I knew when I saw that Dr. Barber was giving the homily yesterday at the National Cathedral that I would check it out. It is a marvelous piece of oratory and I strongly recommend it.

I have Robert Altar’s three volume translation of the Hebrew Bible. It is, of course, an overwhelming work to read. I have been reading Genesis in three translations, his, the Norton English Study Bible, and R. Crumb’s illustrated version.

I like it that R. Crumb used Alter’s translation as an acknowledged source for most o fhis own prose.

It’s slow going reading multiple translations, but it’s also how I’m reading Dante. I was amused when this weekend the Old Testament reading was one I had just read in this manner. Just gettin’ in the to the word, like my crazy Christian friends used to say.

I find that Alter’s explanatory prose is what interests me the most, so that’s why I ordered The Art of Bible Translation. Translating is something that I think about quite a bit. I’m living with a translator right now, my son-in-law, Jeremy. He has a web site at which offers Chinese Law translations.

Plus, a lot of what I read, I read in translation: Dante, Cervantes, Homer, to mention just a few.

Michael Eric Dyson got me thinking about Martha C. Nussbaum again when he mentioned her in his NYTBR By the Book interview. I picked up my copy of Cultivating Humanity by her and was bemused to see that I left off at the chapter on African American Studies in American Universities. I read in that this morning.

Meanwhile. sign up for the Mass Poor People’s Assembly and Moral March om Washington this Saturday.