The hardest part of my week was the Hebrew Translation exercise. It was due on a Thursday morning, which meant I dreaded Wednesday night. I remember the first time I stayed back in the library, under the harsh fluorescent lights. I had thre things in front of me. First was my ‘Hebrew Grammar,’ a textbook that had cost me a lot of my fortnightly Austudy payment. Then a thick Hebrew dictionary called a ‘lexicon’ that I had dug out of the library shelves and I couldn’t make head nor tail of. Finally, I had the Hebrew text on photocopied paper with a big blank spot below for my translation.

If you haven’t seen Hebrew writing before, you’d be likely to think that it’s upside-down. The letters all look square and top-heavy, like a row of buses in gridlock. I remember Wet Weather Warren going crook at the lecturer. (I called him Wet Weather Warren, because he was always prepared for wet weather, both physically and metaphorically. He rode to classes on a bicycle dressed in yellow raingear and he rarely smiled.) Warren couldn’t tell the difference between a handwritten Hebrew W and a Hebrew D and he took out his frustration on the teacher.

The text in front of me was about three sentences long, a selection of a couple of verses from some obscure back room of the Old Testament. I had already been at the task for the better part of an hour, and I was about six words in. The libary was closing at ten o’clock, and it was a race against time and against my mental reserves.

One of my classmates was sitting at a table opposite. He had started his homework soon after me, and I saw him stand up and sweep his things into his bag. “Giving up?” I asked.

“Nah. Finished,” he said, and he threw his bag over his shoulder and sauntered off.

Finished? How had he done it so quickly? I looked back down at my unfinished translation and my heart sank.

The problem is this. You can’t just look up the word in the dictionary, because Hebrew words generally have a prefix bolted on the front, so you have to carve off what you hope is the prefix and look up the word – all reading from right to left in a new alphabet where the first letter doesn’t make a sound and Z comes before S. Before both Ss. Good luck!

But the good news is that six words in, I was getting the hang of finding the words in the dictionary. I had wasted a half hour with a wrong book. I don’t even know what type of dictionary it was, but it hadn’t worked, so I had gone back to the shelves and found another. I put my head down and started tackling word number seven.

Somehow, I finished my translation before the closing call and I brought it to class the next morning with a mixture of dread and triumph. I saw my classmate who had been in the library the night before. “How did you do it so quickly?” I asked.

He smiled. “I just used the King James Version.” he said. “Why, what did you do?”

The following Wednesday night, I was back in the library under the fluorescent lights, staring at a new translation. As it turned out, most of the students in the class had taken shortcuts, copying out the verb parsing part of the exercise from one book, and then opening the King James version and copying out the verses word for word. Now, they were home eating dinner and watching TV. But I didn’t want to take any shortcuts.

I was pretty proud of my translation, but the next day, when we reviewed the exercise in class, it was clear that I had made a few mistakes, and the rest of the class hadn’t. Bummer! I gritted my teeth and swore not to make the same mistake again!

Weeks passed, and I continued every Wednesday night, lonely under the fluorescent lights, and I found the dread becoming something different. Determination and sheer good old Aussie bastardry. I was going to beat that translation, whether I liked it or not!

I was never as quick as the other guys, but I got to the point where I could get the task done in about an hour. Imagine my excitement when I started recognising some of the more obscure words in the translation, and I didn’t have to refer to the dictionary. But it was still very difficult. And in the Thursday morning class I found the situation reversing. The guys who had taken shortcuts were still taking shortcuts, but hadn’t learned anything. On the other hand, I was starting to get excited at being able to access the multiple layers of meaning, hiding behind the English.

It came to a head in the final class of the semester. I had parsed those verbs to within an inch of their life, and had decided that the final verb was actually something complicated. I had looked carefully at the vowel pointing, and decided it wasn’t a normal verb, it was a Piel participle.

The tutor wrote the answers up on the board, and when he identified that final verb as a normal garden variety verb, I was nearly standing on my chair, shouting him down. “Well, I think it works better in context as a participle, and that is in agreement with the vowel pointing…”

“No, I’ve got it right,” he said, consulting his notes.

I don’t remember the details, but I remember I argued back, citing a small table on the bottom left of page 178 in the Hebrew grammar, and reiterating that the vowel pointing was consistent with a participle, and that he was mistaken. My voice was shrill, and the other guys in the class were getting restless.

The tutor looked back at his notes, and then looked up with a sheepish grin. “I don’t know,” he said, “I just copied my verb parsing from the book.”

Boom!

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Moral of the story? Don’t take shortcuts. Put in the hard, lonely work. It pays off in the end.