Some of the reasons reading in the original language is so pleasant (aside from the bragging rights):
Connotations: some words
don’t have equivalent English word clouds. “Priscus” in Latin means ancient,
but also carries the sense of something venerable, noble and pious. It’s an upright kind of word, and to my ear,
distinctly Roman praise. For fun, compare and contrast our use of "gravitas."
Structure: Latin is the
obvious example because it has no articles, and doesn't truck much with pronouns
or prepositions; it’s all about construction of beautiful clauses.
Hebrew has some flexibility of
word order and also has a direct object marker which is attached to definite
objects. When God addresses Abraham in Genesis 22 and
says, “Abraham, please, could you take (direct object) your son…(direct object) your
only one …(sub-clause) whom you love…(direct object) Isaac… ” it does seem a
little wordy. God knows perfectly well
who Isaac is without all the qualifiers; he was there for the conception.
And
then: “... and bring him
up as a sacrifice on a mountain.” Wait,
what? But Abraham just packs his wood
and saddles up his donkey. It's the same story, but with a slightly different rhythm.
Speed: translation slows you down. Especially reading the classics which, let’s
face it, you've read in English so many times you can pretty much skim. Moses and the plagues: “and God said, ‘locusts’ and boom! there were locusts but,
still, the Pharaoh wouldn't let the people go, and so on."
“So Moses held out his rod over
the land of Egypt and the Eternal drove an east wind over the land all that day
and all night; and when morning came, the east wind had brought the locusts.”
The Hebrew does have some “creation / let there be” elements: the day and the night, the wind and the morning. But it’s not so much the words that strike me as the
detail of that wind that blows all day and night. Whether it makes
you think of sky deities or Stephen King, it’s creepy. And easy to miss if you are breezing (I said it) through the English.
In reading Exodus, with its page after page of wonders, and incident after incident of “murmurings”,
(the Israelites doubting Moses) you really start to
wonder if the Israelites are...well...idiots. Hey, Israelites, remember the manna? Look at the page across from this one you're on--it's
right there. But then, remember that thing you read
yesterday, how cool it was, and how you couldn't see how anyone could
ever be bored in this world? And then today, when you
could hardly get out of bed? The Israelites had a point: given any length
of time, even a page or two, the universe can seem pretty fickle.
