Page:Philip Birnbaum - ha-Siddur ha-Shalem (The Daily Prayer Book,1949).pdf/19

XVII shows that this sentence is based on Psalm 79:13 and should read: We ever thank thee, who art the Lord our God and the God of our fathers. Unaware that the phrase “evening, morning and noon” refers to the three daily services, they have construed it as if it were a dangling modifier of another phrase. Correctly translated, the third sentence of Modim ought to read: In every generation we will thank thee... evening, morning and noon. Others apparently thought that the original text was in need of some repair, so they paraphrased it: “We thank thee... for the wonderful gifts which thou dost dispense unto us morning, noon, and night.”

There are translators who indulge in periphrastic and verbose locutions like “in the flowering of thy saving power gives life”; “even as in the prophet’s vision the choir of holy Seraphim in triple consecration call with sweet word one unto another.” A good translation ought to be authentic and free from deceptions. One must not read into the original what is not there. No new poetry should be introduced into the Siddur presumably as the translation of the Hebrew text. The meaning ought to be preserved as close to to the original as possible. The poem “Rock of Ages,” for example, is certainly not a translation of the familiar Ḥanukkah hymn Ma‘oz Tsur.

The Siddur contains prayer-poems which should be annotated but not translated. Such are the, replete with historical and midrashic allusions and constructed in an involved poetic fashion. They comprise many intricate acrostics and a variety of Hebrew synonyms which, if translated, are likely to create a wrong impression and confuse the reader. One of these prayer-poems is composed of an interesting alphabetic list of twenty-two Hebrew synonyms for the Temple; another presents an alphabetic description of Israel’s qualities; a third enumerates types of locusts and destructive forces of nature mentioned in the Bible. It may well be