| Abstrakt: |
Isaac Salkinson, whose 1871 Vayegaresh et Haʾadam is the first translation of John Milton's Paradise Lost into Hebrew, is a curious character: a Jewish convert to Christianity and missionary in Pressburg and Vienna, who also made major contributions to Hebrew letters, translating not only Milton and the New Testament, but also (for the first time) two plays of Shakespeare. I use Salkinson's translation to test the theoretical claim, advanced by Gil Anidjar and Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin inter alia, that modern secularization recapitulates Christian supersession. Attending to the shibbutsim (allusive phrases) that distinguish his translation's maskilic style, I argue that Salkinson secularizes both Milton and the canon of classical Jewish texts, foregrounding their discontinuity and conflict. Debates over the secular often pay insufficient attention to literary questions of figuration, metaphor, and allusion. In Salkinson's case, reimagining Milton in dialogue with Jewish texts modernizes both traditional corpuses, freeing the great English poet from his constraints of time and place while imagining a sphere of Hebrew letters no longer defined by religious, dogmatic limits. Salkinson's secular derives not from either his rabbinic nor his Renaissance English sources but precisely from their collision—a point that can be appreciated only through close reading of his allusions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
