Tuesday, December 16, 2003

THE FIRST VOLUME OF A NEW TRANSLATION OF THE ZOHAR has been published:

Daniel C. Matt (translator), The Zohar: Pritzker Edition, Vol. 1


You can read a San Francisco Chronicle review by a proud nonspecialist here:

David Kipen, "Translated Kabbalah not for the layperson"


Excerpt:

The Zohar can also be, especially toward the end of the first volume, weirdly prophetic. In the Noah section, references crop up to what seem remarkably like dinosaurs and gravitation.

Appropriately enough, the first volume of the Pritzker "Zohar" ends with commentary on the Tower of Babel's destruction. God's punishment for our building the tower, remember, was the "confusion of languages," which sowed too much chaos for us ever to pull anything like that again. But without that curse of multiple languages, professional translators like Matt would be out of a job. For him the curse shapes up as, at worst, a mixed blessing.

For the rest of us, the new "Zohar" looks like a mixed blessing, too. The intrepid, especially those game to take one of the many Kabbalah classes offered around town, may now find the Zohar easier to tackle than ever before. But easier and easy are most emphatically not the same thing. Nobody should expect to read a few pages of the Pritzker "Zohar" and immediately see God. Just seeing straight would be an accomplishment.


There's also a customer review at the Amazon link above.

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