shocking parallel between the suffering of Buddha and that of
Abraham. God appears to Abraham and tells him to leave his family and
murder his child. The Buddha-to-be is also faced with a heartbreaking
choice: stay with his wife and son, or go off and seek
enlightenment.
SM: The story of Abraham is darker and has such transcendent power.
It deals with the most extreme suffering possible for a human. Imagine
the emotions that come with having to murder a beloved child. On the
surface, it's a very authoritarian story. But once you dig deeper you see
it depicts the hardest thing that anyone following any spiritual practice
can do--let go of attachments. Both the Buddha and Abraham do. In
Abraham's case, he lets go to the point where he can withstand even the
most unthinkable horror.
PT: You write that it's possible to be "so fluid and centered, so
filled with trust in the intelligence of the universe, that even horror
can pass through us and eventually be transformed into light." Have you
experienced that kind of suffering and transcendence yourself?
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