The Gender of the Biblioblogger Count

This quick post is just an update of "The Gender of Blogger Clout."

3 things:

1. A comparison of woman : male ratios in the top OpEd journals with the woman : male ratios in the top Biblioblogs.

theopedproject.org VS, biblioblogtop50.wordpress.com

2.  A couple of related posts and comments.

There's a new comment at the post where, as Rod puts it, "April DeConick was labelled a man-hating angry feminist as some of us just dismissed all too easy her request to even change how the stats take place (another day, another time)."  The commenter self-identifies as a woman by name and says:

I don't know about the Alexa ratings, but for those lists that exist because someone nominates a blog or requests that their own blog be listed-- if this is being perceived as a "boys club" (whether accurately or otherwise), some women may simply not be trying, or may not be interested in trying, to get in. Why try if the deck is already stacked against you? (Even if that's just a perception, it could be affecting the ratings.)

There's a new post at The Biblioblog Top 50 blog.  We can imagine, from the "us"-vs.-"them" and the "we"-vs.-"you" language, that the writer of the post is a man (and not one of those women bloggers of the Bible).  He is ostensibly speaking on behalf of the top men blogging the Bible.  He's taking a stab at humor, is saying "Now accepting women!" and is playing on "April" DeConick's name.  His final sentences are as follows:

We will also oppose those forces of systemic gender inequality that exist to marginalize (but not in a victimy way, ok, April) women in academia and in academic biblical studies. In solidarity with all those who are othered by the hegemonic centre, we call on all bibliobloggers to discontinue blogging about those institutions which defend the status quo, such as the Bible, the political system, the churches, biblical studies, and the Biblical Archaeology Review - until such time as the system crumbles and falls! Ok?

So is the deck stacked against women who are bibliobloggers?  Who is really interested in joining this Top Club now?  Are "we" men now joining "women in academia and in academic biblical studies" in opposing "systemic gender inequality"?  Is our equal strategy really "to discontinue blogging about" any given or particular topic?  Is that what this man thinks women want?  Yes, I know.  Get serious now.  This guy (who doesn't need to identify his sex or even to use his name) is just funny and really only just wants a laugh.  So lighten up.  Ok?


3.  A comment on the title of this post.

The title of my posts can also be humorous.  I'm following Anne Carson's lead here; she writes that insightful and funny essay, "The Gender of Sound."  She has not, it seems, done anything to discontinue writing "about those institutions which defend the status quo."  She does, in fact, write about the bible, the political system, and translator bias, and gender bias, and Aristotle, and so on and so forth.

16 stupid biblical attempts at description: Anne Carson

The following are some of my attempts to describe how Anne Carson influences how I read the Bible.  You might call them stupid.  You might call them biblical.  You might even count them so that when you finally get to 16 you can figure on just how she has influenced me.  I'll try to help:

1. 

Attempts at description are stupid: who can all at once describe a human being? even when he is presented to us we only begin that knowledge of his appearance which must be completed by innumerable impressions under differing circumstances. We recognize the alphabet; we are not sure of the language. I am only mentioning the point that Gwendolen saw by the light of a prepared contrast in the first minutes of her meeting with Grandcourt: they were summed up in the words, "He is not ridiculous." But forthwith Lord Brackenshaw was gone, and what is called conversation had begun, the first and constant element in it being that Grandcourt looked at Gwendolen persistently with a slightly exploring gaze, but without change of expression, while she only occasionally looked at him with a flash of observation a little softened by coquetry. Also, after her answers there was a longer or shorter pause before he spoke again.
--George Eliot (aka Mary Anne Evans), Daniel Deronda (chapter 11)

2. 

And for me, even when I read George Eliot, I read her for the descriptions of weather. Perhaps that’s the wrong way to read George Eliot, but how comforting, the way she describes light moving over trees and lying on a bench and somebody’s foot there.  [Paris Review Interviewer, Will Aitken: But you quote Eliot saying that attempts at description are stupid. Did she really say that?]  She did say that. But she keeps on trying to do it. She does limit it though. I think she has a much greater capacity for description than she allows herself. The weather is just a dab at the beginning of each chapter usually. Then she goes onto metaphysical dialogues where people discuss the meaning of life. But the weather is always there at the beginning, and it is undeniable. She just gets it. She describes clouds moving over the sun at eleven o’clock in the morning on a path in an oak forest and it’s just exactly how that it be. I admire that more than any other aspect of writing.
--Anne Carson, "The Art of Poetry No. 88"

3. 

..... Attention is a task we share, you and I. To keep attention strong means to keep it from settling. Partly for this reason I have chosen to talk about two men at once [i.e., Simonides of Keos and Paul Celan]. They keep each other from settling. Moving and not settling, they are side by side in a conversation and yet no conversation takes place. Face to face, yet they do not know one another, did not live in the same era, never spoke the same language. With and against, aligned and adverse, each is placed like a surface on which the other may come into focus. Sometimes you can see a celestial object better by looking at something else, with it, in the sky.
..... Think of the Greek preposition πρός. When used with the accusative case, this preposition means "toward, upon, against, with, ready for, face to face, engaging, concerning, touching, in reply to, in respect of, compared with, according to, as accompaniment for." It is the preposition chosen by John the Evangelist to describe the relationship between God and The Word in the first verse of the first chapter of his Revelation [i.e., John's Gospel as revealing The Word with translation]:

..... πρὸς θεόν

"And The Word was with God" is how the usual translation goes. What kind of withness is it?
..... I am writing this on the train to Milan. We flash past towers and factories, stations, yards, then a field where a herd of black horses is just turning to race uphill. "Attempts at description are stupid," George Eliot says, yet one may encounter a fragment of unexhausted time. Who can name its transactions, the sense that fell through us of untouchable wind, unknown effort--one black mane?
--Anne Carson, Economy of the Unlost: (Reading Simonides of Keos with Paul Celan)

4. 

..... What does Alkestis' resurrection mean for the sacrificial contract that Admetos had negotiated with Death? This question is never addressed in the play. Mathematically Death is down one soul; common sense (what the Greeks call Necessity) tells us such a situation can’t last. But Herakles seems a character able to override common sense. He releases Alkestis simply by choosing to do so. As if to say, within every death a life stands waiting to be set free, should anyone have the nerve to do it. As if to say, try looking deep into a house, a marriage, or an idea like Necessity and you will see clear through to the other side. Death, like tragedy, is a game with rules. Why not just break the rules?
..... Rules broken by Euripides in Alkestis include the rule of closure. What are we to make of the ending? Can we be sure the veiled woman is alive? that she is Alkestis? that she will live happily ever after with her husband and children? Critics have doubted all these. There is a kind of nuptial drama staged in the final scene--perhaps a parody of the ancient Greek wedding, which centered upon an unveiling of the bride before the eyes of her husband and some exchange of words between them--that stalls oddly at its peak moment. Here the bride is unveiled to her husband at 971/1121 (or so it seems to me; critics doubt this too) but she will not be permitted to speak for three days due to her death-polluted condition. An eerie silence carries her into the big dark house of her unconventional husband.
..... I find I want to say less rather than more about Alkestis. Not because there is less in this play but because the surface has a speed and shine that evaporate with exegesis, like some of [Alfred] Hitchcock’s plots. Or a trembling of laughter, terrible if it broke out. (248-49) 
--Anne Carson, Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides 

5. 

Silence is as important as words in the practice and study of translation.  This may sound like a cliché.  (I think it is a cliché.  Perhaps we can come back to cliché).  There are two kinds of silence that trouble a translator.  I want to talk less about physical silence than about metaphysical silence.   Physical silence happens when you are looking at, say, a poem of Sappho's inscribed on a papyrus from two thousand years ago that has been torn in half.  Half the poem is empty space. A translator can signify or even rectify this lack of text in various ways  – with blankness or brackets or textual conjecture - and she is justified in doing so because Sappho did not intend that part of the poem to fall silent.  Metaphysical silence happens inside words themselves. And its intentions are harder to define.  Every translator
knows the point where one language cannot be translated into another.  Take the word cliché.  Cliché is a French borrowing, past participle of the verb clicher, a term from printing meaning "to make a stereotype from a relief printing surface." It has been assumed into English unchanged, partly because using French words makes English-speakers feel more intelligent and partly because the word has imitative origins (it is supposed to mimic the sound of the printer's die striking the metal) that make it untranslatable.  English has different sounds. English falls silent. This kind of linguistic decision is simply a measure of foreignness, an acknowledgment of the fact that languages are not sciences of one another, you cannot match them item for item.  But now what if, within this silence, you discover a deeper one....

--Anne Carson, "The Question of Translation"

6.

There is something maddeningly attractive about the untranslatable, about a word that goes silent in transit.  I want to explore some examples of this attraction, at its most maddened, from the trial and condemnation of Joan of Arc.

All Joan's guidance, military and moral, came from a source she called "voices." All the blame of her trial was gathered up in this question, the nature of the voices. She began to hear them when she was 12 years old. They spoke to her from outside, commanding her life and death, her military victories and revolutionary politics, her dress code and heretical beliefs. During the trial Joan's judges returned again and again to this crux: they insisted on knowing the story of the voices. They wanted her to name, embody and describe them in ways they could understand, with recognizable religious imagery and emotions, in a conventional narrative that would be susceptible to conventional disproof. They framed this desire in dozens of ways, question after question. They prodded and poked and hemmed her in. Joan despised the line of inquiry and blocked it as long as she could.  It seems that for her the voices had no story. They were an experienced fact so large and real it had solidifed in her as a sort of sensed abstraction – what Virginia Woolf once called "that very jar on the nerves before it has been made anything."  Joan wanted to convey the jar on the nerves without translating it into theological cliché. It is her rage against cliché that draws me to her. A genius is in her rage.  We all feel this rage at some level, at some time.  The genius answer to it is catastrophe.

I say catastrophe is an answer because I believe cliché is a question. We resort to cliché because it's easier than trying to make up something new. Implicit in it is the question, Don't we already know what we think about this? Don't we have a formula we use for this? Can't I just send a standard greeting card or paste in a snapshot of what it was like rather than trying to come up with an original drawing ? During the five months of her trial Joan persistently chose the term “voice” or a few times “counsel” or once “comfort” to describe how God guided her. She did not spontaneously claim that the voices had bodies, faces, names, smell, warmth or mood, nor that they entered the room by the door, nor that when they left she felt bad. Under the inexorable urging of her inquisitors she gradually added all these details. But the storytelling effort was clearly hateful to her and she threw white paint on it wherever she could, giving them responses like:

..... ...You asked that before. Go look at the record.

..... ...Pass on to the next question, spare me.

..... ...I knew that well enough once but I forget.

..... ...That does not touch your process.

..... ...Ask me next Saturday.

And one day when the judges were pressing her to define the voices as singular or plural, she most wonderfully said:

..... The light comes in the name of the voice.

The light comes in the name of the voice is a sentence that stops itself. Its components are simple yet it stays foreign, we cannot own it.

--Anne Carson, "The Question of Translation"

7.

..... It is in large part according to the sounds people make that we judge them sane or insane, male or female, good, evil, trustworthy, depressive, marriageable, moribund, likely or unlikely to make war on us, little better than animals, inspired by God. These judgments happen fast and can be brutal. Aristotle tells us that the highpitched voice of the female is one evidence of her evil disposition, for creatures who are brave or just (like lions, bulls, roosters and the human male) have large deep voices. If you hear a man talking in a gentle or high-pitched voice you know he is a kinaidos (“catamite”).  [See how Aristotle puts this in one of his biological treatises, History of Animals 582a, and in Physiognomics 807a, where he himself has to vocalize nothing, since Aristotle there is a writer to readers, male to other males.]  

..... The poet Aristophanes put a comic turn on this cliché in his Ekklesiazousai: as the women of Athens are about to infiltrate the Athenian assembly and take over political process, the feminist leader Praxagora reassures her fellow female activists that they have precisely the right kind of voices for this task. Because, as she says, “You know that among the young men the ones who turn out to be terrific talkers are the ones who get fucked a lot.”

..... This joke depends on a collapsing together of two different aspects of sound production, quality of voice and use of voice. We will find the ancients continually at pains to associate these two aspects under a general rubric of gender. High vocal pitch goes together with talkativeness to characterize a person who is deviant from or deficient in the masculine ideal of self-control. Women, catamites, eunuchs and androgynes fall into this category. Their sounds are bad to hear and make men uncomfortable. Just how uncomfortable may be measured by the lengths to which Aristotle [writing On the Generation of Animals 787b-788] is willing to go in accounting for the gender of sound physiognomically; he ends up ascribing the lower pitch of the male voice to the tension placed on a man’s vocal chords by his testicles functioning as loom weights.

--Anne Carson, Men in the Off Hours (page 142)

8.

Females blurt out a direct translation of what should be formulated indirectly [as in one of Aristotle's rhetorical syllogisms, or enthymemes, which he formulates indirectly in his Rhetoric, where, at 1398b, he must concede the male Mytileneans honored Sappho “although she was a woman.”]....  [S]ince woman does not bound herself, she must be bounded.
..... The celebrated Greek virtue of self-control (sophrosyne [σωφροσύνη]) has to be defined differently for men and for women, Aristotle maintains. Masculine sophrosyne is rational self-control and resistance to excess, but for the woman sophrosyne means obedience and consists in submitting herself to the control of others.  [See Aristotle's clear description of this defined division of his, in his Politics, Book I, 1260a]
--Anne Carson, Men in the Off Hours (page 142)

9.

..... Aristotle accords to the male in the act of procreation the role of active agent, contributing "motion" and "formation" while the female provides the "raw material," as when a bed (the child) is made by a carpenter (the father) out of wood (the mother).  We might note also that the so-called Pythagorean Table of Oppositions, cited by Aristotle, aligns "boundary" or "limit" on the same side as "masculine": over against "the unbounded" and "feminine" on the other side.
..... The assumptions about women that underlie the views of Plato, Aristotle and the Pythagoreans can be traced to the earliest legends of the Greeks.  Myth is a logic too.  In myth, woman's boundaries are pliant, porous, mutable.  Her power to control them is inadequate, her concern for them unreliable.  Deformation attends her.  She swells, she shrinks, she leaks, she is penetrated, she suffers metamorphoses.
--Anne Carson, Men in the Off Hours (page 133)

10.

IV.

When Isaiah came back in from the desert centuries had passed.

There was nothing left of Isaiah but a big forehead.

The forehead went rolling around the nation and spoke to people

. . . who lept to their feet

and fled.

If the nation had taken Isaiah to court he could have proven his righteousness.

But they met in secret and voted to cut him off.

Shepherds! Chosen ones! Skinny dogs! Blood of a dog! Watchmen

. . . all! said Isaiah.

Isaiah withdrew to the Branch.

It was a blue winter evening, the cold bit like a wire.

Isaiah laid his forehead on the ground.

God arrived.

Why do the righteous suffer? said Isaiah.

Bellings of cold washed down the Branch.

Notice whenever God addresses Isaiah in a feminine singular verb

. . . something dazzling is

about to happen.

Isaiah what do you know about women? asked God.

Down Isaiah’s nostrils bounced woman words.

Blush. Stink. Wife. Fig. Sorceress—

God nodded.

Isaiah go home and get some sleep, said God.

Isaiah went home, slept, woke again.

Isaiah felt sensation below the neck, it was a silk and bitter sensation.

Isaiah looked down.

It was milk forcing the nipples open.

Isaiah was more than whole.

I am not with you I am in you, said the muffled white voice of God.

Isaiah sank to a kneeling position.

New pain! said Isaiah.

New contract! said God.

Isaiah lifted his arms, milk poured out his breasts.

Isaiah watched the milk pour like strings.

It poured up the Branch and across history and down into people’s

. . . lives and time.

The milk made Isaiah forget about righteousness.

As he fed the mild to small birds and animals Isaiah thought only

. . . about their little lips.

God meanwhile continued to think about male and female.

After all there are two words for righteousness, Isaiah could not be

. . . expected to untie this

hard knot himself.

First the masculine word TSDQ, a bolt of justice that splits the oak in

. . . two.

Then in the empty muscle of the wood, mushrooms and maggots and

. . . monkeys set up a livelihood:

here is (the feminine word) TSDQH.

God grave the two words on Isaiah’s palms.

God left it at that.

And although it is true Isaiah’s prophecies continued to feature

. . . eunuch cylinders and

clickfoot woman shame.

And although it is true Isaiah himself knew several wives and begot a

. . . bastard son.

Still some nights through his dreams slipped a river of milk.

A river of silver, a river of pity.

He slept, the asters in the garden unloaded their red thunder into the dark.

--Anne Carson, "Book of Isaiah" Glass, Irony, and God (page 117)

11. 

God's Woman

Are you angry at nature? said God to His woman.
Yes I am angry at nature I do not want nature stuck
up between my legs on your pink baton

or ladled out like geography whenever
your buckle needs a lick.
What do you mean Creation?

God circled her.
Fire. Time. Fire.
Choose, said God.


God Stiff

God gave an onomatopoeic quality to women's language.
These eternally blundering sounds eternally
blundering down

into the real words of what they are
like feet dropped into bone shoes.
"Treachery" (she notices) sounds just like His zipper going down. 
--Anne Carson, Glass, Irony, and God (page 46)

12.

ON MARKS AND LACKS

Sappho's fragments are of two kinds:  those preserved on papyrus and those derived from citation in ancient authors.  When translating texts read from papyri, I have used a single square bracket to give an impression of missing matter, so that ] or [ indicates destroyed papyrus or the presence of letters not quite legible somewhere in the line.  It is not the case that every gap or illegibility is specifically indicated:  this would render the page a blizzard of marks and inhibit reading.  Brackets are an aesthetic gesture toward the papyrological event rather than an accurate recored of it.  I have not used brackets in translating passages, phrases or words whose existence depends on citation by ancient authors, since these are intentionally incomplete.  I emphasize the distinction between brackets and no brackets because it will affect your reading experience, if you'll allow it.  Brackets are exciting.  Even though you are approaching Sappho in translation, that is no reason you should miss the drama of trying to read a papyrus torn in half or riddled with holes or smaller than a postage stamp -- brackets imply a free space of imaginal adventure.
..... A duller load of silence surrounds the bits of Sappho cited by ancient scholiasts, grammarians, metricians, etc., who want a dab of poetry to decorate some proposition of their own and so adduce exempla without context.  For instance, .... [s]ome shrewd thinking of Sappho's about death is paraphrased by Aristotle:

..... Sappho says that to die is evil: so the gods judge.  For they do not die.
.....  ..... .....--Aristotle Rhetoric 1398b = Sappho fr. 201 Voight

 As acts of deterrence these stories carry their own kind of thrill -- at the inside edge where her words go missing, a sort of antipoem that condenses everything you ever wanted her to write -- but they cannot be called texts of Sappho's and so they are not included in this translation.

--Anne Carson, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (English and Greek Edition)

13.

--Anne Carson, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (English and Greek Edition)

 
14.

If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (English and Greek Edition)
 

15. 

It was Sappho who first called eros "bittersweet." No one who has been in love disputes her. What does the word mean?
____Eros seemed to Sappho at once an experience of pleasure and pain. Here is contradiction and perhaps paradox. To perceive this eros can split the mind in two. Why? The components of the contradiction may seem, at first glance, obvious. We take for granted, as did Sappho, the sweetness of erotic desire; its pleasurability smiles out at us. But the bitterness is less obvious. There might be several reasons why what is sweet should also be bitter. There may be various relations between the two savors. Poets have sorted the matter out in different ways. Sappho's own formulation is a good place to begin tracing the possibilities. The relevant fragment runs:

Ἕρος δαὖτέ μ᾽ ὀ λυσιμέλες δόνει,
γλυκύπικρον ἀμάχανον ὄρπετον
Eros once again limb-loosener whirls me
sweetbitter, impossible to fight off, creature stealing up
_____________________________(LP, fr. 130)

It is hard to translate. "Sweetbitter" sounds wrong, and yet our standard English rendering "bittersweet" inverts the actual terms of Sappho's compound glukupikron. Should that concern us? If her ordering has a descriptive intention, eros is here being said to bring sweetness, then bitterness in sequence: she is sorting the possibilities chronologically....  But it is unlikely that this is what Sappho means....  Love and hate bifurcate Eros....  Paradox is what takes shape on the sensitized plate of the poem, a negative image from which positive pictures can be created. Whether apprehended as a dilemma of sensation, action or value, eros prints as the same contradictory fact: love and hate converge within erotic desire.
____Why?
--Anne Carson, Eros: the Bittersweet

16. 

(Y)our Re-View:

Quotations 1 through 3 above are to show how George Eliot's writerly descriptions have influenced Anne Carson profoundly.  It's not just that Eliot can describe things so very well and adequately and beautifully in writing.  It's also that she claims, ironically, that attempts at description are stupid.  Notice how and where Eliot makes the claim (as if she were a literary critic):  she makes it as a novelist in the voices of human beings, characters, in her novel.  This sort of paradox doesn't escape Anne Carson.  Carson reads the Bible, the Greek of the Jewish John, and finds his proposition lacking, which she lets Eliot say is stupid, as a description.  However, in the lack there's much.  When I read the Bible now, whether the gospels or the "new testament" or the "septuagint" in translated Greek or the "masoretic text(s)" in Hebrew, I think about the writers' attempts a lot.

Block quotation 4 above contains these clauses:  "This question is never addressed in the play. Mathematically Death is down one soul."  Here, Anne Carson is finding a Greek original leaving out much, especially formalism where it counts.  In other words, Euripides doesn't need to explain or to describe everything, and math-like logic can't add to or take away from the human soul.  She helps me read the Bible with these perspectives of persons not needed to lock down or be locked down by language, as if it were some sort of hermetically sealed tomb.

Quotations 5 and 6 above get at Anne Carson's philosophy of translation.  She's a woman, of course, and expresses how she's learning from the fragments of a woman (i.e., Sappho) and from the legend of another woman (i.e., Joan of Arc).  The fragments remind me that the Bible comes to us similarly, and the voices Joan of Arc would not translate in masculine ways do too.  Nonetheless, much is learned and heard.

Quotations 7 through 12 above show how much and how well Anne Carson reads of Aristotle.  Feminists did not attempt to describe males and females differently, but Carson does know and does show how Aristotle, by his uses of language, did.  What if God talked with Isaiah as if he were Aristotle?  What if women only could view this male-only God that way?  What if Aristotle were to read the Bible his way?  What if we were free to know and to show what Aristotle was doing?  How then might any of us read the Bible?

Passages 13 through 15 above show Anne Carson practicing what she preaches, teaching what she herself theorizes.  I've included her fragmentary, "foreign" translation of Sappho's fragments.  The first is the famous as-if faux-logical "if not, winter."  But, of course, it's incomplete, which makes readers read it as an attempt at description (which Aristotle's logic would attempt either to complete definitively or to mock as really stupid).   

The second page of translation of Carson's shown above is something Christ-ians might be interested in, since there's "myrrh" in it and "anointing" and such. I want to draw our attention to Sappho's "καὶ π..... [____]," to note how Carson has marked this in Greek as a lack with the brackets.  She's also been willing to speculate the sort of withness that other translators speculate when translating the prologue of the gospel of John.  Isn't π..... to be read as "the Greek preposition πρός"?  And can't we all then read it as the English preposition "with" as in "with God...  And with sweet oil"?  Weren't some around Jesus with sweet oil, male and female, just as lavish?  I'm thinking of those magi and the baby (in the feed manger) and that prostitute and the permissive teacher (in the fellow Rabbi's home).  I'm also looking back at quotations 3 and 14 above.

The third translation of Sappho by Carson is something linguists and bible translators might try to get their heads around.  Here is Sappho's twist on our bittersweet, which must be foreign, right?  I mean, in English we never say sweetbitter.  But did Greek men or women, before Sappho, ever really say that either?  We're left to decide for ourselves about eros and just how stupid an attempt any description of love (even biblical love if we must) must be.  And yet, even so, as if it's completely turned around from what we might first expect, this is how we so richly get it.

Would Jesus Discriminate?

This is the question posed by a controversial campaign of the Dallas/Fort Worth (DFW) Metropolitan Community Churches. Some of my local friends who are all (presumably) straight have been arguing about it on Facebook. And Rod (who also lives here in DFW) wrote at his blog (Political Jesus) a helpful post (a questionable interpretation of Matthew 8:5-13?) to get at the issues. Last time I linked to Rodney's post, he made a couple of additional, useful comments - especially noting this: "There is a failure I think to examine all power dynamics present in the Matthew passage if Matthew 8:5-13 is just about Jesus affirming a relationship."

I think examining the power dynamics is always helpful. But I want to examine the power dynamics in the silences here. Aristotle would discriminate, and his logic does. Jesus's methods tend to do things very very differently. When you read Cheryl Glenn's careful research about the rhetorics of silence (Unspoken: A Rhetoric of Silence), you tend to think of Jesus also. When you read Krista Ratcliffe's recovery of rhetorical listening (in Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness and in other articles), you see how Aristotle explicitly left listening out of the methods of rhetorics that were common among Greeks before his famous formulation of the "science." So I think there's a contrast in power dynamics from the get-go, when one sets out to ask "Would Jesus Discriminate"? It's a rhetorical question followed up with "Then why should we?" The point is Jesus listened, and he was silent, at least as Matthew writes of and translates him. (Aristotle insisted on discrimination, and he insisted on authoring without a translator).

So let's come back to the text of Matthew 8:5-13 and to the question of interpretation of Greek words there. Three of the most interesting English translators of the New Testament are also classical Greek scholars, who hear the echoes of the ancients in the first century texts. I'm talking about Ann Nyland, Richmond Lattimore, and Willis Barnstone. (Nyland has actually worked with her publisher to package her translation and lexical commentary as a Study New Testament For Lesbians, Gays, Bi, And Transgender: With Extensive Notes On Greek Word Meaning And Context). So, it's interesting to see how Nyland, Lattimore, and Barnstone translate the word παῖς (pais) into English from Matthew 5. They all translate the word as "servant." Lattimore actually hears echoes of intimacy and in one sentence has the Roman officer saying, "my son."

The thing I want to stress is that Matthew is translating! Perhaps the Roman officer is speaking Greek in this bit of history; but even if he is, Matthew's Jesus doesn't typically speak Greek aloud but rather speaks Hebrew Aramaic which Matthew renders for readers into Greek. The phrase "ὁ παῖς μου" (in 8:6 and 8:8) is a quotation of the Roman officer by Matthew, a likely translation - with Matthew making his own story teller's note (in 8:13) with his conclusion (to what Jesus affirmed) that "his servant" (i.e., "ὁ παῖς αὐτοῦ") was healed then.

The important thing to note in Matthew's translating is that he, the Greek-language storyteller and translator, does not discriminate. Matthew is rather like Anne Carson when she translates the poetry fragments of Sappho into English from Greek. Carson first notes how much so many have made discriminations about the sexual orientation of the one whom Plato called the "tenth muse"; Carson says (on page xi of the Preface to If not, winter):

Controversies about her personal ethics and way of life have taken up a lot of people's time throughout the history of Sapphic scholarship. It seems that she knew and loved women as deeply as she did music. Can we leave the matter there? As Gertrude Stein says:

She ought to be a very happy woman. Now we are able to recognize a photograph. We are able to get what we want."

The translator, Carson says, does not discriminate. And she goes on (on page xii) to acknowledge her translator "principle that Walter Benjamin calls 'the intention toward language' of the original'." She says that he says:

The task of the translator consists in finding that intended effect upon the language into which he is translating which produces in it the echo of the original. . . . Unlike a work of literature, translation does not find itself in the center of the language forest but on the outside; it calls into it without entering, aiming at that single spot where the echo is able to give, in its own language, the reverberation of the work in the alien one.

The translator, Carson says, does not discriminate but reverberates.

Matthew translating reverberates. He echoes the sentiments of the Roman officer of the first century. He echoes Jesus's own reverberations of the original sentiments of this man and his servant, his son.

Anne Carson and Aristotle

The beauty of the husband: a fictional essay in 29 tangos By Anne Carson:  page 89

In the effort to find one's way among the contents of memory
    (Aristotle emphasizes)
a principal of association is helpful—
"passing rapidly from one step to the next.
For instance from milk to white,
from white to air,
from air to damp,
after which one recollectes autumn supposing one is trying to
      recollect that season."
Or supposing,
fair reader,
you are trying to recollect not autumn but freedom,
a principal of freedom
the existed between two people, small and savage
as principals go—but what are the rules for this?
As he says,
folly may come into fashion.
Pass then rapidly
from one step to the next,
for instance from nipple to hard,
from hard to hotel room,
from hotel room

to a phrase found in a letter he wrote in a taxi one day he passed
his wife
walking
on the other side of the street and she did not see him, she was—
so ingenious are the arrangements of the state of flux we call
our moral history are they not almost as neat as mathematical
propositions except written on water—
on her way to the courthouse
to file papers for divorce, a phrase like
how you tasted between your legs.
After which by means of this wholly divine faculty, the "memory
     of words and things,"
one recollects
freedom.
Is it I? cries the soul rushing up.
Little soul, poor vague animal:
beware this invention "always useful for learning and life"
as Aristotle say, Aristotle who
had no husband,
rarely mentions beauty
and was likely to pass rapidly from wrist to slave when trying to
    recollect wife.

What is an adjective? (as if the question might be How are they glancing?)

What is an adjective? Nouns name the world. Verbs activate the names. Adjectives come from somewhere else. The word adjective (epitheton in Greek) is itself an adjective meaning "placed on top," "added," "appended," "imported," "foreign." Adjectives seem fairly innocent additions but look again. These small imported mechanisms are in charge of attaching everything in the world to its place in particularity. They are latches of being.

Of course there are several different ways to be. In the world of the Homeric epic, for example, being is stable and particularly is set fast in tradition. When Homer mentions blood, blood is black. When women appear, women are neat-ankled or glancing. Poseidon always has the blue eyebrows of Poseidon. Gods' laughter is unquenchable. Human knees are quick. The sea is unwearying. Death is bad. Cowards' livers are white. Homer's epithets are a fixed diction with which Homer fastens every substance in the world to its aptest attribute and holds them in place for epic consumption. There is a passion in it but what kind of passion? "Consumption is not a passion for substances but a passion for the code," says Baudrillard.

--Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse, from page 4

sounds of Good Friday

Reb Joshua ben Joseph speaks Greek. At least, his students have him speaking Hellene - a translating of his Hebrew Aramaic. (He, of course, to English speaking Christians today is "Jesus").

Mark, a student recording his last days, comments and says he says the following on that good Friday in the garden he calls Oil-Press (גת שמנא Gethsemane):

καὶ ἤρξατο ἐκθαμβεῖσθαι καὶ ἀδημονεῖν.
καὶ λέγει αὐτοῖς, Περίλυπός ἐστιν ἡ ψυχή μου ἕως θανάτου·

Greek scholar Richmond Lattimore renders Mark's rendering as this:

"and then he began to be shaken and distressed
and he said: My soul is in anguish to the point of death."

But maybe Mark is just talking around what he said more or less directly. Maybe there were things he said too painful to record in Greek letters.

Maybe there are ways the Greeks in pain would say it differently. Like this; listen:

ὀτοτοτοῖ πόποι δᾶ!

"Oh shame upon the earth!" renders Lattimore. And he goes on to identify who's speaking to whom (Cassandra to Apollo): Ὦπολλον Ὦπολλον. "Apollo Apollo!"

but one who seems to hear, to hear and feel the excruciating pain of abandonment and its anticipation, has no good words, no wordy translation of the utterances the gutterances. Here's Anne Carson's rendering, her Englishing of the cries, the expressions of profound distresses. (Carson, of course, is also a Greek language expert with some difference to listen to; and hers "isn't your parents'" translation, says Kat Balkoski). Listen:

"OTOTOI POPOI DA! Apollo! O!pollo! Woepollo! O!"

We're left wondering, then, what if on that good Friday he'd taken (instead of men) with him to the garden the women close to him. First, would they have abandoned him the way the men, and his father, do? Second, would they have heard him differently? And would Anne Carson translate for us (either Joshua/Jesus or Mark or that woman hearing, feeling, and translating with Joshua)? And would we hear?

ὀτοτοτοῖ πόποι δᾶ!

I'll Have What She's Having!

"O... O god... Ooo Oh god... Oh... O... O... Oh god... Oh yeah right there Oh! Oh... Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes... O... Oh... Yes Yes Yes.... Oh... Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes... O... Oh... Oh... Oh god Oh... O... Uh...

I'll have what she's having!"
--Sally,
and her eavesdropping onlooker,
in Rob Reiner's "When Harry Met Sally"

"If ever man were moved with woman moans,
Be moved with my tears, my sighs, my groans..."
--Lucrece,
in William Shakespeare's
"The Rape of Lucrece"

When the men first translating the bible came to Numbers 5 verse 22, they stole a sexy, sexist line from a play or two. They did not (as John Hobbins and Mike Sangrey and Wayne Leman are doing) argue whether either (1) the source language is "Biblish that is worth retaining" or (2) "the meaning of the form of any language should be translated to the same meaning using some form of the receptor language [... and] that meaning should trump concordance if we have to use forms which are not a part of a language."

Another way to say that is this:

The first men translating the bible did not get into that argument between Aristotle and Plato: whether either (1) a logos, or a pure statement, may be inherently beautiful (as in their natural, native statements taught at the Academy) or (2) there must something deeper behind it (i.e., in the writer's or speaker's ideal intention) that trumps concordance with any statement.

Rather, the first men translating the Hebrew scriptures understood what translator Anne Carson observes in the translational intentions...

of the "soldier of God" Joan of Arc (i.e., "to convey the jar on the nerves without translating it into theological cliché");

and of the Irish painter Francis Bacon (i.e., "to create a sensible form that will translate directly to your nervous system the same sensation as the subject");

and of the German lyric poet Friedrich Hölderlin (In other words: "The result was versions of Sophokles that made Goethe and Schiller laugh aloud when they heard them.")

So we don't for a minute think that Carson, Joan of Arc, (painter) Bacon, and Hölderlin would have any disagreement with how philosopher Merold Westphal gets through the debates (like those of Hobbins with Sangrey and Leman or of Aristotle with Plato). Westphal says,

Of course, this does not mean that anything goes [in translation], and it would be seriously misleading to suggest that on the performance model [of translation] matters of correctness and incorrectness are simply replaced by other values, perhaps aesthetic. There are many ways in performance to get it wrong. One can play the wrong notes or say the wrong words, to mention only a couple. But it remains the case that when I've gotten everything right that the text dictates, there remains considerable leeway, indeterminacy, or, if you like, undecidability that I am compelled to decide before I will be able to offer anything that will count as my interpretation. The most recent film version of Romeo and Juliet and the Al Pacino take on Richard III give some idea of how considerable this leeway can be. Or one can compare Pope's translation of the Iliad with Fagles's. There is a gap between text and interpretation that neither the author nor any hermeneutical method can fill in, but only the performer. ("In God We Trust," The Hermeneutics of Charity, page 100)

Next time you watch Leonardo Dicaprio as Romeo or Claire Danes as Juliet, as I did with my daughter recently, you'll get that huge gap in the text of Shakespeare.

A quotation from Shakespeare is how I started this post. Or at least, I heard his Lucrece saying something that reminded me of Sally's shameless performance in that restaurant so public, which is the quotation that started this post. Women's sexuality is on display.

So when the first bible translators come to Numbers 5 verse 22, they see (or hear) a performance of woman's sexuality on display. It jars the nerves without theological cliché, a "sensible" form, that makes men laugh out loud.

Yes, the Hebrew is something like this:

(either quite literal in the biblish English of Robert Alter:)

And this besetting water shall enter your innards to swell the belly and to sag the thigh. And the woman shall say, Amen, amen.

(or ostensibly the Hebrew's deep meaning in the "dynamically equivalent" English of the TNIV:)

May this water that brings a curse enter your body so that your abdomen swells or your womb miscarries.
Then the woman is to say, "Amen. So be it."

Now, compare this with what the first bible translators do (translating into Greek):

καὶ εἰσελεύσεται τὸ ὕδωρ τὸ ἐπικαταρώμενον τοῦτο εἰς τὴν κοιλίαν σου πρῆσαι γαστέρα καὶ διαπεσεῖν μηρόν σου
καὶ ἐρεῖ ἡ γυνή γένοιτο, γένοιτο.

I'm drawn first to the fact that the translators refuse to translate their Hebrew אָמֵן אָמֵן as a transliteration. This is what both Alter and the TNIV team do with "amen" (even if the TNIV team goes on with their "dynamically equivalent" phrase "So be it").

The original translators have transliterated plenty of other places in the text up to this point. In an earlier post, I tried to suggest that Egyptian and Hebrew sounds (such as in the name "Moses") were important to the translators, who did transliterate. So there's no point in our figuring they just don't transliterate.

What the translators are doing is playing with both the sounds and the sight of the Greek letters. They may be resisting Aristotle's hope for natural precision in language; they may be resisting Plato's hope for a meaning to be mined ideally from the language.

They are in Alexander the Great's Alexandria. They are Jews back in Egypt, under a king of Egypt again, and under a kind of Egypt that has them laboring over translation.

In their translation, there's the wordplay of ἡ γυνή /he gune/ and the repeated γένοιτο, γένοιτο /genoito genoito/. The first phrase, of course, means ambiguously both "woman" and "wife" - and the second is a literal translation of the Hebrew repeated phrase, meaning something like, "so it is"; in the Hellene version, there is this Greek overtone of "so it is born, so it is generated."

But there's much more here produced, and reproduced. There's a performance, a play on the plays of the day. The translators by choosing not to transliterate אָמֵן אָמֵן (which they do elsewhere, such as in Nehemiah 8:6, and which the New Testament writers and Greek translators do everywhere else) draw readers to other Greek texts that have similar wordplay. They revel in the sexy, sexist funny play of the epics and the dramas of Greece, of the imposing Greek empire.

Here's one Greek text (in which the man Peleus chastises the man Menelaus -- in the play "AndroMache" of Euripides, with an English translation by David Kovacs and a few changes by me):

What? Can you belong with the men, you utter coward? [How do you merit inclusion among the men?] You lost your wife to a Phrygian by leaving your house unguarded, believing you had a chaste wife in your house, when in fact she was an utter whore. Not even if she wanted to could a Spartan girl be born chaste [οὐδ’ ἂν εἰ βούλοιτό τις σώφρων γένοιτο Σπαρτιατίδων κόρη]. They leave their houses in the company of young men, thighs [μηροῖς] showing bare through their revealing garments, and in a manner I cannot endure they share the same running-tracks and wrestling-places. After that should we be surprised if you do not train up women for wives who are chaste [κᾆτα θαυμάζειν χρεὼν εἰ μὴ γυναῖκας σώφρονας παιδεύετε]? You should speak to Helen seeing that she left behind Zeus of the Kindred in your house and went off on a revel with a young man to another country. Was it for her sake, then, that you led such a great throng to Troy? You ought to have spat her away and not moved a single spear once you had discovered her treachery, should have let her stay in Troy and never taken her back into your house, should have payed her a wage to stay away.

Here's another Greek play (in which the king Agamemnon addresses his wife / queen Clytemnestra about their daughter, Iphigenia, whom the priest sacrificed -- the play "Iphi-Genia in Aulis", with an English translation by E. P. Coleridge and a few changes by me):

Queen / Wife [γύναι], we may be counted happy, as far as concerns our daughter; for in truth she has fellowship with gods. But you must take this tender child and start for home, for the army is looking now to sail. Fare you well! it is long before I shall greet you on my return from Troy; and what's birthed to you be well [καὶ γένοιτό σοι καλῶς]!

And another part of the same play (when the king Agamemnon, earlier in "Ihpigenia in Aulis", talks about the same spirit of jealousy in husbands, with bound curses, that God and Moses and the priests deal with in Numbers 5):

Leda, the daughter of Thestius, gave birth to [Ἐγένοντο] three children, maidens / virgins [παρθένοι]: Phoebe, Clytemnestra my wife, and Helen. The foremost of the favored sons of Hellas came to woo Helen; but terrible threats of spilling his rival's blood were uttered by each of them, if he should fail to win the girl. Now the matter filled Tyndareus, her father, with perplexity, whether to give her or not, how he might best succeed. This thought occurred to him: the suitors should swear to each other and join right hands and pour libations with burnt-sacrifice, binding themselves by this curse: whoever wins the child birthed to Tyndareus for a woman/ wife [ὅτου γυνὴ γένοιτο Τυνδαρὶς κόρη], they will assist that man, in case a rival takes her from his house and goes his way, robbing her husband of his rights;

And there's Homer's epic Odyssey (here translated by James Huddleston, with emphases added):

Instead, we dread the talk of men and women,
[husbands and wives, ἀνδρῶν ἠδὲ γυναικῶν,]
Yes, men inferior by far woo a noble man's wife,
lest someday someone, another Achaean, a meaner one, might say:
"And can't in any way string his finely-crafted bow,
but another, some beggar man, came wandering,
and easily strung the bow and shot through iron,"
so they'll say, and what's born would be to our disgrace
[ὣς ἐρέουσ', ἡμῖν δ' ἂν] ἐλέγχεα ταῦτα γένοιτο].

So, we might want to listen again, to look again. Here's the Greek translation of Numbers 5:22b:

καὶ ἐρεῖ ἡ γυνή γένοιτο, γένοιτο.

Why are the women
(Jewish women overheard and read in Egypt),
in the desert outside of Egypt -
why, o why, are they crying out with such repeated consent?
Is it what women like Sally, like Lucrece,
like Spartan wives with their sexy thighs,
like Andromache, like Clytemnestra,
and like Helen
moan
when men
are jealous of one another
over women and their thighs?

Three Poems for Isaac: for Every One That Heareth

וַיִּקְרָא אַבְרָהָם אֶת־שֶׁם־בְּנֹו הַנֹּולַד־לֹו אֲשֶׁר־יָלְדָה־לֹּו שָׂרָה יִצְחָק׃

And Abraham called the name of his son that was born unto him, whom Sarah bore to him, Isaac.

וַתֹּאמֶר שָׂרָה צְחֹק עָשָׂה לִי אֱלֹהִים כָּל־הַשֹּׁמֵעַ יִצְחַק־לִי׃

And Sarah said: 'God hath made laughter for me; every one that heareth will laugh on account of me.'

Sometimes it's the end of a poem, the punch-line, that starts us.  If you will, it starts us off laughing (even making us ashamed at ourselves for something, like listening in the first place, and then laughing involuntarily in public, or as if in private, desiring that we be different somehow). What if hope, change, our conversion - not just to "being better" but to "being together better beings" - came from this listening, translating process? A few days ago, Rachel Barenblat, Anne Carson, and Paul Celan started this process, for me anyway. Today, it seems, we continue with them. Listen (but please only listen if sexual language -- "the seed of Abraham" -- and the laughter it -- "Rebecca's Isaac" -- might invoke doesn't offend you):

PULLING THE STRINGS by Rachel Barenblat

Trickster Rebecca, I wish you'd known better
than to pit your sons one against the other

like Isaac and Ishmael, jostling and angling
for the lone blessing in their father's hands.

If you had taught your bookish son, the one
who stayed in the tent weaving stories

and your rough red-bearded hunter
whose heart chafed against being indoors

to see one another as sides of the same coin
think how much drama we could have been spared!

Then again, blind Isaac may have seen more
than we know. He tried twice to shame Jacob into truth.

God must have told you we need this tension
to shape the Israel we're meant to become.


GOD'S NAME by Anne Carson

God had no name.
Isaac had two names.
Isaac was also called The Blind.

Inside the dark sky of his mind
Isaac could hear God
moving down a country road bordered by trees.

By the way the trees reflected off God
Isaac knew which ones were straight and tall
or when they carried their branches

as a body does its head
or why some crouched low to the ground in thickets.
To hear how God was moving through the universe

gave Isaac his question.
I could tell you his answer
but it wouldn't help.

The name is not a noun.
It is an adverb.
Like the little black notebooks that Beethoven carried

in his coatpocket
for the use of those who wished to converse with him,
the God adverb

is a one-way street that goes everywhere you are.
No use telling you what it is.
Just chew it and rub it on.


HAUT MAL von Paul Celan

Unentsuehnte,
Schlafsuechtige,
von den Goettern Befleckte:

deine Zunge ist russig,
dein Harn schwarz,
wassergallig dein Stuhl,

du fuehrst,
wie ich,
unzuechtige Reden,

du setzt einen Fuss vor den andern,
legst eine Hand auf die andre,
schmiegst dich in Ziegenfell,

du beheiligst
mein Glied.


HAUT MAL translated into English by Nikolai Popov and Heather McHugh

O irredeemable
beloved, sleep-attacked,
tainted by the gods:

your tongue is sooty,
your urine black,
your stool a bilious liquefaction.

like myself,
you use
foul language;

you put one foot before the other,
lay one hand atop the other,
burrow into goatskin,

consecrate
my cock.


HAUT MAL translated into English by Niko Boris and Heather McHugh

. . . .

deify
my dick.


HAUT MAL translated into English by Rochelle Tobias

. . . .

consecrate
my virile member.


HAUT MAL translated into English by Brian Lynch and Peter Jankowsky

. . . .

hallow
my phall.

one of our oldest arguments

I can tell by the way my mother chews her toast
whether she had a good night
and is about to say a happy thing
or not.

Not.
She puts her toast down on the side of her plate.
You know you can pull the drapes in that room, she begins.

This is a coded reference to one of our oldest arguments,
from what I call The Rules Of Life series.
My mother always closes her bedroom drapes tight before going to bed at night.

I open mine as wide as possible.
I like to see everything, I say.
What’s there to see?

Moon. Air. Sunrise.
All that light on your face in the morning. Wakes you up.
I like to wake up.

At this point the drapes argument has reached a delta
and may advance along one of three channels.
There is the What You Need Is A Good Night’s Sleep channel,

the Stubborn As Your Father channel
and random channel.
More toast? I interpose strongly, pushing back my chair.

Those women! says my mother with an exasperated rasp.
Mother has chosen random channel.
Women?

Complaining about rape all the time
I see she is tapping one furious finger on yesterday’s newspaper
lying beside the grape jam.

The front page has a small feature
about a rally for International Women’s Day—
have you had a look at the Sears Summer Catalogue?

Nope.
Why, it’s a disgrace! Those bathing suits—
cut way up to here! (she points) No wonder!

You’re saying women deserve to get raped
because Sears bathing suit ads
have high-cut legs? Ma, are you serious?

Well someone has to be responsible.
Why should women be responsible for male desire? My voice is high.
Oh I see you’re one of Them.

One of Whom? My voice is very high. Mother vaults it.
And whatever did you do with that little tank suit you had last year the green one?
It looked so smart on you.

The frail fact drops on me from a great height
that my mother is afraid.
She will be eighty years old this summer.

---

Samhita's post "The sleepwalking defense?" and David's "There’s no escape from your husband", made me think, again, of Anne Carson's poem "The Glass Essay", and the bit of encoded argument, recurring, excerpted above. I know a man, a family guy, who raped a woman while "sleep walking." The guy's walking around today, "awake." The rest of us? What comes in poetry? And who listens? Is it really much of an argument? However old it is, when will it stop. Like I said, some things make me think, but some things make me sink.

Two Poems -- worth our reading

Without much ado
(and yet, below, just a bit of commentary from Anne Carson on Paul Celan's poem
and only a link to commentary from Rachel Barenblat herself on her own poem),
Two Poems -- worth our reading, rereading, remembering:

----

Keine Sandkunst mehr / No More SandArt   by Paul Celan

Keine Sandkunst mehr, kein Sandbuch, Keine Meister.
Nichts erwurfelt. Wieviel Stumme? Siebenzehn.
Deine Frage, deine Antwort. Dein gesang, was weiss er? 

Tiefimschnee, 

iefimnee,
i-i-e.

No more sand art, no sand book, no masters.
Nothing on the dice. How many mutes? Seventeen.
Your question, your answer. Your song, what does it know?
Deepinsnow, 

eepinnow,
e-i-o.

(Carson on Celan's poem:

But suspended within the act of whitening is a terribly quiet pun. For one cannot help but think, watching "Deepinsnow" melt away, that if this poem were translated into Hebrew, a language in which vowels are not usually printed, it would vanish even before its appointed end. As did many a Hebrew.

In preparing his pun, Celan depends upon a very ancient Hebrew exemplar. It is in the book of Genesis (22:17) that God makes Abraham a promise: "That in blessing I will bless thee and in multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven and as the sand which is upon the sea shore. And thy seed shall possess the gate of his enemies." In his lifetime Celan saw the seed of Abraham lose possession of the gate of his enemies and exchange the innumerability of sand for a specific number that is usually put at six million. By the odd mathematics of that time the number six million came to be equal to zero. Celan sets up a parallel mathematics of reduction, but he has replaced sand with snow and zero with a letter of the alphabet. Here is a short answer to his own epistemological question: what a poet knows is how to imitate the human zero with a poetic 'O!' Poetry is an act of memory that carves its way between sand art and snow art, transforming what is innumerable and headed for oblivion into timeless notation. Excising all that is not grace. But I wonder if Celan is not negating this poetic act even as he executes it, when he turns the last verses of his poem into an inside-out Hebrew lesson: here--unusually--it is the consonants that have to be supplied from memory. Here it is the full that thinks the void. How else to refer to the losses implied in these consonants. Or to the grace that poetry claims as its rate of exchange?

from Economy of the Unlost: Reading Simonides of Keos with Paul Celan, pages 116-17)

---------

SILENCE (VAYERA) by Rachel Barenblat

Abraham failed the test.
For Sodom and Gomorrah he argued
but when it came to his son
no protest crossed his lips.

God was mute with horror.
Abraham, smasher of idols
and digger of wells
was meant to talk back.

Sarah would have been wiser
but Abraham avoided her tent,
didn't lay his head in her lap
to unburden his secret heart.

In stricken silence God watched
as Abraham saddled his ass
and took Isaac on their final hike
to the place God would show him.

The angel had to call him twice.
Abraham's eyes were red, his voice hoarse
he wept like a man pardoned
but God never spoke to him again.

(Barenblat on Barenblat's poem:

This week's portion: silence

at her blog Velveteen Rabbit)

Anne Carson and Anne Lamott on Resurrection

Listen to silly Anne Lamott and foolish Anne Carson, wanting hoping desiring so gullibly to keep open the historic and literary possibilities of resurrection, as women see it. The one Anne speaks of Jesus, the other Anne of another Greek-fabled drama, Alcestis in Alcestis by Euripides.

Euripides, of course, is that one of whom the Historian F. A. Wright, in his Feminism in Greek Literature from Homer to Aristotle says: “Euripides and Plato are almost the only [male] authors who show any true appreciation of a woman's real qualities, and to Euripides and Plato, Aristotle, by the whole trend of his [sexist, bigoted] prejudices, was opposed.” But I’m reading the “scholarship” of another “historian” (supposedly) who scoffs, like Aristotle, at true appreciation of a woman’s views. I’m talking about James F. McGrath and his newly published book The Burial of Jesus: History and Faith. McGrath is crying for reviews, but not this one here. In his book, again and again (on more than a dozen pages so far), McGrath feels like he has to pooh pooh the inclusion of women as credible witnesses to the resurrection of Jesus in the gospel of Mark. Not surprising. His historiography is straight phallogocentrism. What I mean by that is this. Hélène Cixous, in her book Stigmata: escaping texts, translates and quotes “Clarice Lispector, who did not think in terms of phallogocentrism.” Cixous points out that Lispector provides a definition of the term: “We have seen this before; it is the ‘phallocratic system’ . . . this is how she [Lispector] conceives of it: a ‘system of inflexible last judgment, which does not permit even a second of incredulity’” (123). Now the English translation of Cixous’s French translation of Lispector’s Brazilian Portuguese has yielded the term. The three together have made “phal-” from Aristotle’s φαλλικὰ (“ph-a-l-l-ika”); “logo,” from Aristotle’s λόγος (or “l-o-g-os”) which he himself makes (by) his λογική (or “l-o-g-ikē” aka LOGIC); and “centric” from Aristotle’s κεντρική (or “k-e-n-tr-ikē”). McGrath, like father Aristotle, does not permit even a second of incredulity. He redefines “faith” and “history” under the guise of “religion.” Enough of that then.

Here’s Anne Lamott in Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith:

I don't have the right personality for Good Friday, for the crucifixion: I'd like to skip ahead to the resurrection. In fact, I'd like to skip ahead to the resurrection vision of one of the kids in our Sunday school, who drew a picture of the Easter Bunny outside the tomb: everlasting life, and a basket full of chocolates. Now you’re talking.

In Jesus’ real life, the resurrection came two days later, but in our real lives, it can be weeks, years, and you never know for sure that it will come. I don’t have the right personality for the human condition, either. But I believe in the resurrection, in Jesus’, and in ours. The trees, so stark and gray last month, suddenly went up as if in flame, but instead in blossoms and leaves--poof! Like someone opening an umbrella. It’s often hard to find similar dramatic evidence of rebirth and hope in our daily lives. (140).

Here’s Anne Carson in Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides:

What does Alkestis' resurrection mean for the sacrificial contract that Admetos had negotiated with Death? This question is never addressed in the play. Mathematically Death is down one soul; common sense (what the Greeks call Necessity) tells us such a situation can’t last. But Herakles seems a character able to override common sense. He releases Alkestis simply by choosing to do so. As if to say, within every death a life stands waiting to be set free, should anyone have the nerve to do it. As if to say, try looking deep into a house, a marriage, or an idea like Necessity and you will see clear through to the other side. Death, like tragedy, is a game with rules. Why not just break the rules?

Rules broken by Euripides in Alkestis include the rule of closure. What are we to make of the ending? Can we be sure the veiled women is alive? that she is Alkestis? that she will live happily ever after with her husband and children? Critics have doubted all these. There is a kind of nuptial drama staged in the final scene--perhaps a parody of the ancient Greek wedding, which centered upon an unveiling of the bride before the eyes of her husband and some exchange of words between them--that stalls oddly at its peak moment. Here the bride is unveiled to her husband at 971/1121 (or so it seems to me; critics doubt this too) but she will not be permitted to speak for three days due to her death-polluted condition. An eerie silence carries her into the big dark house of her unconventional husband.

I find I want to say less rather than more about Alkestis. Not because there is less in this play but because the surface has a speed and shine that evaporate with exegesis, like some of [Alfred] Hitchcock’s plots. Or a trembling of laughter, terrible if it broke out. (248-49)