Friday, November 30, 2007

Incarnation

I am astonished, astounded, and amazed by French feminism, by Greek rhetoric, and by Jewish translation. So I started my Christmas readings early this year.

After its incredible, presumptuous introductory gene-a-o-logy, this initial narrative startles me:

18 τοῦ δὲ ἰησοῦ χριστοῦ ἡ γένεσις οὕτως ἦν. μνηστευθείσης τῆς μητρὸς αὐτοῦ μαρίας τῶ ἰωσήφ, πρὶν ἢ συνελθεῖν αὐτοὺς εὑρέθη ἐν γαστρὶ ἔχουσα ἐκ πνεύματος ἁγίου.
19 ἰωσὴφ δὲ ὁ ἀνὴρ αὐτῆς, δίκαιος ὢν καὶ μὴ θέλων αὐτὴν δειγματίσαι, ἐβουλήθη λάθρᾳ ἀπολῦσαι αὐτήν.
20 ταῦτα δὲ αὐτοῦ ἐνθυμηθέντος ἰδοὺ ἄγγελος κυρίου κατ᾽ ὄναρ ἐφάνη αὐτῶ λέγων, ἰωσὴφ υἱὸς δαυίδ, μὴ φοβηθῇς παραλαβεῖν μαρίαν τὴν γυναῖκά σου, τὸ γὰρ ἐν αὐτῇ γεννηθὲν ἐκ πνεύματός ἐστιν ἁγίου·
21 τέξεται δὲ υἱὸν καὶ καλέσεις τὸ ὄνομα αὐτοῦ ἰησοῦν, αὐτὸς γὰρ σώσει τὸν λαὸν αὐτοῦ ἀπὸ τῶν ἁμαρτιῶν αὐτῶν.
22 τοῦτο δὲ ὅλον γέγονεν ἵνα πληρωθῇ τὸ ῥηθὲν ὑπὸ κυρίου διὰ τοῦ προφήτου λέγοντος,

23 ἰδοὺ ἡ παρθένος ἐν γαστρὶ ἕξει καὶ τέξεται υἱόν, καὶ καλέσουσιν τὸ ὄνομα αὐτοῦ ἐμμανουήλ, ὅ ἐστιν μεθερμηνευόμενον μεθ᾽ ἡμῶν ὁ θεός.
24 ἐγερθεὶς δὲ ὁ ἰωσὴφ ἀπὸ τοῦ ὕπνου ἐποίησεν ὡς προσέταξεν αὐτῶ ὁ ἄγγελος κυρίου καὶ παρέλαβεν τὴν γυναῖκα αὐτοῦ·
25 καὶ οὐκ ἐγίνωσκεν αὐτὴν ἕως οὖ ἔτεκεν υἱόν· καὶ ἐκάλεσεν τὸ ὄνομα αὐτοῦ ἰησοῦν.


Do you see it?

l' écriture feminine, Et

1:20 ἐνθυμηθέντος, καὶ

7:14 ‏לָ֠כֵן יִתֵּ֨ן אֲדֹנָ֥י ה֛וּא לָכֶ֖ם א֑וֹת הִנֵּ֣ה הָעַלְמָ֗ה הָרָה֙ וְיֹלֶ֣דֶת בֵּ֔ן וְקָרָ֥את שְׁמ֖וֹ עִמָּ֥נוּ אֵֽל׃

But just so none of us (Jew nor Greek, Hellene nor barbarian, Hélène Cixous nor man logician, slave nor free, male nor female) is offended, let's listen together. Hear. Here's another Jewish translation of that one above (Matthew's Greek translation of angel language and Hebrew translated by Willis Barnstone into our English).

18 The birth of Yeshua the Mashiah happened in this way. Miryam his mother was engaged to Yosef, yet before they came together she discovered a child in her womb, placed there by the holy spirit.
19 Yosef her husband, a just man and loath to expose her, resolved to divorce her secretly.

20 But as he was making plans, look, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream an said, Yosef, son of David, do not fear to take Miryam as your wife. The child engendered in her came from the holy spirit,
21 and she will give birth, and you will name him Yeshua,for he will save his people from their wrongdoings.
22 All this was done to fulfill the word of God uttered through his prophet Yeshaya, saying,
23 "Listen. A young woman will have a child in her womb and give birth to a son, and his name will be Immanuel."
24 When Yosef rose from a dream, he did what the angel of the Lord told him, and he accepted her as his wife,

25 yet he did not know here until after she gave birth, and he called the child the name Yeshua.

Now, what if that little Greek girl were reading this to us? You know, the girl whose mother pleaded with Yeshua somehow miraculously to exorcise the deity her daughter had been given over to. (See Mark 7 or fast forward to chapter 15 in Matthew or confess a recognition of the family resemblance of this young woman to the prostituted oracles.)

Imagine that the body of this female, deflowered by proprietary pimping priests and yet unnamed in any man's history, is now freed of the demon.

Consider the possibility that she then follows after this Joshua who saves from their wrongdoings.
Suppose she's bilingual in the Hellene and the Hebrew tongues.
Suspend your disbelief that she becomes biliterate and finds her way to the libraries of Alexandria held secret from Rome in so-called dirty Egyptian mothers' cupboards.
Understand how (differently) she reads men such as Matthew translating into Greek (as above)
and men (as below) such as Isaiah and Hesiod and Homer and Aristotle.

For those who have ears to hear, overhear the sounds of her voice (as if in [y]our English):

הִנֵּה הָעַלְמָה, הָרָה וְיֹלֶדֶת בֵּן, וְקָרָאת שְׁמוֹ, עִמָּנוּ אֵל.
(see, the young woman will conceive, and bear a son, and will call his name Immanuel.)

ἰδοὺ ἡ παρθένος ἐν γαστρὶ ἕξει καὶ τέξεται υἱόν καὶ καλέσεις τὸ ὄνομα αὐτοῦ Εμμανουηλ
(see, the virgin will hold in her womb a child, and will bear a son, and will call his name Emmanouel)

ἡ δὲ γυνὴ τέτορ' ἡβώοι, πέμπτῳ δὲ γαμοῖτο.
(The young woman's four years older than puberty; wed in her fifth year.)
παρθεν-ικὴν δὲ γαμεῖν, ὥς κ' ἤθεα κεδνὰ διδάξῃς,
(While virgin-istic, she's to be married, to teach her all her respectable duties.)

καὶ διὰ παρθεν-ικῆς ἁπαλόχροος οὐ διάησιν,
(And through virgin-istic smooth-skinned maidens it cannot penetrate)

ἔνθα οἱ ἀντεβόλησε θεά, γλαυκῶπις Ἀθήνη,
(bright-eyed goddess Athena met him)
παρθενικῇ ἐϊκυῖα νεήνιδι, κάλπιν ἐχούσῃ.
(in the virgin-istic guise of a young maiden woman holding a pitcher.)

ἡ ῥητορική ἐστιν ἀντίστροφος τῇ διαλεκτικῆ
(Speaker-ism is a turn taken different from the "-ism" of talking Truth.)
. . . ἐνθυμημάτων . . . ἐστὶ σῶμα τῆς πίστεως,
(. . . inner passions . . . embody the beliefs,)



And just to help us sympathize and empathize with the inner passions (the "rhetorical enthymemes embodied in the persuasions") of this young lady, we listen to a scene described by rhetorician George A. Kennedy in his New Testament Interpretation Through Rhetorical Criticism:

The truth is immediately and intuitively apprehended because it is true. Some see it, others do not, but there is no point in trying to persuade the latter. This is the most radical form of Christian rhetoric. When Jesus performs his first miracle, the witnesses are "amazed" (1:27); they recognize truth but do not comprehend it rationally. The miracle is a sign of authority, as the crowd at once admits. No effort is made to include any picture of Jesus' early teaching as seen in the Sermon on the Mount and the Sermon on the Plain. This kind of explanation is irrelevant to Mark. When Jesus preaches in Mark it is in parables, which are directly apprehended. There are enthymemes in Mark . . . (105).

So inner passions embody beliefs, and some see it while others do not. And all too often this is the grief of the teachers and preachers and other reachers for our beliefs and our bodies. Notice how even physical bodies embody belief:

Physicist Anatol Rapoport:
Once when teaching elementary physics, I was impressed with the resistance of mature intelligent students to some fundamental facts and concepts. For example, when a man falling in a parachute has reached constant velocity, the forces action on him add up to zero. Beginners almost invariably resist this conclusion. "If there is not resultant force action on a falling body," they ask, "why does it fall?" Proof by appeal to the fundamental equation of motion is of little avail. They “believe” the equation, but they believe their preconceptions. (qtd. in Rhetoric: Discovery and Change, by Richard E. Young, Alton L. Becker, and Kenneth L. Pike, p. 239)

Philosopher Professor Dallas Willard:
Sometimes I will half jokingly say to [my 101 students] as they hand me their tests after an exam, “Did you believe what you wrote?” And they all smile. Because they know that the important thing is not to believe what you write but to write the right answers ("Truth: Can We Do Without It?" p. 12).

Rhetorician Professor Richard Young:
[Our co-taught advanced course in rhetorical argument] did not achieve its principal objective: That is, it did not appear to help students develop considered judgments on ethical problems. . . This was surprising since most of us, I think, would predict that the thinking [i.e., beliefs] of at least a few students would have changed to some significant degree. But, to my dismay, their pretests were the best predictors of their posttests. ("Toward an Adequate Pedagogy for Rhetorical Argumentation: A Case Study in Invention" p. 161).

Psychologist Professor Haim Ginott:
Dear Teacher,
I am a survivor of a concentration camp. My eyes saw what no man should witness:
Gas chambers built by learned engineers.
Children poisoned by educated physicians.
Infants killed by trained nurses.
Women and babies shot and burned by high school and college graduates.
So I am suspicious of education. My request is:
Help your students become human. Your efforts must never produce learned monsters, skilled psychopaths, educated Eichmanns.
Reading, writing, arithmetic are important only if they serve to make our children more human.
(Teacher and Child, p. 371)



Now we return to the child whose body experienced bondage beyond belief. What does she hear? What does she believe in her unbound body? What does she say?

18 τοῦ δὲ ἰησοῦ χριστοῦ ἡ γένεσις οὕτως ἦν. μνηστευθείσης τῆς μητρὸς αὐτοῦ μαρίας τῶ ἰωσήφ, πρὶν ἢ συνελθεῖν αὐτοὺς εὑρέθη ἐν γαστρὶ ἔχουσα ἐκ πνεύματος ἁγίου.
This is the birth of the Anointed, Joshua. His mother Miriam was engaged to Josef; before they came together she held in her womb a child who came by the Breath of the Special One.

19 ἰωσὴφ δὲ ὁ ἀνὴρ αὐτῆς, δίκαιος ὢν καὶ μὴ θέλων αὐτὴν δειγματίσαι, ἐβουλήθη λάθρᾳ ἀπολῦσαι αὐτήν.
Josef, her man, her husband, a just person who didn't wish to make a show of her, counseled secretly to release her from himself.

20 ταῦτα δὲ αὐτοῦ ἐνθυμηθέντος ἰδοὺ ἄγγελος κυρίου κατ᾽ ὄναρ ἐφάνη αὐτῶ λέγων,
ἰωσὴφ υἱὸς δαυίδ, μὴ φοβηθῇς παραλαβεῖν μαρίαν τὴν γυναῖκά σου, τὸ γὰρ ἐν αὐτῇ γεννηθὲν ἐκ πνεύματός ἐστιν ἁγίου·
These inner passions of his were angst. See. An announcer of the Master, in a dream, appeared to him to state:
"Josef, son of David, don't be afraid to take beside you Miriam, your woman, your wife; the baby birthed in her, in fact, is by the Breath of the Special One.

21 τέξεται δὲ υἱὸν καὶ καλέσεις τὸ ὄνομα αὐτοῦ ἰησοῦν, αὐτὸς γὰρ σώσει τὸν λαὸν αὐτοῦ ἀπὸ τῶν ἁμαρτιῶν αὐτῶν.
She will deliver a son, and you will call his name Joshua; he will, in fact, save his people from their wrongdoings."

22 τοῦτο δὲ ὅλον γέγονεν ἵνα πληρωθῇ τὸ ῥηθὲν ὑπὸ κυρίου διὰ τοῦ προφήτου λέγοντος,
These events were born out entirely so that the things spoken by the Master would be fulfilled through the Prophet who stated:

23 ἰδοὺ ἡ παρθένος ἐν γαστρὶ ἕξει καὶ τέξεται υἱόν, καὶ καλέσουσιν τὸ ὄνομα αὐτοῦ ἐμμανουήλ, ὅ ἐστιν μεθερμηνευόμενον μεθ᾽ ἡμῶν ὁ θεός.
"See, the young virgin will hold in her womb a child, and will bear a son, and will call his name Emmanouel," which is translated "With us is God."

24 ἐγερθεὶς δὲ ὁ ἰωσὴφ ἀπὸ τοῦ ὕπνου ἐποίησεν ὡς προσέταξεν αὐτῶ ὁ ἄγγελος κυρίου καὶ παρέλαβεν τὴν γυναῖκα αὐτοῦ·
When Josef got up from his sleep, he did what the announcer of the Master told him, and he took beside himself his woman, his wife.

25 καὶ οὐκ ἐγίνωσκεν αὐτὴν ἕως οὖ ἔτεκεν υἱόν· καὶ ἐκάλεσεν τὸ ὄνομα αὐτοῦ ἰησοῦν.
And he did not know her until after she delivered her son; and he called his name Joshua.

Sunday, November 25, 2007

The Good, the Baad, and the Translation of Psalm 23

I need some help here. Aristotle didn't translate, and he didn't use the word ψαλμὸς. But consistently, those who knew them well rendered תהילים (i.e., Tehilim, or the "praises") as Ψαλμοί (i.e., the Psalms, or the "strummings"). And today, Mr. Benyamin Pilant, who maintains the copyright for the Jewish Publication Society's English language TEHILIM, calls them the Book of Psalms.

The translation of this word seems good, and since the Septuagint it has seemed good enough.

But some time after the translation of the Jewish scriptures of all sorts into Greek, problems ensued. And now we all have a few questions in English. What answers can we find?

1. The disciple Ιωάννης (i.e., John or יָנִיב?) translated the Hebrew Aramaic words of his רַב (i.e., his rabbi, his teacher) into Greek this way:

Ἐγώ εἰμι ὁ ποιμὴν ὁ καλός
(or, in English: "I am the good shepherd")

But why?

Was John's a good translation or was it (as sheep might translate that) a baaad one?

2. Was Rabbi Joshua (i.e., יְהוֹשֻׁעַ or Ἰησους or Jesus) paraphrasing David's praise to God, when the shepherd boy after God's heart was singing this?

יְהוָה רֹעִי
(or "HaShem is my shepherd" / "'I am' / 'He is' / 'The Name' is my shepherd")?

And if Jesus adds "good" when it's not in the original is that baad (for sheep)?

3. Or was John looking at the Septuagint (as he seems to do when he begins his gospel of Jesus, giving a nod to the LXX beginning of Genesis)?

In other words, did John add "good" or ὁ καλός when translating what Jesus said?

And, if John was reading the LXX, is it baad that the Jewish translators (from Hebrew into Greek) lose "good" in the last verse of Psalm 23:

טוֹב וָחֶסֶד

becomes

καὶ τὸ ἔλεός σου

(or "Surely goodness and mercy"

becomes

"and your mercy")

And when losing "goodness," the baad Greek gains "you," a very personal (vocative, 2nd person personal pronoun) reference to "master my shepherd" that the Hebrew has lost in verse 6. Why?

4. What if John and his rav Jesus (or יָנִיב and יְהוֹשֻׁעַ / or Ιωάννης and Ἰησους) could read David's תהילים / Ψαλμοί both in Hebrew and in Greek? Would the differences they surely would have noticed have been ugly? Or is what gets lost and found in translation both good and bad?

Friday, November 23, 2007

The Problem of Parable: A Feminism, Rhetoric, Translation

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?

Thursday, November 22, 2007

And (She) Said

בחר הוהיב ינרק המר הוהיב יבל ץלע רמאתו הנח ללפתתו
:ךתעושיב יתחמש יכ יביוא-לע יפ


και ειπεν εστερεωθη η καρδια μου εν κυριω υψωθη κερας μου εν θεω μου επλατυνθη επι εχθρους το στομα μου ευφρανθην εν σωτηρια σου

And [she] said, "My heart in master was [under]stood; my horn in my god was [raised] high; to enemy [attention] my mouth was opened: blessed sounds [and songs of giving thanks] in your salvation!"


Wednesday, November 21, 2007

Sexism: A Multiple Choice (Quiz)

A full decade ago, from the first couple of pages of Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity Through the Renaissance, Cheryl Glenn reminded us of our problematic history that meets our present sexism. She says:

For the past twenty-five hundred years in Western culture, the ideal woman has been disciplined by cultural codes that require a closed mouth (silence), a closed body (chastity), and an enclosed life (domestic confinement). . .

Rhetoric always inscribes the relation of language and power at a particular moment (including who may speak, who may listen or who will agree to listen, and what can be said); therefore, canonical rhetorical history has represented the experience of males, powerful males, with no provision or allowance for females. . .

Except for rhetoric, no intellectual endeavor—not even the male bastion of philosophy—has so consciously rendered women invisible and silent. . . .

So how are we doing (if we are citizens of Western culture now)?

Here’s a quiz:

1) In 2007, for every dollar a man earns in the U.S., a woman earns:

A. 77 cents
B. 84 cents
C. 92 cents
D. the same

2) In the most recent count during the past decade, for every dollar a man earns in the following seven countries respectively (Portugal, Australia, Belgium, Denmark, Spain, France, and Canada), a woman earns:

A. 92, 91, 91, 89, 88, 87, and 86 cents
B. 93 cents (woman’s dollar to man’s) in all seven countries
C. 96 cents (woman’s dollar to man’s) in all seven countries
D. women earn the same as men in all seven countries

3) In 2007, women make up what percent of Canada’s Members of Parliament?

A. 21%
B. 31%
C. 41%
D. 51%

4) In 2007, women make up what percent of the U.S. Senate?

A. 14%
B. 21%
C. 33%
D. 50%

5) In 2007, women make up what percent of the U.S. Congress generally?

A. 16%
B. 23%
C. 35%
D. 50%

6) In 2007, women make up what percent of the state legislatures in the U.S. (with percentages of all fifty states averaged)?

A. 24%
B. 35%
C. 46%
D. 50%

7) In 2007, what percent of tenured professors at PhD-granting universities in the U.S. are women?

A. 20%
B. 30%
C. 40%
D. 50%

8) In 2007, what percent of Fortune 500 CEOs in the U.S. are women?

A. 2.6%
B. 15%
C. 26%
D. 50%

9) In 2007 (by measures so far), what percentage of the speakers at web conferences are women?

A. 37%
B. 47%
C. 57%
D. 67%

10) In 2007, how many of the 28 translators of the newly published English translation of the Greek Septuagint are women?

A. 1
B. 5
C. 15
D. 22
So how are we doing? What do the numbers say? And how did you do? You may have recognized the correct answer for each question is “A.”

The real question is whether answer A ought to be “correct” this late in the history of men and women.

(I also wonder whether Frank Miller really had to have Sparta’s Queen Gorgo agree to be unfaithful in her marriage just to earn the right to speak to the all-male Council on behalf of her husband, her city, and her nation. She did. That is, she did sleep with a scoundrel, but she also did have to do that. In 2007, Miller gets it right. We must continue to revise the history of the rhetoric of women until it’s correct. Miller’s film adaptation of his original graphic novel 300 is a “90 percent accurate” history of a profound human struggle, and of “the Spartans' heroic code,” and of “the key role played by women in backing up, indeed reinforcing, the male martial code of heroic honor.” That’s according to film director Zack Snyder and Cambridge Greek history Professor Paul Cartledge. I just regret that Athenian philosopher rhetorician Aristotle isn’t here today to see the movie, and to hear that valiant [woman] Gorgo. Maybe we Westerners would do well to listen and to act as bravely.)

The questions and answers of our quiz are from these sources:

Girl with Pen
The Institute of Chartered Accountants of British Colombia
Christian Science Monitor
Feminist Law Professors
The SWWAN Blog
Matrocracy
The Lilith Gallery
LawGeek
New English Translation of the Septuagint
Better Bibles Blog

Sunday, November 11, 2007

Feminist Binary: Eleventh Step

Feminist Binary: Eleventh Step

Sought through prayer and meditation
to improve our conscious contact with God
as we understood Him,
praying only for knowledge of His Will for us
and the power to carry that out.
-- Anonymous Alcoholics
(Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith)

הלאה הטמהו םיליתפהו תמתחה ימל
-- Tamar
(Moses?)

Think I broke the wings off that little song bird
She's never gonna fly to the top of the world right now
Top of the world
I don't have to answer any of these questions
Don't have no God to teach me no lessons
-- “a man who has passed on,
having a lot of regrets”
(Natalie Maines)

I wish I’d listened to my mother. We may all wish that Aristotle had listened to his mother, for a different reason. More on that in a second.

THE IRONY OF A “FEMINIST BINARY”

First, I want us now to contemplate and, if possible, to enjoy the feminist binary. (That should help us in several ways better appreciate Aristotle’s story, and mine, of ignoring mom.) But a “feminist binary”?! Many feminist scholars explain “the binary” as purely masculinist. Some even, rightly, blame our Western “either/or” ways of knowing all on Aristotle. So it sounds really strange to hear anyone claim that good feminisms use a binary method.

Aristotle would laugh at us, saying: “See what you’ve done? When you feminists try to imagine reality without my binary, then you’ve used it. Ironically, you say: EITHER Aristotle’s binary OR something different. Ha!” We would have to give Aristotle some credit for recognizing irony. But in reply to Aristotle, I’d say (1) there really is a feminist binary and (2) that the feminist binary is neither Aristotelian (i.e., masculinist) nor really such a limited and pure binary at all. This takes some thinking. But stay with me.

Initially, let’s review how feminist scholars can and must characterize Aristotle’s masculinist binary. Then, let’s hear how different feminism is. But we can and must enjoy the twists in the plot. (We’ll even let C. S. Lewis talk some again, as he tells his story of escaping Aristotle). And maybe then, if you’re still with me, we can tell on me, and on Aristotle.

THE MASCULINIST BINARY

Nancy Mairs articulates the feminist binary best. She starts by contemplating how we’ve learned to enjoy (or to tolerate in experience) the masculinst binary. Here’s what Mairs says:

The masculinist binary is “the language of opposites,” which we understand as “the fundamental structure of patriarchy” and as “the dominant discourse” of our Western culture ever since Aristotle.

The masculinist binary, we should understand, works like this:

In order to get what he wants, then, the father must have power to coerce those around him to meet his demands. To have power is to alienate oneself, however, because power is always power over and the preposition demands an object. The fundamental structure of patriarchy is thus binary: me/not me, active/passive, culture/nature, normal/deviant, good/bad, masculine/feminine, public/private, political/personal, form/content, subjective/objective, friend/enemy, true/false. . . . It is a structure, both spatial and temporal, predicated upon separation, not relation. It demands rupture, the split into halves engendered by the abrupt erection of the phallus: those who have and those who have not. It speaks the language of opposites. . . [in] a dimorphic world. (Voice Lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer, 41)

Michelle Ballif has written something similar on the masculinist binary. Ballif, on the one hand, makes clear Aristotle’s part:

According to Aristotle’s aesthetics, a narrative must be arranged according to some organizing principle . . . [which] he [himself] provides us with. . . Aristotle also offers us the classificatory system of binaries to help us order our stories, to order our experiences, to order ourselves. ("Re/Dressing Histories: Or, On Recovering Figures Who Have Been Laid Bare by Our Gaze" 93)

Ballif is saying that Aristotle pushes the dominant binary method in his epistemology. He recreates for us (no, he distorts--imposes upon us) the way a good story is to be told (hang the epic poets his teacher had been saying), and the Aristotelian method has become for us the only way of telling stories, even our stories. Now the rhetorician-philosopher-scientist dominates literature.

HOW DIFFERENT THE FEMINIST BINARY

Ballif, on the other hand, presses us to imagine this:

“[What i]f there were no binaries, no either/or alternatives?” (96)

And she finds a feminist binary answer in Helene Cixous:

What if Truth were a Woman (Nietzsche)—that is, a counterfeit coin—what then?
Cixous replies,

Then all stories would have to be told differently, the future would be incalculable, the historical forces would, will, change hands, bodies, another thinking, as yet not thinkable, will transform the functioning of all society. (“Sorties” 93) (97)

Cixous and Ballif say that Aristotle’s method has consequences which exclude good story telling by any other means but his. And the way we tell our stories, or allow them to be told, has dire consequences for the functioning of all society. This is a grand statement, teetering ironically on the edge of the modern metanarrative. But maybe Mairs is a little easier to understand than Ballif in her postmodern musings and than Cixous in somebody else’s bad translation of strange French into stranger English.

Mairs discusses the feminist binary (in cogent English) this way:

[The masculinist Aristotelian binary] speaks the language of opposites.

Which is not women’s language, since women, for a variety of reasons, live in a polymorphic rather than a dimorphic world, a world in which the differentiation of self from other may never completely take place, in which multiple selves may engage multiply with the multiple desires of the creatures in it. Some theorists would claim that all subjects function thus. But as Julia Kristeva points out, female subjectivity, traditionally linked to cyclical and monumental time rather than to linear time, lies outside “language considered as the enunciation of sentences (noun + verb, topic – comment, beginning – ending).” Possessing an “irreducible identity, without equal in the opposite sex and, as such, exploded, plural, fluid,” a woman may be driven “to break the code, to shatter language, to find a specific discourse closer to the body and the emotions, to the unnamable repressed by the social contract.”

The difference that emerges here is not the polarity intrinsic in the dominant discourse, which reduces “woman to man’s opposite, his other, the negative of the positive.” No, this is an absolute and radical alterity that enfolds the other, as in pregnancy a woman’s immune system shuts down in such a way that she shelters and nourishes, rather than rejects and expels, the foreign body within her: “Cells fuse, split, and proliferate; volumes grow, tissues stretch, and body fluids change rhythm, speeding up or slowing down. Within the body, growing as a graft, indomitable, there is an other. And no one is present, within that simultaneously dual and alien space, to signify what is going on.” Feminine discourse is not the language of opposites but a babel of eroticism, attachment, and empathy. (40-42)

Notice here Mairs’ repeated use of “not”: especially not the polarity intrinsic in the dominant discourse and not the language of opposites but. An opposing is not The opposite that Aristotle insists it is. Rather, a difference emerges, the very difference of a woman enfolds the other, and that difference is simultaneously dual: it’s a developing, creative, “both-and” now. Re-read that last sentence of Mairs above to get the absolute and radical alterity of the feminist binary. Feminine discourse is not the language of opposites but a babel of eroticism, attachment, and empathy.

Now let’s look at an exemplary piece of (feminist) scholarship that works the feminist binary. It’s Patricia Bizzell’s article, “Feminist Methods of Research in the History of Rhetoric: What Difference Do They Make?” In the final paragraphs, what has emerged are Bizzell’s (personal, passionate) statements about how feminist research methods enfold traditional, masculinist (binary) research methods into the feminist (binary) duality of simultaneity. She says it so much better than I (so re-read the article, or at least this bit before her conclusion):

Have [afra-feminist Jacqueline Jones] Royster, and other feminist scholars for whom she has now more completely articulated methodologies already in practice, departed radically from the rhetorical tradition [especially Aristotle’s taken-for-granted dominant binary]? Yes and no. No, because their work relies upon many of the traditional tools of research in the history of rhetoric . . . working within this [dominant, masculinist] tradition and enriching it, rather than constituting utterly separate or parallel rhetorical traditions. But yes, because in order to get at the activities of these new rhetors [i.e., the women silenced by traditional histories of rhetoric], researchers have had to adopt radically new methods as well, methods which violate some of the most cherished conventions of academic research, most particularly in bringing the person of the researcher, her body, her emotions, and dare one say, her soul, into the work. (16)

Here’s the summary so far. The masculinist binary method articulated by Aristotle and perfected since by men in the Western world is our dominant discourse. The method is the way of knowing that is part and parcel of the divide-and-conquer and subject-and-dominate approach. Feminists, good feminists at least, have no problem with the masculinist (mere dimorphic) epistemology AS LONG AS a different, an-other binary is employed. Good feminists must differentiate between the masculinist binary (“either / or”) and the feminist binary (“yes, there’s that either / or and yet there’s also the both / and”). Good feminists may see some value, for example, in some uses of Aristotelianism, in some appropriations of traditional and archaeological historiography, in some adaptations of the plus/minus feature-dependent mechanistic Transformational-Grammar of Noam Chomsky, in some dominant rhetorical critical methods, in some aspects of Sigmund Freud’s psychology on the sub-conscious (which Ballif blasts as soundly as she blasts forceful Aristotelianism), in some story telling. Good feminists do see value in the dominant discourse of men, AS LONG AS the masculinist binary does not dominate the other. Aristotle’s mother was not the one who said to him, “You cannot have your cake and eat it too.”

ABUSES OF THE FEMINIST BINARY (WHICH LOOK AN AWFUL LOT LIKE THE MASCULINIST BINARY)

So far, I’ve been talking about either the masculinist binary of Aristotle or the feminist binary of good feminists. You’ve caught my implication: there is bad feminism. I’m guilty of it, and my mother may have warned me of it (and we’re getting to my story soon enough here). And others are guilty of bad feminism.

Bad feminism often resorts only to the mere masculinist binary, usually in the futile effort to abandon or to denigrate the masculinist binary. Elsewhere, I’ve discussed how Gesa Kirsch and Joy Ritchie have felt they needed to abandon the feminist personal and to resort to masculinist methods “beyond the personal.” In doing so, they cannot easily allow a feminist student to re-conceive her own feminism within her new found Christianity. And I’ve pointed out how the wonderful Cheryl Glenn retreats to the male tradition when she fails inclusively to recognize African and Asian rhetorics as rhetoric. In both cases, we see feminists in the dominant positions of power (i.e., teaching professors and a researching scholar) as trying to hold on to limited notions of “feminism” (i.e., something that can neither include nor be included by Christianity) and of “rhetoric” against what emerges in students and other outsiders.

Bad feminism, then, often lords it over those who challenge feminism (or rhetoric) in rather authoritative senses. Like the bully on the playground, this kind of bad feminism takes it’s ball and goes home, not letting anyone else play. But there’s another kind of bad feminism, which is purposefully snobby. It keeps playing just to keep others from playing. I’ll try to explain. Let’s look at some notions in the life and writings of C. S. Lewis.

FEMINIST TOOLS OF C. S. LEWIS

C. S. Lewis, not exactly a feminist much less a good feminist, uses the feminist binary nonetheless. And Lewis gives us related feminist tools such as “second meanings” and the two orders of consciousness, “contemplation” and “enjoyment.”

We get “second meanings” from Lewis’s chapter title by the same name in his Reflections on the Psalms. Now, Lewis reads and writes as a lowly novice, as a simple outsider. He confesses from the get go that he’s no Hebrew scholar, and yet he reads second meanings in the Hebrew poetry. He’s seen such second meanings, unintended meanings, in texts authored by Greek and Roman men. The text, Lewis rightly observes, does not contain only the author’s intention that only insider-readers can apprehend. No. Even the marginal, especially the low outsider, gets more. The text is not: either what the author intends or nothing. No. Out of the outsiders’ readings emerges more that enfolds the original intentions into “a babel of eroticism, attachment, and empathy.” Yes, of course, you recognize Mairs and not Lewis as the original author of that quotation here. But in my “feminist” readings of Lewis and Mairs, I see second meanings, not theirs only, but also theirs and mine together. Lewis goes on to say that original authors may or may not want to concede the second meanings when confronted with them. But the good authors will allow for both.

We get “contemplation” and “enjoyment” as two experiences of consciousness from Lewis as he tell us his own life story of conversion in Surprised by Joy. Here’s how Lewis puts it:

These are technical terms . . . ; “Enjoyment has nothing to do with pleasure, nor “Contemplation” with the contemplative life. When you see a table you “enjoy” the act of seeing and “contemplate” the table. Later, if you took up Optics and thought about Seeing itself, you would be contemplating seeing and enjoying the thought. In bereavement you contemplate the beloved and the beloved’s death and . . . “enjoy” the loneliness and grief but a psychologist, if he were considering you as a case of melancholia, would be contemplating your grief and enjoying psychology. We do not “think a thought” in the same sense in which we “think that Herodotus is unreliable. When we think a thought, “thought” is a cognate accusative (like “blow” in “strike a blow”). We enjoy the thought (that Herodotus is unreliable) and, in doing so, contemplate the unreliability of Herodotus.

I accepted this distinction [between “enjoyment” and “contemplation”] at once and have ever since regarded it as an indispensable tool of thought. A moment later its consequences—for me quite catastrophic—began to appear. It seemed to me self-evident that one essential property of love, hate, fear, hope, or desire was attention to their object. To cease thinking about or attending to the woman [for me as her lover] is, so far, to cease loving; to cease thinking about or attending to the dreaded thing is, so far, to cease being afraid. But to attend to your own love or fear is to cease attending to the loved or dreaded object. In other words the enjoyment and the contemplation of our inner activities are incompatible. You cannot hope and also think about hoping at the same moment; for in hope we look to hope’s object and we interrupt this by (so to speak) turning round to look at the hope itself. Of course, the two activities [enjoyment and contemplation] can and do alternate with great rapidity; but they are distinct and incompatible. . . In introspection we try to look “inside ourselves” and see what is going on. But nearly everything that was going on a moment before is stopped by this very act of our turning to look at it. Unfortunately this does not mean that introspection finds nothing. On the contrary, it finds precisely what is left behind by the suspension of all our normal activities; and what is left behind is mainly mental images and physical sensations. The great error is to mistake this mere sediment or track or by-product for the activities themselves. That is how men may come to believe that thought is only unspoken words, or the appreciation of poetry only a collection of mental pictures, when these in reality are what the thought or the appreciation left behind—like the swell at sea, working after the wind has dropped. Not, of course, that these activities, before we stopped them by introspection, were unconscious. We do not love, fear, or think without knowing it. Instead of the twofold division into Conscious and Unconscious, we need a threefold division: the Unconscious, the Enjoyed, and the Contemplated. (217-19).

Lewis here has been showing us the problem of Freud in a way that Ballif shows us the problem of Freud. To reduce human mental activity to either the Subsconscious or the Conscious is problematic. One must not dominate. But if we go beyond this "either / or" masculinist binary, then what emerges is an other way of thinking about and even experiencing consciousness. Only one sort of consciousness (either “contemplation” or “enjoyment”) must not be exclusive to the other; and how must either be dominant over the other?

Lewis does not connect “second meanings” with “consciousness,” but I want to. With “second meanings” we see that the marginalized outsider can observe more than the original author and his insider audience does. Likewise, with “enjoyment,” we can see that there is profound subjectivity; just as in “contemplation” there is the intended objectivity. We need both. That is, we need both an author’s intentions in the text and all the unattended second meanings. And we need subjectivity if we need objectivity. In this kind of (good) “feminism,” there is the “both and,” but there is NOT only subjectivity or only objectivity. Not only the masculinist binary. Not only a feminism that refuses to contemplate the masculinist binary (if that feminism seeks to enjoy the masculinst binary).

I realize this is very complex. I’m trying to bring together some very complicated things that relate to my translation project. Translation is a feminist move, if done right. Translation involves the “both and” not just the “either / or.” Translation, if done right, gets at the second meanings, and new meanings emerge. Scholars such as Thomas Conley (in his article “The Greekless Reader”) may suggest that no translation is really worth much in the study of Greek texts. But Conley just doesn’t understand translation, and its value. Translation, if done right, is both contemplation and enjoyment. Translation, if done right, is what Mikhail Epstein calls interlation. Especially when the translation is lined up with the original text, there is interlation, or a “stereotext.” Translation, if done right, allows the scientist writer to use his or her “head” to name precisely in either-or (as science writer Alan Lightman puts it); and translation, if done right, allows the artist writer to use her or his “heart” and “stomach” actually to unname, to get after the readers’ belief (as novelist Alan Lightman puts it). Lightman actually confessed to me that he wants the translators of his English language novels (now translated into 30 some languages) to be both scientists (concerned with the Aristotelian binary) and artists (concerned with much more).

This is not how Aristotle wants us to do translation. The male-authored Greek text with its original meaning is dominant for Aristotle. Everything else is excluded. Aristotle does not want to do translation.

WHAT MOTHER SAID

In my last post, I tried to say that Aristotle had no translation theory, that he in his position of power, didn’t really need and consequently didn’t even want to translate. At some point in his life, Aristotle looked at his mother as a biologically botched human being. Aristotle looked at his wife and at his daughter in the same way. They talked differently from males. They were not males. Since males are naturally more perfect than females, then why should a man listen to a woman? Why should Aristotle listen to the female who is his mother, the female who is his wife, the female who is his daughter? And how? What he (and Socrates and Plato) says and writes matters most. The categorical difference makes all the difference. And the difference, the consequential difference, is the one of the “man who has passed on, having a lot of regrets.” Look at that third epigraph above; did you know Dixie Chick’s Natalie Maines is singing about Aristotle when she sings his song, “Top of the World”?

Maybe translation is required for a male to listen to a female. Maybe Aristotle thought that. But had he listened to Phaestis, his mother, (or to Pythias his wife, or Pythias his daughter), what he would have heard would be an absolute and radical alterity that enfolds the other, including the man Aristotle.

Now I’ll end this post by telling the story of me not listening to my mom. My mom wanted me to translate something, to interpret something for the guests when my wife and I were married. Mom wanted me to help them contemplate the part of the wedding ceremony that was in another culture, in another language, other than the dominant culture and language of the guests. I refused. I just wanted to enjoy the ceremony. (Besides, my mother, my dad, my aunt, and my parents-in-law-to-be had offered my fiancée and me already too much unsolicited advice about our wedding.) You see, the people of two Karo Batak tribes of North Sumatra had woven a special wedding cloth for my fiancée and me to be used in the ceremony. (My parents had been adopted into the tribes and the people of the tribes wanted, very far away, to contribute to the marriage of my parent’s son, me.) Although the meaning of this textile was quite apparent to all living in that part of that island in Indonesia, my fiancée and I were married in the United States, where even the Javanese visitors and missionaries would not have understood the Batak custom. Mom simply requested I both enjoy the Batak marriage ritual and also help the wedding guests contemplate (in translation on a written program) the custom. My refusal was snobby. But I rationalized in a (bad) “feminist” way by refusing to be part of the binary.

So now I repent. But I did leave (snobbishy) untranslated the second epigraph above. So let’s contemplate it and then enjoy it together. Please let me translate and make some applications. The quotation is from Tamar, who disguised herself as a prostitute to trick her father-in-law Judah into having sex with her so that she could get pregnant, conceive, and have a baby. Because there was no DNA testing back then, she took his signet, cords, and staff from him during the sex act to prove later that he’d slept with her. But to add insult to injury not only does she trick him, she makes him figure out that he was duped. She does not even bother to explain. She says: “Discern, I pray thee, whose are these, the signet, and the cords, and the staff” (Genesis 38:25). This kind of snobbishness is bad feminism, that leaves the other hanging alone. In my own story, of course, I did not have Tamar’s cause but I used her method: make the others figure it out. I’m afraid that’s been my practice all too often through the doctoral program also: I’m going to write how I’m going to write; hang the reader who can’t translate that for herself or himself. (My fiancée did have a voice, and a very good one, in how our wedding went, but that’s another story. It’s our anniversary today.)

SUMMARY

I’ve not tried to be linear in my story telling here. You see that. I confess it. I do think Michelle Ballif is on to something in her observations that Aristotle imposes too much order on us (i.e., “either tell your story this way, or it’s a bad narrative”).

However, I think feminists need not retreat, simply, to the abandon of Aristotle. Good feminists recognize that and insist on the inclusion of the masculinist binary just as long as it does not dominate and silence the absolute and radical alterity of other kinds of discourse. The recognition by good feminists is a “both and” that requires difference. For example, good feminists recognize good translation. For good translation recognizes value in both the original text with the author’s original intentions and second meanings both in the original text and in the translated text. Good translation is contemplation and enjoyment.

So, there’s one last epigraph to enjoy and to contemplate: the first one. It’s the eleventh step of the famous Twelve Steps. I think it’s good feminism. The eleventh step of Alcoholics Anonymous gets beyond the addict, goes beyond just me down here and the higher power over there. Taking this step requires inclusivity that neither Aristotle (by his binary method) nor the deadbeat and now dead daddy that Natalie Maines sings about has. Taking the eleventh step also requires the inclusivity that neither Tamar nor I (by retreating to a “you figure it out” enjoyment) have. The eleventh step, following the feminist binary, requires better and more. (Now, back to translation, both enjoyment and contemplation).

update, cross-ref: First Step: Translation in Recovery, Hyperbole, and Parab(o)le

Thursday, November 1, 2007

First Step: Translation in Recovery, Hyperbole, and Parab(o)le

We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—
that our lives had become unmanageable.

μακριοι ο πτωχο τ πνεματι
τι ατν στιν βασιλεα τν ορανν

ες αυτν δ λθν
(
φη . . . ναστς πορεσομαι . . . κα ρ :
μαρτον ες τν ορανν κα νπιν σου
ο
κτι εμ ξιος
πο
ησν με ς να τν μισθων σου
κα
ναστς λθεν)

μετανοετε
γγικεν γρ βασιλεα τν ορανν

δ επεν να κριε
κα
γρ τ κυνρια σθει π τν ψιχων
τ
ν πιπτντων π τς τραπζης τν κυρων ατν

ρξατο λυπεσθαι κα δημονεν
τ
τε λγει ατος
περ
λυπς στιν ψυχ μου ως θαντου
με
νατε δε κα γρηγορετε μετ' μο
κα
προελθν μικρν πεσεν π πρσωπον ατο
προσευχ
μενος κα λγων

Aristotle is not an alcoholic. And he is not anonymous.

Aristotle is not a woman, not a barbarian, not a slave, not poor, not homeless, not uneducated, not afraid for his daughter who is dominated by a deity, not crying out in a “safe place” in profound pain to his closest friends and his dear father all about to abandon him.

Aristotle is neither in recovery nor in need of doing recovery work.

Aristotle may well manage to be our father of Western modern mathematics, of physics, of biology, zo-ology, medicine, psychology, sociology, anthropology, civics, politics, political science, the art of war, ethics, history, linguistics, literacy, literature, poetry, theater, philosophy, metaphysics, writing, and rhetoric. But where does that get him? And were does it get us?

Aristotle does not translate. And by his own Aristotelian philology he will not be translated well. He does not have a translation theory. He does not even take the first step.

A (good) translation theory starts with admission of ambiguity and humility. (And now I begin listening humbly to the ambiguous epigraphs above. I’m listening by writing out the next six paragraphs in some correspondence with the epi-graphs. This is not yet translation, although I do “translate” some of the Greek here. Please don’t even start think that these zany para-graphs are some sort of glimpse into what that kind of translation will look like. I don’t. The glimpses are at http://rhetoricofaristotle.wetpaint.com. In posting these crazy playful notes, I’m going to stop blogging for a while. I will be reading and might be commenting on your blogs. Those of you who’ve been commenting with me, and at me, and from me here or at other blogs may recognize yourselves, or me, in my silliness here. Apologies again. I really do want to step up my work on translating Aristotle’s Rhetoric, with a translation theory. Did I already say Aristotle lacks one? As you see from the other Greek here, I’m co-opting the practical, rhetorical, feministical translation theory of Jesus Christ. And I’m converting again in a different way this week: from PC desktop to Mac book pro. So I’m stepping forward, again, admitting a certain powerlessness and lack of manageability.)

A good translation theory insists first on the greatest teacher’s original lessons not being “in the original” if ever original at all. It initially gets off its high horse – as we say here in Texas – by leaving what has been in the mother tongue of a barbarian – as they called it there in Greece – and by leaving it finally in the collaborative hands of unskilled students of barbaric Greek. This does not begin to account for all the other barbarisms, the truly dirty languages, that the original stories get found in. (I’m talking now about Jesus Christ and his disciples, and what “they” did in rhetoric, in translation. They admitted powerlessness, and yielded manageability, and began recovery work for the underdogs, for the marginalized, for themselves. Okay. Yes, I know I’m punning “recovery” as something feminist historians of rhetoric and literature and philosophy and the Jewish and Christian scriptures also do in the academy.)

A good translation theory begins before Aristotle’s teachings on “Pneuma,” which is in 6 letters how we transliterate 1 word for His full and vital inspiration, His spiritual authority, which is what we today appropriate as the plenary inspiration of the text with certain necessarily-mysterious Divine-only locked-up-in-His-heaven categories of mistakes. A translation theory worth its salt starts at the point of utter poverty of breath. (I’m referring to the first “blessed” in the beatitudes. These inspired words must find their way back into un-recorded Hebrew Aramaic speech, and recovered into translated Greek that mirrors earlier collaborative translations of Hebrew into Greek by 70 some Jewish men commissioned by a polytheistic Egyptian king in a city established by a polytheistic Greek conqueror, the man who is none other than Aristotle’s very own student. Now, if that last sentence takes your breath away, then “it’s all good,” as my children would translate it. I might translate this whole paragraph on inspiration in translation theory with this whole English-Greek word: hyperbole.”)

A translation theory that yields some light is one that speaks sometimes-shadowy “parables.” We could re-translate our Greek word parables ambiguously and humbly as this: as someone else’s stories thrown along side our own. But if I get on both sides, then I might come to the end of myself, moving in and out of the stories, until I move beyond that first step.

(I’m writing here about prodigals. One prodigal son, C. S. Lewis, writes the story of his own personal conversion out of atheism, in which God is the great chess-master who, late in the game, approaches checkmate by getting the literary critic, in his consciousness, to move out of simple “contemplation” [and shall we call such “contemplation” “Aristotelian,” with it’s cold detached singular arrogant objectivism?]. God moves Lewis into another side of consciousness: into robust and vibrant “enjoyment.” And Lewis begins to yield power and management to the translation, perhaps the interlation [as Mikhail Epstein theorizes it], between conscious contemplation and conscious enjoyment. So for more on that parable, find Lewis’s Surprised by Joy, but beware: it’s a life changer. Beware even more if you’re not a fan of literature or literary translation theory.)

A good translation theory starts back(wards) by re-thinking everything. (Here, you may recognize that I’ve translated μετανοετε as [or by] “re-thinking everything.” We could have “translated” it “metanoia” by transliteration, the way Aristotelian rhetoricians and Christian preachers do with “hyperbole” and “parable.”)

A good translation theory with what Hélène Cixous also might advise from the get go is: avec l'écriture féminine. (Of course, pardon my French, or hers in my italics; but I do find it amazing that Jesus would speak to women, in their own goyim ethnic mother tongues – even in Greek on occasion, although most Jewish men and many ethnic Greeks under Aristotle wouldn’t bring themselves to think of letting these botched humans – especially the foreign females – speak. At first, Jesus himself appears to struggle with the powerlessness and unmanageably of their pleas, but, in interlation or translation or translingualization, their womanly rhetoric amazes and humbles him instantly, genuinely, and with great effect. The Greek deities in the daughters always over-hear and flee.)

A good translation theory seems not safe at first. But it starts to admit that none of us is safe especially by oneself or even from oneself. There are dangers from which we need safe retreat with the closest of others so as neither to be abused nor to abuse, so as to face pain and abandonment and death. Most of us have to start earlier, with our fears and resentments and needs and imperfections with interactive boundaries in place. (And if Aristotle’s safe place is being on top of the world without needing to translate into or out of the barbarian’s mother tongue, then for most of the rest of us, a safe place must be altogether different. Jesus models this difference. He invites interaction – translations and interlations and “monolingual demonstrations” between men and women of extreme difference and imperfection – but he attends to his very personal needs in safe places. That’s all until “pain” and “abandonment” yield to their sister, “death.” Then, the “seed falls into the ground – good ground is another translation – and dies”: how else would he translate and how else could we learn without such a first step?)

update, cross-ref link: Feminist Binary: Eleventh Step