Resisting <i>Wirkungsgeschichte</i>: Bible Translators as Agents of Reception

Abstract This article investigates the relationship between translation and reception by focusing on Bible translators as “agents of reception.” Translators exercise their agency in relation to the previous effective history ( Wirkungsgeschichte ) of the biblical texts, which they can either affirm or resist. The outcome of their work is a specific textual representation of the biblical texts, thereby guiding the way most readers receive ‘the Bible.’ In this sense, translators have a large potential power when it comes to affirming or altering existing patterns of reception. As a case study I focus on two contemporary Swedish translations of the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible). The first one, Bibel 2000 , was carried out by a team of translators working from the assumptions of ‘secular’ academic biblical criticism, whereas the other, Svenska Folkbibeln , was initiated as a ‘protest’ bible targeted against the methodological atheism or agnosticism of the first translation. These outsets impacted how the two teams related to interpretations associated with Christian (and to a lesser extent Jewish) effective history of the biblical texts. I investigate how this played out in how the translators rendered certain passages in Genesis – both with respect to the main text (the translated text) and to various paratextual materials produced by the two translator teams. I argue that both teams resisted the effective history of the biblical texts, but in two quite different ways: the team of the conservative ‘protest’ translation resisted effective history on a discursive level, arguing that interpretations associated with Christian effective history were an inherent feature of the biblical texts themselves; while the translators of Bibel 2000 resisted it on a practical level, refusing to let specific effective-historical interpretations play out in their translated texts.