SOURCE: Linafelt, Tod. “Survival in Translation: The Targum to Lamentations.” In Surviving Lamentations: Catastrophe, Lament and Protest in the Afterlife of a Biblical Book, pp. 80-99. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000.

In the following essay, Linafelt describes the origin, nature, and character of the Targum Lamentations and differentiates the Targum and Hebraic versions of the poems.

The original requires translation even if no translator is there, fit to respond to this injunction, which is at the same time demand and desire in the very structure of the original. This structure is the relation of life to survival.

—Jacques Derrida

In its survival—which would not merit the name if it were not mutation and renewal of something living—the original is modified.

—Walter Benjamin

If the book of Lamentations ends with the absence of God and the absence of Zion's children, Second Isaiah ends with the full...