The Challenge of Hebrew Bible Love Poetry: A Pleonastic Approach to the Translation of Metaphor—Part 1

Abstract

The Song of Songs communicates both aesthetic and emotional “meaning,” but the poem’s message in historical context should not be overlooked. After arguing that it is possible to translate poetry, this article suggests—as a dynamic equivalent in-text solution—“pleonastic” translation. Within the chosen skopos, this translation style adds pleonasms (synonymous adjectives) to metaphors to convey the most essential associations from the source text’s cognitive environment. Meanwhile, it honours the purposeful polysemy and the emphatic elusiveness of the poetry. Although the use of pleonasms spoils the original brevity of the Hebrew poetry, one can compensate for this by other poetic devices. Part 2 (forthcoming) exemplifies this with a translation of Song 7.2-6 (English 7.1-5) that is true to the poetic nature of the Song of Songs, its emotional expressions, and its register, while also rendering the metaphors intelligibly for today’s reader.

1. Statement of the problem

Within the framework of communication, translation should aim for accuracy (regarding meaning; this includes the original sociocultural and communicative contexts), accessibility or clarity, and naturalness in the target language. ¹ None of these criteria is easily met, but different kinds of Bible translation ² nevertheless attempt to deal with the various challenges involved in translation. ³ It is striking, however, that most of the translations of the Song of Songs are quite uniform, providing a word-by-word translation with a poetry layout. Translations differ, however, when it comes to certain taboos in the target language, such as the words “navel” and “belly” in Song 7.3. Whereas the King James Version translates Song 7.2 (Hebrew 7.3) as prose, “Thy navel is like a round goblet, which wanteth not liquor; thy belly is like an heap of wheat set about with lilies,” the New International Version provides its very similar translation with a poetic layout:

Your navel is a rounded goblet,

that never lacks blended wine.

Your waist is a mound of wheat

encircled by lilies.

The Good News Bible dispenses with explicit body references, substituting them with the word “there”:

A bowl is there,

that never runs out of spiced wine.

A sheaf of wheat is there,

surrounded by lilies.

The New Living Translation substitutes the second female body part with a euphemistic yet suggestive description:

Your navel is perfectly formed

like a goblet filled with mixed wine.

Between your thighs lies a mound of wheat

bordered with lilies.

The Amplified Bible sticks to prose and only substitutes “navel” with “body,” translating, “Your body is like a round goblet in which no mixed wine is wanting. Your abdomen is like a heap of wheat set about with lilies.”

The phrase in question is part of a poem. As The Message acknowledges such in its layout, its translation is quoted here within a broader context: ⁴

Shapely and graceful your sandaled feet,

and queenly your movement—

Your limbs are lithe and elegant,

the work of a master artist.

Your body is a chalice,

wine-filled.

Your skin is silken and tawny

like a field of wheat touched by the breeze.

Your breasts are like fawns,

twins of a gazelle.

Your neck is carved ivory, curved and slender.

Your eyes are wells of light, deep with mystery.

Quintessentially feminine!

Your profile turns all heads,

commanding attention.

The feelings I get when I see the high mountain ranges

—stirrings of desire, longings for the heights—

Remind me of you,

and I’m spoiled for anyone else!

This translation substitutes both (apparently) taboo words in 7.3 (English 7.2) and makes a number of other changes that make the translation read like fine poetry. Despite some explanation, this translation is in danger of ignoring the ancient Israelite context (such as the lotuses, Heshbon, Lebanon, Damascus, Carmel), the upward movement of the description (by using the location-vague terms limbs, body, skin, and profile), and the contextual meaning of the love song for its audiences up to the (process of) canonization of the Song of Songs. It reproduces the Hebrew text but interprets the metaphors with modern associations (those already present in the recipient language). Ernst Wendland argues that important references to the original milieu should be preserved in translation. Although he agrees on the meaningfulness of the figurative language, he does not offer a way to convey the ancient associations evoked by this language, but searches for the balance between poetry and meaning as follows:

A certain amount of literary and cultural contextualization in terms of an appropriate indigenous genre of love (or lyric) poetry will undoubtedly be necessary in order to preserve the dynamic impact and esthetic dimension of the original. But one cannot go too far in this regard so that the biblical situational context is contradicted or important intertextual resonances are lost (e.g., vines/vineyards, cedars, sheep/goats, Lebanon, Mount Carmel). (Wendland 1995, 54) ⁵

Without a proper balance between poetry and comprehensibility, the danger exists that the poetry will be misunderstood as grotesque or hilarious. Indeed, some scholars, such as Athalya Brenner, assume that the description songs are to be read as a parody of the genre. ⁶ Instead of reading the book itself as jest, I would rather refer to Harry Mulisch’s parodic reception of the Song of Song’s description songs to exemplify parody:

Behold, thou art fair, o my bride! Thy eyes are the sun rising above the fisherman cycling palely out of town with their worms. Thy voice is singing of the first birds in the roof gutters. Thy hair shines like oil lying in the street where cars have been parked in the watery early morning light. Thy teeth are as the milk that schoolchildren drink at playtime, your lips a scarlet pool of blood at lunchtime, recalling the lady who has been run over. Thou art all fair, my love! Thy laughter is as the gold leaf of the sirens in the ear of factory girls. Thy breasts glow like the first neon signs, unseen in the falling dusk. Thy navel is the orange fire of the setting sun in the windows of the department stores. Thy belly is hidden like the shop window behind the rattling steel shutters that the jeweler lowers to the ground over his treasures after six o’clock. (Mulisch 1996, 245)

To state the obvious, it is easier to understand this reception as a parody than to assume such intentions for the author(s) or editor(s) of the Song of Songs. Parody comments on an earlier text—for the Mulisch quote this is obvious—and the common late date of the Song of Songs also allows such for our text. Nevertheless, the intention of parody should also become clear somehow—and given the possibility of a more straightforward non-parodic interpretation, I see no reason to read the Song of Songs as a parody. For the Mulisch quote we have enough understanding of the context to sense the mockery from his text by itself, and knowing more about Mulisch’s background confirms our sense of his treatment of biblical texts.

The challenge in translating biblical poems, such as those in the Song of Songs, includes gaining an appreciation of the poetic devices, a good assessment of the register, a plausible interpretation of the text, and awareness of the treatment of taboos. These are all matters of context. Context can be distinguished as sociocultural context (language, culture, society, history, and economics) and communicative context. ⁷ The latter is often explained with the acronym SPEAKING: Setting (physical circumstances), Participants, Ends (goals), Activity (performance and kinds of speech acts), Key (manner, attitude, and atmosphere), Instrumentality (medium or communicative aids), Norms (customs, style, register, etc.), Genre (Wendland 2008, ch. 5; Wilt 2002, 43–58).

Therefore, in what follows I will discuss the context (and skopos) of the translation (style) offered (section 3), and introduce Hebrew poetry (section 4), biblical metaphor (section 5), and the Song of Songs (forthcoming in part 2), meanwhile elaborating on and exemplifying pleonastic translation. However, first we need to address the question of whether poetry can be translated at all.

2. Can poetry be translated?

It is a truism that every translation means a loss (despite its intended gain). This is even more true for the translation of poetry. We can agree with Umberto Eco that the openness of a creative work makes it less translatable (Eco et al. 1992, 140). Open texts, especially poetry, purposefully use polysemy and may even try to be elusive in terms of meaning. ⁸ In translation, polysemy is—at least to some extent—brought to a closure, even if this closure is open for polysemic interpretation. ⁹ However, to what extent should one look for meaning? Susan Sontag, in her classic essay “Against Interpretation” (1964), argues against the hegemony of content/meaning and concludes, “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art” (Sontag 1966, 14, §10). She gives an example of a film that aims for a “pure, untranslatable, sensuous immediacy of some of its images” (Sontag 1966, 9, §6). Therefore, “We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more.” And likewise, commentaries are “to make works of art . . . real to us” (Sontag 1966, 14, §9). Although I agree that a work of art, and thus a poem too, is a reality (in the sense of something to be experienced) beyond its meaning or content, there is a middle way between the sheer denial of meaning and the view that a text can have every sense (Eco et al. 1992, 141). Moreover, as Eco states, “Undoubtedly, the fact that our knowledge is relational and that we cannot separate facts from the language by means of which we express (and construct) them, encourages interpretation” (143). And, if we agree to interpret, we are also encouraged to express this interpretation and to render it into a different context.

Whereas the following sections address translation, skopos, etc., in more detail, the reader should acknowledge the importance of the present argument when it comes to the question of how the imagery of the Song of Songs could be understood by readers today; amidst all the other challenges of translation, this article claims an ancient intelligibility of the metaphors in the Song of Songs, an intelligibility that should be rendered today. Alter observes, “Some of the metaphors . . . may seem a little strange to modern readers. . . . Other figurative comparisons . . . retain all their lovely expressiveness after more than twenty-two centuries” (Alter 2015, 7). In the latter category, Alter cites “your eyes are doves.” Yet, as expressive as the phrase is, the modern reader might benefit from a few more hints at the meaning in the translation in order to sense the reality of this line of poetry more fully (see below).

Ricœur also argues for the openness and polysemy of metaphor, including the possibility of a change of meaning. In this sense, the French title of his book The Rule of Metaphor is so much more telling: La métaphore vive (The living metaphor). ¹⁰ For Klangwisan this puts into perspective an emphasis on communication and relevance theory (see section 3) when dealing with poetry:

The effects created through poetic stylistics are also often more impression-oriented than knowledge-oriented. It produces mutual feeling—mood—rather than cognitive mutuality. This poetry is filled with erotic ambiguities, metaphors, similes and hyperbole. Within Relevance Theory, poetics are treated by the same scheme of comprehension as other communicative forms. Through context the audience understands when a phrase is to be taken literally or if it implies another location for meaning. The audience will select the optimally relevant meaning. (Klangwisan 2014, 21)

Soulen, arguing against grotesque and ludicrous meaning, takes the description songs in the Song of Songs as “a celebration of the joys of life and love and at the same time an invitation to share that joy” (Soulen 1967, 190). However, instead of finding meaning to overcome claims made by a grotesque reading, he seems to turn away from content, much like Sontag, stating that the imagery is to “titillate the sense, not the capacity to reason” (Soulen 1967, 223). Against Soulen, Marcia Falk, reflecting on her own translation, underlines the importance of the specific metaphors chosen: “By reducing the imagery of the wasfs to vague evocations of ineffable feelings, Soulen deprives the relationship between tenor and vehicle of meaning” (Falk 1993, 229). ¹¹ Thus my efforts in this contribution to The Bible Translator harmonize with Falk’s goal:

My goal was to let the images be vivid rather than puzzling pictures of a foreign but accessible culture, in hopes that the imagery of the Song might eventually be demystified for both scholarly and general audiences. (Falk 1993, 231)

3. Filters and skopos

The present article identifies with a tradition of relevance theory ¹² and has in mind a translation whose skopos ¹³ is, on the one hand, to remain true to the poetic nature of the Song of Songs, its emotional expressions (cf. Peetz 2015), and its register, but which, on the other hand, renders the metaphors intelligibly. As observed above, the quoted translations of the Song of Songs, and perhaps those of the description songs in particular, do not serve this purpose. In terms of relevance theory, these translations fail to enlarge the cognitive environment of the reader of the translation to such an extent that the reader can share the associations of the poet(s) and the first (generations of) recipients of the poem. ¹⁴ Thus the translation should not only serve the aesthetic but also aim at comprehensibility, as Nida and Taber call for, ¹⁵ and therefore, add information about assumptions “the ancients” were capable of making in their cognitive environments. ¹⁶ In order to provide this information in the text, “pleonastic translation” adds synonymous adjectives (pleonasms) to metaphorical nouns to convey the most essential associations from the source text’s (the poet’s and first audiences’) cognitive environment. Section 4 and section 1 in part 2 of this article (forthcoming) reflect on communicating the Song of Songs as Hebrew poetry with its aesthetics and emotions in translation. Section 5 further develops “pleonastic translation” and section 2 in part 2 provides a succinct exegetical background for the translation offered, with special attention for the cognitive environment.

The translation that exemplifies the pleonastic approach argued for in this article is written in American English ¹⁷ and aims at the broad public of Bible-reading people, especially those whose needs are served with a rather dynamic equivalent translation that accounts for the primary contemporaneous associations of the ancient metaphors employed in the Song of Songs. It is not unthinkable that the translation offered at the end of part 2 of this article could—mutatis mutandis—find its way into a modern Bible translation that aims at presenting the text as poetry with its ancient cognitive environment (implicature or “mental furnishings”) ¹⁸ made accessible for readers today.

Especially if one makes the choice not to add comments (e.g., in footnotes), the text of the translation has to account for the emotions in the text and render the source intelligibly. Thus, this proposal aims at an in-text solution. As Blackmur states in his 1935 essay on “A Critic’s Job of Work,” “There is no vicar for poetry on earth. Poetry is idiom, a special and fresh saying, and cannot for its life be said otherwise” (reprinted in Blackmur 1957, 349). He applies this bold statement in the first place to the absolute gap between poetry (or painting) and speaking about it—that is, commentary, and, we may add, explanatory footnotes.

4. How to translate biblical (love) poetry?

a. Poetry and the target language

The Song of Songs is a poetic book. This leads immediately to important questions: What is distinctive about Hebrew poetry? How should one translate poetry into poetry? How is love poetry written in the target language? To respond to the last question first: love poetry is available in some form in many languages. For (American) English, love poetry (even when more often sung than recited as a poem) is mainly a designation based on contents, not on formal characteristics within the category of poetry, as many anthologies and other collections of love poetry show. Love, within the present context, can be specified as the love between two lovers (in this case a female and a male lover). Within this context, a generally shared agreement on the terms “love” and “poetry” is assumed.

b. Hebrew poetry

Although the Hebrew Bible editions (e.g., BHS) give certain texts in a poetic layout, this is not a consistently practiced ancient phenomenon. In fact, despite rough agreement on which Hebrew Bible texts are poetry, there is much debate over the hallmarks of Hebrew poetry. Many of the single characteristics discerned are exemplified in prose as well. ¹⁹

Rhythm and parallelism are the most common criteria used to determine a text’s poetic genre. Although there is discussion on how to discern rhythm, ²⁰ the cadence of the Song of Songs’s short lines, in particular, sounds rhythmic. Since Robert Lowth (1753), parallelism has been recognized as a major characteristic of Hebrew poetry. Parallelism denotes the “correspondence” between two (sequential) elements in the text, often pairing lines. This correspondence often involves a heightening of the first statement in the second; sometimes the second line contrasts with the first line, or extends it. ²¹

c. Hebrew (love) poetry in translation

In the UBS series “Helps for Translators,” Lynell Zogbo and Ernst Wendland published a volume on Hebrew poetry in the Bible (Zogbo and Wendland 2000). One of the characteristics of Hebrew poetry they identify, in comparison with prose, is the intensity of figures of speech and tropes (6). They advocate translating poetry into poetry. Concerning love poetry in particular, they state that “a poetic rendering of this book [Song of Songs] will probably be appropriate and appreciated in almost any language” (67). However, they also emphasize that such a choice should be a conscious decision, arguing that—especially for cultures not yet familiar with biblical poetry—sample translations might be used to see how the poetic form is received.

Furthermore, for meeting the challenges of translating poetry, they demand an awareness of word choice, because through unusual words a translation can convey additional meaning and increase the sense of poetry. Hebrew poetry uses words the target language might not have an equivalent for; an additional challenge in the Song of Songs is the many words that appear only once in the Hebrew Bible and whose meanings are sometimes hard to establish. In one example, Zogbo and Wendland get close to the pleonastic approach presented in the next section. They suggest the use of “evocative” terms and so add the word “lush” in their translation of Song 1.14: “You are like flower blossoms from the gardens of lush En-Gedi” (Zogbo and Wendland 2000, 125). ²² They further draw attention to the formal equivalent (concordant) translation of key terms and call for creativity in translating poetry and being open to the possibility of making a freer translation (121–37), such as The Message above. Finally, in general about Hebrew poetry, they state, “The essential content and function of the original text must be preserved” (137).

Wendland also expressed this double concern in his article about the Song of Songs; after a call for a lyric style and his acknowledgement that a balance must be struck, he writes,

Furthermore, there should be an effort to avoid a naturalistic, overly sexual explication, a rendering that might well turn out to sound pornographic, hence completely unacceptable to those for whom the translation is intended. . . . As a broad working policy then it would perhaps be best to adopt a relatively literal approach throughout and to explicate (e.g., by means of paraphrase, qualifiers, or cultural substitutes) only those figures that refer to love in more general terms or those that would turn out misleading and misunderstood in the language of translation. (Wendland 1995, 54–55)

But if specific figures of speech sound strange or can be misunderstood easily for other reasons, the translation needs to make more effort to bring across the meaning of the poetry and its metaphors intelligibly. Wendland continues: “Much of the poem’s message lies in the literary beauty and evocative power of its language in the original Hebrew” (Wendland 1995, 56). Despite such programmatic statements, he does not make enough effort to ground this “evocative power of its language” in something other than the poem’s “literary beauty.” Even when Wendland argues that the Song of Songs needs to be made more accessible and comprehensible, the only example he provides of this is the one quoted about En-Gedi. In fact, it is only the present article that appears to put this plea into practice. Explication is not only needed where a literal translation could be misleading; explication should also evoke a greater knowledge of the cognitive environment, thus guiding the reader of the translation in understanding what is often not understood at all. “The less the writer [or translator] assumes that the reader has access to [in terms of background knowledge], the more he or she will provide in the way of explanation and detail” (Baker 2011, 259).

As seen in the introductory examples, the Song of Songs is often regarded as lyrical poetry, while attention to the “essential content” of its parts is lacking.

In reading and appreciating the Song of Songs we should not look for information about or a representation of God’s relationship to Israel (it is not theology), or a story with a plot and real characters (it is not a narrative), or explicit reflection on the sources and nature of love (it is not philosophy). Rather, to appreciate fully the Song of Songs requires that one pay close attention to its poetic art, including the structure of both individual lines and larger poems, word choice, sound play, metaphor, tone, and voice. Some of these elements, most especially sound play, are less obvious or even unavailable in translation, but one can still get a very strong sense of how the Song of Songs works as poetry even in translation. (Linafelt 2009, 205)

This quotation, too, demonstrates that the poetic art of the Song of Songs is more important for many than its content. ²³ Indeed, it is wonderful poetry, but with a communicative purpose as built up in its parts. Whatever the priority, the content is indispensable.

The Song’s profuse metaphors are not just artistic flourishes that challenge the commentator and trigger the imaginations of its readers. Like everything else in the Song, metaphor is employed in the service of the poet’s vision of love as mutual desire and gratification, as strong as death, as transforming the world. (Exum 2005, 19)

This section has dealt with the translation of poetry. Although the Song of Songs is understood as song, the insights offered below do not deal with musical composition. In this sense, the present article does not offer more than a few guidelines for a translation of the “Poem of Poems.” However, a lyrical, rhythmic translation might invite musicians and composers to add their skills and set such a translation to music.

5. How to translate biblical metaphors?

a. General observations

A metaphor is a picturing identification; it pictures one thing as another and uses this identification to evoke meaning. The associated meanings are evoked in the interplay between the two things identified. ²⁴ For instance, עיניך יונים (‘enayikh yonim “your eyes ²⁵ are doves”) ²⁶ implies, along with other, less compelling associations, an identification of the eyes with messenger birds, especially messengers of love. This way they are also associated with the love goddess—at least in the ancient Near East at large; whatever her role in ancient Israel, the poetry seems to imply that the association of the dove as a messenger of love was (still) understood. In the recipient language other associations, such as colour, might be stronger (Keel 1984, 52–63).

When translating this particular metaphor one could, for instance, opt for: ²⁷

• A simile: “your eyes are like doves, telling me how much you love me.” This restricts the metaphor to one ground of comparison. ²⁸

• Demetaphorization: “with your eyes you tell me how much you love me.” Although it may sound romantic, it loses the figure of speech, without compensation. “Following this path [erasing metaphor] we can translate the Bible into a language which is more abstract and less expressive, but we will not reach the original meaning” (Alonso Schökel 1988, 100).

• A comparable metaphor in the target language (transculturation): “Your glances are messengers of love!” (Keel 1994, 71). This example is also more abstract. When one makes a choice for a metaphor specific to the recipient culture, the metaphor is often anachronistic and, although intelligible, it may sound funny, such as, “your eyes are a Valentine’s Day card.”

These observations mainly apply to single verses. When the biblical text uses symbols and conceptual metaphors (which are more pervasive and not restricted to one or two verses), such as the lamb in the New Testament or the so-called “marriage metaphor” in the Hebrew Bible, it is more problematic if the translator needs to demetaphorize these because, for example, the receiving culture does not have sheep (cf. Kroneman 2004). One also has to be aware of the canonical interconnections which may be lost when the different verses with the marriage metaphor are treated differently.

As the translation of poetry often needs some kind of compensation and the poetry as target text may have its own requirements, the translation of poetry is not simply a matter of translating individual verses, but is a task that must attend to the entirety of the composition. The possible lack of brevity in an English translation (compared to the more terse Hebrew original) could be compensated for in other ways ²⁹ —for example, by rhyme, (extra) alliteration, assonance, etc., because the translation of poetry, in particular, brings a criterion of aesthetics into play. ³⁰

b. Pleonastic approach, exemplified with the description songs

In order to employ Song 7.2-6 as an example in this subsection, this paragraph starts with a brief introduction (see further part 2, section 1). Song of Songs 7.2-6 is the last of three “description songs” in the book (after 4.1-5 and 5.10-16), a genre that has been compared with the Arabic wasf. ³¹ It describes a body, especially the bodies of lovers, both female and male. Although it might seem obvious that the description is metaphorical, some exegetes have taken a literal approach to absurd lengths, ³² or have compared it with Egyptian plastic art (Gerleman 1962; cf. Gerleman 1965). ³³ Others have ignored the straightforward sense of the text and have emphasized its playfulness (Segal 1962, 480–81) or the emotion behind it, ³⁴ or have thought the descriptions to be riddles encoding purity, attraction, and sensuality (Boman 1968, 62–69). Indeed, the descriptions convey emotion and desire, but they are also to be understood from their lexical expression. A flattened translation “you are so beautiful [sigh]” ³⁵ does not do justice to the source text (a comparison with the original would make the translation sound a little prudish). Most commentators of the last several decades agree that the descriptions are metaphors that convey (certain) meaning(s). The present article draws on the work of Othmar Keel’s student Urs Winter for the hermeneutical key to understanding the description songs. The female is described ambivalently by the approaching male, who sees her as “military-aggressive” and “erotic-attractive” (Winter 1987, 470). ³⁶ These characteristics become clear when the imagery is understood in combination with the dynamic meanings of the body parts (Winter 1987, 662). ³⁷ Understood in this way, the description songs make sense, fit their literary setting, and can be translated intelligibly. Therefore, the thesis that the description songs are a parody becomes superfluous.

The poetry, with its nominal sentences, is characterized by brevity, as discussed above. It is very hard to keep this feature in a translation that wants to preserve something of the metaphors’ meanings. If the brevity is to be kept, the only way to communicate the primary contemporaneous associations of these metaphors would be “out-of-text” solutions, such as footnotes. ³⁸ This would distract from the aesthetics and emotions distinctive to the poetry. Still, an in-text solution does not allow everything to be explained, as the translation should preserve the cohesion, coherence, and to some extent the brevity of the texts by restricting itself to the most relevant clarifications (cf. Baker 2011, 190–273).

If a metaphor is translated as a simile, the meaning of the metaphor is reduced to one ground of comparison (as a closure of the polysemy). This spoils the open-endedness of association and meaning. As it can be argued that one or two meanings are dominant implications within the spectrum of open-endedness, a “pleonastic translation” is the best solution, explicating the dominant implications in the source text with adjectives and therefore avoiding closing off the polysemy. Thus, the implications become explicit in the target language, but without being restricted through similes with a “like” formula; the sense of metaphorical open-endedness should remain. A pleonastic approach as an “in-text” solution allows the original poetry to be received as intelligible poetry in the target language without an analytical manual (even if provided as expository notes) for those who want to understand the meaning of these poems. As an aside, it could be argued that providing more in-depth background is the proper role of commentaries; however, in the end, a good translation is the final product of proper exegesis and therefore reflects the exegesis in a nutshell.

The description song in Song 7 is a toe-to-top description of a body. ³⁹ A question raised above is whether the body parts should be understood as the members of a biological body or rather in their “dynamics” (body part function or association), whether עיניך “your eyes” should be rather translated “your looks” or “your glances.” By adding adjectives (or using a particular verb, such as “shine”), this sense is evoked without moving away from the basic description of a body. ⁴⁰ But depending on the skopos, one could decide otherwise.

Picking up the example of “your eyes doves,” the present pleonastic approach could lead to the translation “your sparkling eyes are love-delivering doves.” The eyes, like other body parts, play a role in the ideal of beauty in ancient Israel and the ancient Near East (cf. Gansell 2014). A description of the body can continue in an even more explicit expression of desire, such as in Song 7.7-10 in comparison with 7.2-6.

Finally, geographical references form a special challenge when there is a large cultural-historical gap between source text and audience of the translation. Within a historical narrative, one is to keep the place names as the geographical framework of the story. For metaphors using place names, the question concerns the familiarity of the terms and their associations. Do the references make sense for the target audience? If not, the translation might provide some adjectives for the place names as well, as exemplified with Zogbo and Wendland’s translation of Song 1.14 above. ⁴¹

In part 2 of this discussion (forthcoming in TBT), I will exemplify the pleonastic approach introduced here with an exegesis and translation of Song 7.2-6 (English 7.1-5).