Saturday, August 12, 1995
SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS
The Bible’s Sensuous Song
A conversation with Chana Bloch
“The Song of Songs” is the world’s oldest love poem and one of its most controversial.
Long attributed to King Solomon and interpreted as his description of God’s love for the people of Israel, it has been the subject of countless commentaries and interpretations. It has been praised for teaching chastity and denounced as lewd and immoral. For 2,000 years, translators have played down its frank sensuality.
But no more.
An exuberant new translation of “The Song of Songs” (Random House, $27.50) celebrates the sexual awakening of a young woman and the intoxicating experience of first love: “I rose to open to my love, my fingers wet with myrrh, sweet flowing myrrh, on the doorbolt.” The only “lesson” of this “song” is that love is the greatest power on earth and the sweetest of all human pleasures.
This radical re-interpretation is the outcome of three years’ labor by Ariel Bloch, a Semitic linguist at the University of California, Berkeley, and Chana Bloch, a poet, translator and English professor at Mills College in Oakland. Their translation has been hailed by academics for its precise, meticulous scholarship and by poets for its lyrical purity and voluptuous sensibility.
“We approached the text without preconceptions, only to discover that we were coming up with something quite different from other translations and substantially closer to the Hebrew,” claims Chana (pronounced Hannah) Bloch.
The song presents difficult problems to the modern translator, in part because of the high number of words that occur only once or twice elsewhere in the Bible. In almost all previous translations, for example, the Hebrew word, sammah, has been translated as “veil.” Here, the word is shown to mean “hair.”
“(That) makes an enormous difference,” explains Chana. “This poem praises the lovers’ bodies. It wouldn’t have made sense if the young woman walked around with a veil. No, it’s her wild, abundant, sexy hair.”
It is ironic that after 25 years of marriage the Blochs separated upon completing the translation of this love poem. But they speak of their collaboration with real pleasure. They both live in the Bay Area.
Following is an edited transcript of an interview with Chana Bloch.
Q It seems incredible that this was ever read as a religious poem.
A The nature of symbolic language is that it lends itself to a number of readings. But, yes, it’s astonishing that for almost 2,000 years it was read as a spiritual poem.
It was read by the rabbis as a love poem between God and the Land of Israel. The church fathers read it as a love song between Christ and the church. In the Middle Ages, it was read as a poem about the Virgin Mary; it was actually regarded as a poem in praise of virginity and chastity, believe it or not, and was very popular in monasteries.
At a time when people saw a split between body and soul, they thought they were looking past the literal meaning to reach the soul of the poem. But a lot of their readings seem very peculiar today. For example, the young woman’s breasts were read symbolically as Moses and Aaron. The whole poem was read in this way; every part of it was given a spiritual interpretation.
Today, I don’t think people see a split between body and soul; they realize both are the same thing. So it’s possible for us to read the poem as it was almost certainly originally intended.
Q So what is it doing in the Bible?
A People are very surprised to discover an erotic love poem in the Old Testament, but I think that’s because they assume the Bible is all of one piece and that it’s pious in every part. Neither of those is true. The Bible is an anthology, written over more than a millennium, and not all of the books are pious. Job and Ecclesiastes don’t meet the test of piety.
We think this book might have been included in the canon for two reasons: It was ascribed or thought to have been written by King Solomon, one of the great kings of Israel. And it was understood, in a spiritual sense, as a love poem between God and the people of Israel.
Q Was the author a woman?
A That’s a major question. We think it’s conceivable, because women are associated with song and poetry in the Bible. In the Old Testament, women are the ones who sing victory songs to greet returning warriors and dirges at funerals. Women were also court singers. Yes, this is a poem which very much reflects a woman’s sensibility. But was Juliet created by a woman? Or Anna Karenina?
This is a poem that celebrates youth, and I’m quite certain it was not written by a young person. No, no, I’m willing to bet the author was older, looking back. I am a mother of two teen-age boys, and I know there is no way they could write about love like that.
Q This is the one book in the Bible that seems like it was written for women. It’s sympathetic, even loving, to women.
A We were attracted to the song because we found it the most beautiful book in the Bible and one of the greatest love poems ever written. Only when we began to work on it did we discover how central the woman is. This was not something I knew when I started out, and I discovered it with great delight.
Of all the women in the Bible, she seems the most like Juliet. She is about Juliet’s age, which is just past puberty. She’s just come into her own as a woman; she has just discovered her own sexuality; and, like Juliet, she takes the initiative in their relationship. She says at one point to her lover: “I awakened you.”
The imagery of spring throughout the poem also reflects the youthfulness of the lovers. There is a quality of intensity and hyperbole that one associates with young people. These are young people discovering love for the first time. That’s what gives the poem its amazing freshness.
Q The song is completely different from any other book in the Bible, isn’t it?
A Yes, no morals are drawn, no prophecies are made. There are no theological concerns, no hints of nationalism. And “God” is never mentioned.
Copyright 1995 San Jose Mercury News
