Volume 7, Number 7 · November 3, 1966
The Art of Agnon
By John Gross
Two Tales
by S.Y. Agnon, translated by Walter Lever
Schocken, 240 pp., $4.95
Agnon is a commanding figure, as gifted and eloquent as his admirers claim. Or so I would judge from what I know of his work in English. One has to enter the face-saving proviso much earlier in his case than one normally would with a novelist encountered only in translation, partly because he writes with the intensity and idiomatic richness of a poet, partly on account of his quasi-religious attitude towards Hebrew. No doubt the two factors overlap, since to write authentic poetry is by definition to reverence the language you happen to use. When Paul Valéry celebrates the 'Honneur des Hommes, Saint LANGAGE,' one can reasonably assume that he is thinking in the first place of French, not of some hypothetical lingua franca. Still, it does make a big difference that Agnon's 'saint langage' should be one which until fairly recently was regarded by the bulk of those who understood it as quite literally lashon hakodesh, the holy tongue. He is a highly civilized man, incapable of boorish flag-wagging chauvinism, but he has plainly inherited a sense of sacred obligation about the use of Hebrew. To an unusual degree, the medium is the message, and presumably the most a translation can do is give the reader some idea of how much he is missing.
Review, 1871 words
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