παραδειγμάτων δὲ είδη δύο: ὲν μὲν γάρ εστιν παραδείγματος ειδος τὸ λέγειν πράγματα προγενομένα, ὲν δὲ τὸ αυτὸν ποιειν. Τούτου δὲ ὲν μὲν παραβολὴ ὲν δὲ λόγοι, οιον οι Αισώπειοι καὶ Λιβυκοί.
There are two species of example: one species of example is the narration of preceding events, the other inventing them oneself. Of these latter one is comparison, the others fables, like those of Aesop and the Libyan.
I have to stop translating for a moment. I’ve come to Book II of the Rhetoric, Chapter 20, which Aristotle starts by saying, “It remains to speak of the proofs common to all branches of Rhetoric” (p. 273 of the J. H. Freese translation). Aristotle’s second paragraph starts with my epigraph above (which is translated into English by Hugh Lawson-Tancred as that second epigraph).
I stop translating for a moment to note that παραβολὴ, in this context of Aristotle, has been variously translated into English since 1686 as “Similitude,” “illustration,” “the illustrative parallel,” “comparison [parabolē],” and “parable.”
I stop translating to ask some questions:
Why did those listening to Jesus best have to translate his Hebrew word for his own rhetoric as “παραβολὴ”?
Why does Aristotle (in his classic binary mode here) say
(1) that the historical account of King Darius and then King Xerxes conquering Egypt and then Greece is the example of factual narration of preceding events (and Xerxes is the same King slowed by the 300, the same who marries Esther),
but (2) that “παραβολὴ δὲ τὰ Σωκρατικά, οιον ει τις λέγοι” or that the example of inventing events oneself is from the “parable of Socrates, as if from his fables”?
Why does Jesus use the Hebrew equivalent of the Greek parable?
Why does Socrates use the original Greek parable, fables like Aesop’s and the African Libyan’s?
Why does Robert E. Quinn say that Jesus’s (and Martin Luther King Jr’s, and Mahatma Gandhi’s) strategy for change was not “the telling strategy” or “the forcing strategy” or “the ‘win-win’ strategy” but the self “transformation” strategy?
Why does Kenneth L. Pike listen to and only use the other’s language in his monolingual demonstrations? Why does Robert de Beaugrande see Pike’s fieldworking method as getting so much more than either Stephen Krashen’s or Noam Chomsky’s linguistic “theory”? Why have the Bible translators abandoned tagmemics (as the composition studies scholars have)? Why do so many different scholars in so many different academic disciplines hear the useful, transformative, parable of emic and etic?
Why does historian of rhetoric Cheryl Glenn say that Aspasia is more the mother of the Greek parable than Socrates is its father?
Why does rhetorician Wayne Booth say “listening rhetoric” is so much more powerful (parable power) than the many other species of rhetoric?
Why does (feminist, woman) rhetorician Krista Ratcliffe come to Rhetorical Listening, after listening to (the parables of) Pike, and Glenn, and Booth?
Why do parable tellers risk letting the hearers have so much agency? Why do the original authors of parables relinquish their rights?
Is (good) feminism, (good) rhetoric, (good) translation, more than parable? Won't we have to listen to our own stories, and someone else's stories, to know?
2 comments:
Kurk,
You keep asking questions exactly backwards from what I would expect. From my point of view you appear to treat the words as the logically prior entities, asking: what could the contexts be that these words possibly refer to?
I think that's absolutely upside down. (I will grant, however, that that's the way Anglo-American linguistic philosophers work, and that's effectively how Chomsky looks at things.) But the issue to me (and to Pike, by the way) concerns how a particular wording fits a particular context, not what context can be imaged for a particular wording.
A more productive way of thinking about language is to look at it as being a speaker's solution to a communicative problem. Translation is just re-solving the problem in the target language. Word equivalences are merely epiphenomenal.
So I'm mostly uninterested in what the "standard" translation is. At best, that only tells you what referential ballpark you're in. It doesn't tell you what the framing is, and it often misleads you into believing the wrong framing and sometimes even wrong reference.
If there's a large enough corpus around, the reference and the framing will reveal themselves. (See my series on ἐπιτιμάω from last year over on BBB -- sorry I don't know how to link in a comment.) This is the point of Pike's monolingual demonstrations. In fact, this is how children learn language. They observe how words are used in context. I'd argue that language is actually "tuned" to be discoverable in context.
From my point of view it's a problem to accept at face value what dictionaries say, particularly in the case of dead languages with large corpora. Doing so is tantamount to accepting what was understood by the linguists of the 19th century when the guts of most of those dictionaries were assembled. This is how we got into the terrible mess about man, woman, person/human (being) (= ἀνήρ,γυνή, ἄνθρωπος) where many people believe that ἄνθρωπος means ‘man’ because the dictionary says it does. That's a fact about 19th century English, not a fact about Greek.)
I will, however, admit to the experience that Ortega y Gassett talks about, that language is both exhuberant and deficient. But then this follows from the fact that all language is categorizing, and all categorization is both exhuberant and deficient.
(Finally, there is also a response to your comment over on BBB. It didn't come yesterday because I was off-line for Thanksgiving.)
Rich,
Your wonderful series on ἐπιτιμάω is linked here now. (In comments, just use < a href = "url" > visiblestring < / a> without the spacings in the code here).
I see over there in the series that your are showing clearly enough the Greek word, as used by various authors, with various meanings, not all negative (at least not at first glance). If the meanings were not all negative, then I might be persuaded. When I leave your series to return to your comment here on my post, I see something very similar going on. Maybe you intended that. That is, maybe you the author of your comment intend a “didactic rebuke.” Yes, I understand that you don’t intend “to track down completely” didacticism. And, if your tone seems “neutral,” then the context of your lesson to me here should take care of how I ought listen to your instruction; if we were face to face, then your voice might dictate how I hear. We’re not within earshot, but some day I’d really love to talk in person.
I’m asking questions here about “parable.” And, somehow, you turn me around, and spin me “absolutely upside down” with Chomsky and Anglo-American linguistic philosophers. That’s clever.
You make me use words as “logically prior entries,” as pointer-references to later contexts. (Aren't you doing with my words what you accuse me of doing as if with lexicon in hand?) My canon, you say, has become dictionaries and the face value acceptance of what dictionaries (oh, my, what agency!!) “say”! Worse, moreover, I have to find Pike way over there with you (and your reluctant friend Ortega y Gassett), hearing yall yelling at me that “‘standard’ translation is,” well, “uninteresting” and that real translation is, of course, “just re-solving the problem in the target language.” Hey, now, if I’m misquoting you please correct; Professor Pike (in the spirit of the humble monolingual demonstration) always insisted we use direct quotations when trying to re-say what someone else has said (especially good advice when what they’ve said is a mis-characterization of what I’ve said). Pike had a very hard time with how Marvin Harris was warping emic and etic even though he couldn’t as easily dispute Claude Levi-Strauss’s contention that the arbitrary labels should be reversed if one runs off to the various earlier Greek uses of such suffixes. Rich, please note that I could really care less how the various dictionaries around the globe have picked up and ossified “the meaning” of these two very useful English and Chinese and Japanese words with particular and peculiar Pikean intent. (Pike did tell of his own resistance to an arrogant linguist who wanted a 1-to-1 word-to-meaning correspondence in language. And yet, Pike humbly rejected that “either / or” binary: “If a word only meant one thing, sir, then how could we learn language?” What a wise, humble question!)
So let me say, for the record (as if my low opinion has worth): corpus linguistics, as the British began it even, is one of the finest examples of tagmemics by another name that the world has ever known. Likewise, Larry Wall with his perl (a computer language founded on Pike’s principles) is more didactic than most translators, standard or otherwise, can be. Nonetheless, the weird Robert de Beaugrande puts you and me and Pike back on the same side together, standing upright and apart from both Chomsky and Stephen Krashen. But Krashen, like you, asks how children learn language.
It’s how adults learn that is fascinating. Pike, the adult, by his monolingual thing demonstrates profound conversion. No, no; absolutely no dictionaries allowed here. And yet; yes: the didactic nature of this process needs no outsider linguist preaching at anyone about the nature of language either. Rather, like a story thrown at me, a story thrown alongside me and right by my own story, I begin to get the parallels as quickly, as painfully deeply, as David gets them from Nathan. Yes, the prophet friend intends something by his face to face intonation, by his ἐπιτιμάω. But the king, by his own pronouncements against the horribly guilty, gets it. The learning is, shall we say, “parable”-ic, parabolic? Doesn't one story translate the other? How do we translate words? How am I, the adult, translated?
(Have you read The Spirituality of Imperfection yet? Thanks for the comments here and at your blog; over there, you've put us on the same page.)
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