sor of religious studies at the University of Virginia Martien Halvorson-Taylor gave the talk “Translating Love and Ecstasy in the Song of Songs.” The lecture focused on Halvorson-Taylor’s analysis of the “Song of Songs” and discussed the nuances of translating biblical texts.

The “Song of Songs,” also known as the “Song of Solomon” or “The Canticle of Canticles,” is a biblical poem that narrates an ecstatic story of love and desire. This ancient text has been translated countless times across the centuries, yet biblical scholars still find value in translating it. Retranslation can revitalize a text, especially one that has been as widely misinterpreted as the “Song of Songs.” Halvorson-Taylor’s translation draws attention to the poem’s depiction of love and desire as empowering sources of joy, prompting readers to reevaluate more conservative interpretations of the text. The Bible’s cultural significance is a major reason why this text must be revisited.

“The Bible as literature [and] the Bible as scripture still hold sway in a lot of our imaginations, whether we’re religious or not,” Halvorson-Taylor said. “It sort of underpins our worldview. Getting more and more precise about translations, using what we discover in archaeology or other languages … is important.”

Translating is a cautious art. Precision is vital, especially since many readers of the Bible are not reading it in its source language. Oberlin Adelia A.F. Johnston and Harry Thomas Frank Professor of Religion Cynthia Chapman, who organized the talk, explained that readers of the Bible often forget that the text is a translation.

“We often approach the Bible as a straightforward text that’s fixed,” she said. “In my classes, one of the first things I want to emphasize is that the Bible we’re encountering is a translation.”

Chapman allows her students to choose what translation of the Bible they want to read. When they read the text in class, they compare their different translations, which serves as a constant reminder of the distance between the text and the student. 

Even Halvorson-Taylor, who can read “The Song of Songs” in the original Hebrew, experiences a distance between the text and herself. 

“The Hebrew itself is sometimes difficult, rough, [and] impenetrable,” Halvorson-Taylor said. “You have to make your best argument for how to translate. It can’t just be, ‘I prefer this translation,’ which a lot of people do. They translate toward a particular doctrine that they have.”

The text is unique due to its large quantity of one-off forms, which are known as hapax legomenon. These words are difficult to translate because they lack clear definitions. One way Halvorson-Taylor circumvents this issue is by looking for cognates in family languages such as Arabic and Aramaic. In addition to searching for cognates, she engages in literary analysis, which College third-year Lukas Feld, who attended the talk, also felt was important.

“Translation is the closest form of reading,” they said. “The work of translation and having to work through fine details of grammar and syntax … that’s work that has to be done to appreciate the poetry of it.”

Halvorson-Taylor carefully analyzed the poetry of the “Song of Songs.” In her talk, she explained how the poem uniquely privileges the feminine. A woman begins and ends the poem, enclosing its narrative with female voice. She details her erotic encounters and celebrates love, setting the poem apart from many biblical texts in which love is depicted as a tool of masculine dominance. In many translations, this narrative is flattened. Havlorson-Taylor provided an example of how translators have desexualized the poem.

“In the King James version, when they say, ‘I am comely,’ the root is actually desire,” she said. “That’s one way in which you can make it too modest. She’s really saying, ‘I’m hot; I’m smoking.’”

Beyond stripping the text of its eroticism, translators have also disempowered the narrator’s voice by linguistically stripping her of self-confidence.

“It is amazing to me how many translators, largely male, have translated toward their conception of what a beautiful woman is,” said Halvorson-Taylor. “They translate things like, ‘I am a daffodil’ … as, ‘I am but a lily of the valley,’ because they cannot stand on the idea that she’s proudly proclaiming her beauty.”

Halvorson-Taylor pointed out how the addition of the word “but” diminishes the woman’s voice, which she argues is much more self-assured. A single word can completely alter the interpretation of a text. Through all the difficulties of translation, there exists the euphoria of revisiting a text that is so old. 

“There’s always the personal thrill … of really looking at the language and translating it,” she said. “It’s like the floor falls out from under you, and you realize: I am so connected to the thought-world of this ancient poet.”

Translation can dissolve centuries of distance. Underneath the opacity of the Hebrew lies the ecstasy of love, the pulse that keeps the “Song of Songs” alive.