Daring to write on translation

Iyov has a lovely post on the JPS and the three days of darkness that followed the completion of the LXX. Also going the rounds is a meme on which book of your library you would take with you from a burning building - no collections or such allowed.

I would take the doomsday book, my own life, and let the rest be consumed. Whether I can read polyglot or know a perfection of Hebrew, or hear God speak on Patmos in Greek, or understand the modulo-19 arithmetic of the Qur'an, none of these written things is needed. God can raise his children from the stones and write laws on their hearts, stony or otherwise, from the book of his presence.

[ed. whoever will save his life ...]

Of course, I might lose my life too, if I were saving it myself, but no book fills the completeness of the Gospel, so I do not need to swim in these particular hypothetical flames to save myself, as it were.

[ed. but would you leave behind those books you have not read? or that a friend just gave you? or that you are blogging about!]

All of them - as it is written, save yourself from this crooked and perverse generation.

Well, so much for that meme.