Artur Sandauer’s translation of the Bible as a medium of literary conversion to modern marranism

Online First 2021-12-29

Article considers Bible translation as a potentially converting for the translator (as a project), and also for his readers (as a text). It is a case study of the work of an important Polish literary critic, Artur Sandauer, who have translated the Genesis and published it with an extensive commentary in 1977, becoming a part of a "biblical boom" that happened in Poland from 1965 to 1985 (as a result of the Second Vatican Council). Numerous translations of the Bible were initiated at that time by both religious institutions and lay individuals of various background. Sandauer, a Holocaust survivor, was one of the last and his position towards existing denominations was particularly complicated. The article identifies textual strategies that he uses to deconstruct the sanctity of the Bible, aiming for spiritual independence of himself and the potential reader. This type of post-secular, literary-oriented biblical translation has the hallmarks of a conversion text, although the change that would be made in the translator and the reader is unstable, and, as such, akin to the status of a modern marrano.