AND
It’s an ancient text that has a renewed approach in the Liberated Classics series. This is the Gospel of Matthew, whose innovative translation brings the work closer to readers at the beginning of the second quarter of the 21st century. The edition to be discussed frames the volume in a literary project, whose goal is to present both the value and the relevance of the classics in the era where transience devours everything in a few moments.
Matthew, Gospel was published in October of this year in Barcelona, by Blackie Books, and is part of a collection of which you can now purchase The Iliad and The Odyssey, The divine comedy, Don Quijote of La Mancha and the book of Genesis. The publisher’s objective is to offer “The great classics of universal literature in new faithful and unapologetic versions, illustrated and commented with an open mind and a light heart.”
The translator of Matthew, Gospel is Roser Homar, doctor in classical philology, professor at the University of Barcelona, specialist in ancient Greek novel and prose from the imperial era. She translated the work from Greek, in its koine variant, “or common language, the variety of the Greek language used in the Hellenistic world; that is, in the period after the conquests of Alexander the Great.”
Roser Homar argues about the characteristics of his translation and I highlight one of them. He rightly emphasizes that, in the Gospel of Matthew , Among those who followed Jesus there were women, children and old women, not just men. For this reason, she notes, “I have tried not to blur this reality and, therefore, I have used common generic nouns in Spanish that reflect the diversity of gender and age. Thus, people or people often appear.” Consequently, the translator clarifies that, regarding one of Matthew’s descriptions of Jesus, “the Greek anthropos designates a human being and not a man ( aner, andros) I have translated son of humanity instead of son of man.”
Today, which is Christmas Eve, it seems appropriate to refer to the translator’s approach to the section in which Matthew describes the birth of Jesus. Roser Homer highlights that “the Greek text lexically marks tenderness when referring to the baby. The same thing happens in the few times in which the father in heaven speaks with pride about his son. I have therefore sought to highlight it in the translation.”
At the Blackie Books publishing house they decided to publish Matthew, Gospelwith chapters, but without verses. Thus, one reads straight, without the small numbers, the part of the first chapter in which the tax collector, who abandoned his job to follow Jesus, gives an account of his teacher’s arrival into the world: “The birth of Jesus, the anointed one, happened like this: Jesus’ mother, Mary, was betrothed to Joseph. Before they went to live together, she found herself pregnant with the sacred breath. Joseph, her man, who was just and did not want to expose her, preferred to abandon her in secret. But while While he was meditating on these questions, look, a messenger from the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said: -Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to accept Mary as your wife. Because within her she keeps the son conceived by the sacred breath and you will call him by the name of Jesus. […] Joseph woke up from the dream and did as the Lord’s messenger had commanded him, and accepted her as his wife, but he did not touch her until she had given birth to the son. And he called him by name: Jesus.”
In addition to the new translation of the Gospel of Matthew, the volume includes rich iconography, which over the centuries has been produced by great artists who found inspiration in the Mattean narrative. Also the joint work of writings by authors such as Jorge Luis Borges, Oscar Wilde, Augusto Monterroso and Juan José Arreola, who made unique approaches to scenes presented by one of the 12 disciples specially chosen by Jesus.
Unlike literature in German or English, highly influenced by the translations of Martin Luther (New Testament in 1522 and the entire Bible in 1534), and the English ones of 1560 and 1611, in Spanish the biblical echoes in Latin American writers have been much more tenuous. In large part because of what José Emilio Pacheco rightly observed, who wrote that an “unknown masterpiece” for Spanish literature was “the Bible that Casiodoro de Reina translated in 1569 and Cipriano de Valera revised in 1602.” […] Since it is about the Protestant Bible, not equaled as verse or prose by any Bible Catholics, our culture has lived with its back to it, unlike what happens in the English language.”
An opportunity to not continue turning our backs, in the words of José Emilio Pacheco, on the biblical writings, as well as the stimulus they provoke in the reconstruction of the personal and social imagination, is to go through the pages of the Gospel of Matthew as a classic that should transcend religious cloisters. And, perhaps, verify, as Oscar Wilde wrote, that it is “Pure romantic enchantment. Reading the Gospel is like leaving a dark house to enter a garden of lilies.”
