"Hieros Gamos – Sacred Marriage" : the Hebrew Bible translated by Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig (with a special focus on Rosenzweig’s poetics of translation)

Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig’s German translation of the Bible is doubtlessly a masterpiece; however, as it reveals its artistic qualities only to those who do not search for them, its beauty may be compared to the elegance of a mathematical proof. The article analyses Buber and Rosenzweig’s cooperative rendition of the Bible (fi rst edited in 1926) against the Jewish tradition of translation, focusing on Franz Rosenzweig, since this Jewish theologian and translator (1886–1929) is less known in Poland than the philosopher Martin Buber. First, the article describes Rosenzweig’s thought as rooted in the Jewish hermeneutic tradition, with its essential notions like midrash, and discusses his contribution to the development and systematization of that tradition. Next, it presents Rosenzweig’s translatory work as well as the principles of Buber and Rosenzweig’s Bible translation (literalness, foreignness, renewal and repetition). In the second part, several translation problems, e.g. proper names and neologisms, are examined comparatively, i.e. selected passages of the Book of Genesis or Exodus taken from Buber and Rosenzweig’s rendering are set against the Luther Bible and the Polish Biblia Tysiąclecia. The analysis highlights Rosenzweig’s contribution to the new German Bible. The article closes with some comments on the reception of the new Bible in Germany, particularly in the interwar period