Students and faculty are invited to the 44th Annual Edward L. Surtz, S.J. Lecture in the Humanities, to be delivered by Robert Alter, Class of 1937 Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley.
“The Challenge of Translating the Bible”
Wednesday, February 26, 2020, 4pm
Information Commons, fourth floor lecture hall
Professor Alter is author of more than 20 books of criticism, translation, and commentary, most recently The Art of Bible Translation (2019). His complete translation of the Hebrew Bible, a work 24 years in the making, was published by W.W. Norton in 2018 and has been acclaimed as stylistically faithful to the Hebrew while inventively artful in English. Alter has also written extensively on the European novel, contemporary American fiction, and modern Hebrew literature. His lecture is co-sponsored by the John Cardinal Cody Endowed Chair in Theology, and the Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage.
Since 1973, the Surtz Lecture has promoted interdisciplinary and trans-historical humanistic inquiry at Loyola University Chicago. This lecture honors the memory and scholarship of Edward L. Surtz, S.J., a beloved member of the Loyola faculty and distinguished scholar of early modern literature and renaissance humanism. Recent lecturers have included Robin Fleming, author of Britain After Rome: The Fall and Rise, 400-1070; Emily Wilson, translator of the Odyssey and author of The Greatest Empire: A life of Seneca; W. J. T. Mitchell, author of Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present and editor of the interdisciplinary journal Critical Inquiry; and Ato Quayson, editor of The Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature.