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Hebrew Syntactic Inversions and their Literary Equivalence in English: Robert Alter’s Translations of Genesis and 1 and 2 Samuel

Van der Parrastraat 22, 2595 RB Den Haag, The Netherlands

This article focuses on syntactic inversions in the Hebrew of Genesis and 1 and 2 Samuel. These can be explained in terms of contrastive focus or topical referents (before the verb), and most salient information represented by the verb (when the verb occurs at the end of the sentence). Second, it analyses the extent to which Robert Alter has expressed the functions of these syntactic inversions in literary language (literary language being his translational norm). This study concludes that when the preverbal element is not under contrastive focus but represents a topical referent, this information is not newer than what is mentioned in the rest of the sentence and there are no alternatives in the context to rule out. It allows the most prominent information to come at the end of the sentence. So, when it is a topical referent (or spatial/temporal basis) that has been put in first position in the Hebrew, maintaining such syntactic inversions in an English translation wrongly suggests focus on the fronted element. The translator should render the respective ways of expressing contrastive focus and of referring to a topical referent in Hebrew into forms of the receptor language which closely correspond in function and literary effect.

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