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Post date: Jun 21, 2019 9:32:11 AM
My newest Haggadah is one published by the Jewish Community of Japan. It is the only Haggadah with a full Japanese translation and also has an English translation. It was published in 2016.
The Japanese translation is provided by the Makuya Bible Seminary, a very pro-Israel Japanese movement. Interestingly enough, for the English translation, the 1952 National Jewish Welfare Board Haggadah was chosen. This translation has some masterpieces of poetic translation e.g.
Great is He, good is He
Lord, Thy Temple let us see
Rise anew, without delay
Very soon, O, in our day.
Lord rebuild, Lord rebuild,
Rebuild Thy Temple, Lord we pray
On the other hand, this translation still uses "flies" for the 4th plague (something found in MANY old English Haggadah translation, based on King James Bible and still used in JPS Bibles), which was also used for the Japanese translation: あぶ meaning gadfly. For a non-Jewish Bible seminar to translate Arov as (gad)flies is not surprising at all, as ALL non-Jewish Bible translations do so. For a Jewish community to do so is surprising in this day and age when almost ALL Jewish translations render it as Wild Beasts, following Rashi.
The Septuagint was the first Bible translation to use flies and the non-Jewish world continued using this. The Midrash brings BOTH opinions, flies and wild beasts but eventually settles on wild beasts. MOST Jewish translations have used Wild Beasts as the 4th plague but especially the English translations have continued using flies for a very long time. Nowadays, almost NO new Jewish translation uses flies any longer, hence my surprise with the decision made by the Jewish Community of Japan.
Another interesting observation is that the English translation is a bowdlerized one. Whereas the Hebrew text has the sentence: "שדים נכנו, ושערך צמח ואת ערום ועריה" which is usually translated as "Your breasts are fashioned and your hair is grown but you were naked and bare", the 1952 English translation states: "[you were] fully grown and developed but without covering or ornament". The removal of the word breasts happened for the first time in English translations in 1897 by Rabbi A. A. Green in London. Now, even more interesting is that the Japanese translation does not have any problems using the word 乳房 (= breasts) in its translation:
Another interesting point is that the Japanese translation provides the relevant bible quotes (e.g. underneath the word breast we see the quotation "Ezekiel 16:7") which are NOT given in the original Hebrew and English texts in the Haggadah. Here we see that the non-Jewish Makuya translators were more conscientious than the Hebrew/ English printers and probably used several other Haggadot while creating their translation. In several places, we see that the Japanese translation is better than both Hebrew and English e.g. before the beginning of the Birkat Hamazon, the Hebrew and English explain about what to do when "3 or more men have eaten together". The Japanese translation also explains what to do when 10 men ate together.
In contrast, whereas the English text has a very lengthy introductory text before Sfoch Chamatcha, the Japanse text is quite short and talks (at least according to my Google translator) about "the coming of Messiah's rice-curator Elijah" but does not give any information about Mideaval blood libels like the English one.
But besides this, the Haggadah is a wonderful addition to my Haggadah collection. It can be bought through the online Myrtos shop for 2700 yen HERE but mind you, the whole website is in Japanese so use Google translate to navigate the site (that is what I did). If you need any help, Yitzhak from Myrtos will phone you from Japan to help you out and he speaks both English and Hebrew.
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