mentally bifocal

“Hot! Every word of Aristotle exposed!” These diglot-peddlers lack shame

I have an embarrassing confession to make... when I get stuck, I have sometimes weakened and allowed my eye to wander over to the right-hand pages.

Yesterday, a fellow blogger got me laughing out loud when he'd written these words.  So much of the sarcasm resonates with me; it's his parody of the fear of a both-and world that so many have.  Most would prefer an either-or world.  Especially when it comes to the Bible, especially when it comes to the singular notion of absolute Truth, the fear is that one may be wrong while The Other, so different, just may be right.  Before I'd read my fellow blogger's silliness, with more seriousness, I blogged a bit yesterday on three examples of this fear.

Today, I'd like to blog on the value of the diglot.  There's value in having one original language open to a page in a translation of that original.  There's value as much or more in being "mentally bifocal," as Pearl S. Buck put it.  If we were to read that in her English, we'd find it in her autobiography My Several Worlds.  If we were to read it in Italian, then we might go here to find it also as "La mente bifocale."  If we were reading it in English but were trying to understand it, to translate it, into Chinese (which is one of Pearl S. Buck's languages in one of her several worlds), then we might start here.  The point is that we could not stay just in one place, within our comfort zone, a zone of limited-perception singular monocular objectivity, with the Other over there not having any part of me or mine.

"Aristotle exposed," indeed.  Until you've just begun to struggle, some with others, with how his words are so like and so unlike your own, then what's the value of knowing him?  Maya Angelou, for example, who was raped by a misogynistic gynophobe when she was an 8-year-old girl, listens rhetorically to Aristotle and insists, rather exclaims!:  "One needs to know Aristotle.... One needs it desperately....  Must! I mean desperately... if one is to be at ease anywhere."  How has she come to know this need to know?  There's something on the other side from me, isn't there?

Much more positively if more theoretically, Mikhail Epstein speaks of stereotextuality and of interlation.  He's saying that a diglot (and this might apply to a Loeb classical library edition of any of Aristotle's works or even to the Bible with its "absolute Truth" for the fearful and its multiple languages for the willing) has value.  Do you notice, reading Epstein's essay, however, how he ends up asking questions?

Can an idea be adequately presented in a single language? Or do we need a minimum of two languages (as with two eyes or two ears) to convey the volume of a thought or image? Will we, at some future time, accustom ourselves to new genres of stereo poetry and stereo philosophy as we have become accustomed to stereo music and stereo cinema? Will the development of translingual discourses (or, in Bakhtin's words, "the mutual illumination and interanimation of languages") become a hallmark of our century?

Well, I go back to little Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker, to her century now, not ours anymore.  Reading her autobiography, I notice how in the mornings she was working with her mother on the schooling called the Calvert method (named after Lord Baltimore Calvert).  I remember doing the very same thing with the very same curriculum with my mother.  Then she'd go study, differently, with her Chinese tutor.  And so I remember with my tutors, the Vietnamese ones.  This is her context for her stereotexting, for her interlating, for her bifocal mentality.  She speaks of the "damage" it caused.  But how seriously do you want to take that?  She's also speaking of racism and of sexism.  Let me exclaim.  She's also speaking of racism and of sexism!  Of the need for a kalaidescope, as Jacqueline Jones Royster does:

Using subject position as a terministic screen in cross-boundary discourse permits analysis to operate kaleidoscopically, thereby permitting interpretation to be richly informed by the converging of dialectical perspectives.

Had Jacqueline Jones Royster and Pearl S. Buck talked, I think they would have understood this together.  Young Pearl began this valuable kaleidoscopic listening and learning early.

I became mentally bifocal, and so I learned early to understand that there is no such condition in human affairs as absolute truth. There is only truth as people see it, and truth, even in fact, may be kaleidoscopic in its variety. The damage such perception did to me I have felt ever since, although damage may be too dark a word, for it merely meant that I could never belong entirely to one side of any question. To be a Communist would be absurd to me, as absurd as to be entirely anything and equally impossible. I straddled the globe too young.

Later in life Pearl saw, as Jacqueline feels every day, the double-sided difficulties of people who only see one side, who only understand what it is like to be singularly absolutely in the American majority in the world.  Pearl, in 1941, when America was still very profoundly full of race prejudice, wrote this:

Profound as race prejudice is against the Negro American, it is not practically as far-reaching as the prejudice against women. For stripping away the sentimentality which makes Mother’s Day and Best American Mother Contests, the truth is that women suffer all the effects of a minority.

Is this despair?  Or do you yourself know these sides of things?  The value of them?  Does Pearl S. Buck with her binocular mind and words really threaten the "authority of God's word" as this blogger suggests she does?  Or isn't there value in seeing something beyond your own supposed objectivity, of reading the Bible as a diglot even?

All Men Are Created Equal (with no regard to gender and race)

Before we think about the translation of the Declaration of Independence, I wonder if we can't think about its interlation.

I'm thinking about the little clause therein that goes "all men are created equal." What did the original author, Thomas Jefferson, and the original signers intend by "men"?

Well, sure, some of these white men owned black women and african men and had their own wives without the same rights and protections as they, the husbands, enjoyed under the law of the new states and the new federal government, which did not recognize the governments of "the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions" because, well, because they were Savages and merciless. But proof positive that these original American men had an inclusive intention for "men" is that they quickly formed a Constitution constituted by "the People."

Never mind all those unnecessary Sentiments of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (a woman) and Frederick Douglass (a black man) and others in 1848, who declared that all men might read "a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her."

Never mind all those briefs of Dred Scott's lawyers who ignored what the Supreme Court of "all white men" would eventually write so precisely: "The words 'people of the United States' and 'citizens' are synonymous terms, and mean the same thing." and " The language of the Declaration of Independence is equally conclusive." Which means. . . .

Never mind what Abraham Lincoln had to address among bodies, not all white men, at Gettysburg: something "conceived" not yet delivered.

Never mind what Martin Luther King, Jr. scribbled, questioning how extreme all men must be, while jailed by all-white men: "And Thomas Jefferson: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal ...' So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be."

Never mind that these words of Jefferson were intended to mirror the Enlighted words of John Locke and of the Bible of King James, men whose concern was not the gender or the race of "all men."

Never mind that some Germans in 1776 mistook that in translation as "alle Menschen." (or that that woman, namely Laurie G. Alberts, backtranslated that as "all people" in 1999.)

(Now, I'm trying to understand our little word problem here. If we allow "all men" to be anything other than "all men" in uni-directional translation, then we'll have to allow "translation" to be something like "interlation" whether in the original source language or in the target language. Sex and skin color are not good things by which to confuse Language or good translation. And language, if we can't fix it, will just be un-fixed.)

Women and Bibles and Jews! Oh my!

This is a continuation of ESV, Luther Bible, and Jewish Women, a post started earlier in conversation with Suzanne's. I suppose there's not much more to give except (a) reminders and (b) illustrations.

(a) The reminders are these:

Jewish-German-bible-translating rhetorical-poetry writing women, such as Gertrud Kolmar, can sound like Martin Luther if they wish. (Listen again - "This towel is dirty beyond all measure.") And they can sound otherwise too. ("You hear me speak. But do you hear me feel?")

In contrast, men who put women down only sound one way. There's a motivator for this: fear masked as logic. For example, the gynophobic Aristotle is afraid to sound like a woman. And Luther (as Aristotle-loathing as he becomes) is nonetheless still fearful of letting a women speak; so he says, even around his own family's dinner table, things like "There is no gown or garment that worse becomes a woman than when she will be wise" and "Never any good came out of female domination. God created Adam master and lord of living creatures, but Eve spoilt all, when she persuaded him to set himself above God's will. 'Tis you women, with your tricks and artifices, that lead men into error." And Wayne Grudem, one of the dozen male-only members of the ESV Translation Oversight Committee, also seems afraid to listen to a women teaching: first, he strangely uses a cobbled excerpt from a secondary source to warrant (incorrectly) that "Aristotle 'believed that men and women should have the same education and training'" in order to conclude that feminists are just wrong about the Greek inequality of education for females; and, second, Grudem oddly uses the Bible itself to claim that women cannot teach men because "It is the order of creation" (pages 173, 176 of his chapter, "Feminist Views Based on Untruthful Claims," in his book, Evangelical Feminism: A New Path to Liberalism?).

Luther, his 1984 revisers, and the ESV team members sometimes ironically downplay the sexism of the text. Their masculinist translations that would have a woman naturally silent are translations that curiously downplay the misogyny by masking over the prominence and dominance of the man. It's as if the translators want to say, "Yes, God's image includes boy image and girl image. But let's just not make a big feminist deal right now out of what natural order of creation is, namely male over fe-male, man over wo-man. Let's just let fe-males and wo-men fit into this default, unmarked world (of us males and men)."

Perhaps these male translators want to hear a woman speak. But if so they want to hear her speaking to other women, and to children.

Perhaps these male translators want to hear a woman speak. But can they hear her feel?

(b) Some illustrations are these:

The only bit I need to show in this post is Exodus 35:20-22. The only bit of textual commentary I'm going to make is this little note of advice:

"Pay attention to the (masked over) male nouns (i.e., / בן ben / איש 'iysh / אנוש 'enowsh / איש 'iysh /) and to their relation to the explicit feminine nouns (i.e., both the grammatically feminine /עדה `edah / and the semantically fe-male /אשה 'ishshah /) and to how the pronouns are constructed in relation to these nouns."

Now, here we go:

ESV Exodus 35:
20 Then all the congregation of the people of Israel departed from the presence of Moses.
21 And they came,
everyone whose heart stirred him,
and everyone whose spirit moved him,
and brought the LORD’s contribution to be used for the tent of meeting,
and for all its service,
and for the holy garments.
22 So they came,
both men and women.
All who were of a willing heart brought brooches and earrings and signet rings and armlets, all sorts of gold objects,
every man dedicating an offering of gold to the LORD.

Luther Bible (revised 1984) Exodus 35:
20 Da ging die ganze Gemeinde der Israeliten von Mose weg.
21 Und alle, die es gern und freiwillig gaben, kamen
und brachten dem HERRN die Opfergabe zur Errichtung der Stiftshütte
und für allen Dienst darin
und für die heiligen Kleider.
22 Es brachten
aber Männer und Frauen
freiwillig Spangen, Ohrringe, Ringe und Geschmeide und allerlei goldenes Gerät, ein jeder das Gold,
das er zur Gabe für den HERRN bestimmt hatte.

Luther (original)
20 Da ging die ganze Gemeinde der Kinder Israel aus von Mose.
...
22 ... Dazu brachte jedermann Gold zum Webeopfer dem HERRN.

In contrast, here is Julia E. Smith, letting the inherent sexism of the text show in her transparent literal translation of Exodus 35:
20 And all the assembly of the sons of Israel will go forth from before Moses.
21 And they will come,
every man whose heart lifted him up
and every one whose spirit impelled him,
and they brought the offering of Jehovah to the work of the tent of appointment,
and for all its work, and for the garments of the holy place.
22 And they will come,
the men with the women,
all of a willing heart,
they brought rings, and ear-rings, and seals, and globules of gold, all vessels of gold:
and every man who lifted up a waving of gold to Jehovah.

And here's some Jews' translation of their own scriptures into Greek (again letting the male dominance show in the text of) Exodus 35:
20 καὶ ἐξῆλθεν πᾶσα συναγωγὴ υἱῶν Ισραηλ ἀπὸ Μωυσῆ
21 καὶ ἤνεγκαν
ἕκαστος ὧν ἔφερεν αὐτῶν ἡ καρδία,
καὶ ὅσοις ἔδοξεν τῇ ψυχῇ αὐτῶν,
ἤνεγκαν ἀφαίρεμα κυρίῳ εἰς πάντα τὰ ἔργα τῆς σκηνῆς τοῦ μαρτυρίου
καὶ εἰς πάντα τὰ κάτεργα αὐτῆς
καὶ εἰς πάσας τὰς στολὰς τοῦ ἁγίου.
22 καὶ ἤνεγκαν
οἱ ἄνδρες παρὰ τῶν γυναικῶν·
πᾶς, ᾧ ἔδοξεν τῇ διανοίᾳ,
ἤνεγκαν σφραγῖδας καὶ ἐνώτια καὶ δακτυλίους καὶ ἐμπλόκια καὶ περιδέξια, πᾶν σκεῦος χρυσοῦν,
καὶ πάντες, ὅσοι ἤνεγκαν ἀφαιρέματα χρυσίου κυρίῳ.

Now the Hebrew:

20

וַיֵּצְאוּ כָּל־עֲדַת בְּנֵֽי־יִשְׂרָאֵל מִלִּפְנֵי מֹשֶֽׁה׃

21

וַיָּבֹאוּ כָּל־אִישׁ אֲשֶׁר־נְשָׂאֹו לִבֹּו וְכֹל אֲשֶׁר נָדְבָה רוּחֹו אֹתֹו הֵבִיאוּ אֶת־תְּרוּמַת יְהוָה לִמְלֶאכֶת אֹהֶל מֹועֵד וּלְכָל־עֲבֹדָתֹו וּלְבִגְדֵי הַקֹּֽדֶשׁ׃
22

וַיָּבֹאוּ הָאֲנָשִׁים עַל־הַנָּשִׁים כֹּל נְדִיב לֵב הֵבִיאוּ חָח וָנֶזֶם וְטַבַּעַת וְכוּמָז כָּל־כְּלִי זָהָב וְכָל־אִישׁ אֲשֶׁר הֵנִיף תְּנוּפַת זָהָב לַיהוָֽה׃

blue like lace underwear

Mikhail Epstein encourages us to experience things very differently from how the monolingual, monological Aristotle must observe the thing. Aristotle couldn’t stand things that were speakeristic: neither poets (whose words were in flux) and translation (which included the barbarian tongue) nor females (either mortals or the goddesses).

Epstein says:

Joseph Brodsky's poem “To Urania” contains the line, “Odinochestvo est' chelovek v kvardrate”--literally: “Loneliness is a man squared.” Brodsky's own translation of this line into English reads, “Loneliness cubes a man at random.” It would be irrelevant to ask which of these expressions is more adequate to Brodsky's poetic thought. They together represent the scope of its metaphoric meaning. A stereo effect is produced, not by Russian or English lines as such but by their figurative relationship. The English “cube” amplifies and strengthens the meanings of the Russian “square,” as a lonely man self-reflects and self-multiplies, growing multidimensional as a compensation for his losses. English “cube” and Russian “square” both serve as metaphors for loneliness, but in addition they are metaphors to each other and thus build up the next level of figurative relationship between languages. Thus bilingualism makes this poem a work of special verbal art that can be called “stereopoetry,” which has more metaphorical layers in it than “monopoetry.”

Stereo effects may be intended by an author or produced in the reading experience . . .

одиночэство эст' чэловэк в квардратэ
Odinochestvo est' chelovek v kvardrate
Loneliness is a man squared
Loneliness cubes a man at random

You can find the poem in Russian in Brodsky’s уранииа, which he translates into English in To Urania. (poemhunter.com offers an ebook of some of Brodsky’s poems in English, including this one, which is found on other sites as well).

What of Ουρανία, read in English, is “blue like lace underwear”?

To Urania

Everything has its limit, including sorrow.
A windowpane stalls a stare. Nor does a grill abandon
a leaf. One may rattle the keys, gurgle down a swallow.
Loneliness cubes a man at random.
A camel sniffs at the rail with a resentful nostril;
a perspective cuts emptiness deep and even.
And what is space anyway if not the
body's absence at every given
point? That's why Urania's older sister Clio!
in daylight or with the soot-rich lantern,
you see the globe's pate free of any bio,
you see she hides nothing, unlike the latter.
There they are, blueberry-laden forests,
rivers where the folk with bare hands catch sturgeon
or the towns in whose soggy phone books
you are starring no longer; father eastward surge on
brown mountain ranges; wild mares carousing
in tall sedge; the cheeckbones get yellower
as they turn numerous. And still farther east, steam
dreadnoughts or cruisers,
and the expanse grows blue like lace underwear.

The Letter's Literary: A Personal Translation

In this post, I try my hand at translation of a book of the Bible, though I'm no Bible translator. I'm working my way through the Greek, as the host language; my English is the guest. The interlation (i.e., Greek and English side by side) below is to show the personal, the embodiment, the word play (i.e., wiggle room and playfulness in language). If Willis Barnstone attempts to recover the Hebrew senses lost in the Jewish gospels of Yeshua and in Israel's Apocalypse of Yohanan, I'm hoping to restore some of the Greek senses (for instance, the allusion to the gods in the names, such as Timothy and Epaphras). (With the English, especially the punctuation and name choices, I do confess "taking liberties," as Iyov once put it. For instance, the letter is redesigned as a memorandum; and Paul is Smally -- I just couldn't use either Pee Wee or Tiny, as those two names are infamously claimed.) I would appreciate any feedback from others, especially those who are more experienced translators, those who would have disagreement with my translation, and anyone amused by it in any way.

I'm trying, here, to translate Philemon for these few reasons:

1) It's the only book I can work through quickly to consider its whole start-to-finish context (though that itself is within the first century Roman imperial context, which looks back to various waves of Greek influence).

2) The "book" really is a letter. It is "someone else's mail" - as theologian Richard B. Hay calls Paul's first letter to the Jewish, Christian Greeks in Corinth; and that makes you and me "eavesdroppers." In Kenneth Pike's theory, then, we are principled "etic" observers, outsiders who will change the text and be changed by it, depending on whether and how we go in.

3) The little letter is highly rhetorical, and John Hobbins constantly brings attention to the rhetorical (even when he translates into English Matthew's Greek translation of a sermon of Jesus; more on Hobbins' translation in a moment, with a link to it).

4) As rhetorical and epistolary on the specific issue of slavery, Paul's letter is ambiguous in a number of different ways:

a) first, it is a letter that became a scriptural proof-text for both sides in the U.S. Civil War;
b) second, though a mere letter, it uses principles of rhetoric to make a strong argument (i.e., it delays the main point -- the freeing of the slave Onesimus and even the identification of who the letter is about -- until after the principle disputer, Philemon, has been reasonably won over by enthymeme and epideictic).
c) third, the ambiguous, rhetorical letter on slavery is applicable to other issues such as hermeneutics around whether a husband must be lovingly "over" a wife who must submit;
d) fourth, the ambigous rhetorical letter applicable to many question of human equality is literary (i.e., the proper nouns play with common nouns poetically, semantically; the incidence of chiasmus is frequent; and the implied touch of Paul's chained hand to the paper adds a splash to the poetic punch.)

Now, before jumping right in, I'll mention another huge problem right off the bat. By calling Philemon a letter but by translating it also as literature, we're mixing categories. Logic might say:

premise 1 - letters do not equal literature.
premise 2 - Philemon is a letter.
conclusion - Philemon does not equal literature.

And we could go on like that more, for to translate in a literary fashion something that is not literature is not logical. Not only it is illogical to call letters literature, but it's also unreasonable to use literary translation principles on a epistolary text. (Rather, we might more rationally use Formal Equivalence OR Dynamic Equivalence).

Peter Kirk makes this point in a comment on Elshaddai Edward's post, "Is it time for a new translation acronym?":

I would deny that of much of the Bible, in any meaningful sense of the word “literary”. The Gospel of Mark, for example, is not literary in style, nor in intent; the only meaningful sense in which it is literary is that it has been considered so by some literary critics, judged as if it were literary and found wanting. Similarly, Paul’s letter to Philemon is not “literary” but a personal letter. So, to use the term “literary translation” for Bible translation seems to imply either the false assumption that the original is literary or, in violation of Lingamish’s principle [i.e, "A literary translation will not be literary in ways that the original is not"], an attempt to distort a text which was not originally literary into a translation which is.

So I'd like to go back to the N-dimensionality of language, that Kenneth Pike talks about. Language is not so logical as, well, syllogistic logic. Language's categories (despite all Noam Chomsky's helpful theorizing) do not have the government and binding of "either/or" binary features manifesting in the performance of deep structure grammatical competence, if you'll allow the repetition of the jargon. Aristotle might like that if Chomsky would just translate his theory back into Hellenistic writing. Pike reminds us again and again: Person Above logic.

So now we can mention again John Hobbins' translation of Matthew 23. Note Hobbins' perspective on a sermon (i.e. a discourse with "hortatory" features): he calls it literary. And I say, if it fits as Matthew's Greek translation of Jesus's Hebrew Aramaic sermon within the context of Matthew's Greek gospel within the context of a multilingual multicultural first-century Israel, then why not allow "literary translation" of the literature. Barnstone flat out calls Matthew's gospel literature (while not denying its prosaic qualities, which he says most English and most Christian translations reduce the text to).

And note how Sir Philip Sidney writes The Defense of Poesy. How ironic that he must use rhetoric and Prose to defend Poetry. Why not use Poesy (i.e. Poetry)? And could poetry prove the worth of rhetoric and of prose too? Of course! Again, it is we the people writing and reading and speaking and listening who see the various qualities (sometimes ironic, sometime unintended by the author) as various letter or literature, poetry or prose, formally equivalent or dynamically equivalent or literarily equivalent.

So here is Philemon, first in the original Greek (with some re-formatting -- it's my poor html that doesn't quite do what I want), and second in a kind of original English:

1 Παῦλος δέσμιος Χριστοῦ Ἰησοῦ
καὶ Τιμόθεος ὁ ἀδελφὸς

Φιλήμονι τῷ ἀγαπητῷ καὶ συνεργῷ ἡμῶν
2 καὶ Ἀπφίᾳ τῇ ἀδελφῇ
καὶ Ἀρχίππῳ τῷ συστρατιώτῃ ἡμῶν
καὶ τῇ κατ' οἶκόν σου ἐκκλησίᾳ

3 χάρις ὑμῖν καὶ εἰρήνη ἀπὸ θεοῦ πατρὸς ἡμῶν καὶ κυρίου Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ

4 εὐχαριστῶ τῷ θεῷ μου πάντοτε μνείαν σου ποιούμενος ἐπὶ τῶν προσευχῶν μου 5 ἀκούων σου τὴν ἀγάπην καὶ τὴν πίστιν ἣν ἔχεις πρὸς τὸν κύριον Ἰησοῦν καὶ εἰς πάντας τοὺς ἁγίους 6 ὅπως ἡ κοινωνία τῆς πίστεώς σου ἐνεργὴς γένηται ἐν ἐπιγνώσει παντὸς ἀγαθοῦ τοῦ ἐν ἡμῖν εἰς Χριστόν

7 χαρὰν γὰρ πολλὴν ἔσχον καὶ παράκλησιν ἐπὶ τῇ ἀγάπῃ σου ὅτι τὰ σπλάγχνα τῶν ἁγίων ἀναπέπαυται διὰ σοῦ ἀδελφέ 8 διό πολλὴν ἐν Χριστῷ παρρησίαν ἔχων ἐπιτάσσειν σοι τὸ ἀνῆκον 9 διὰ τὴν ἀγάπην μᾶλλον παρακαλῶ τοιοῦτος ὢν ὡς Παῦλος πρεσβύτης νυνὶ δὲ καὶ δέσμιος Χριστοῦ Ἰησοῦ 10 παρακαλῶ σε περὶ τοῦ ἐμοῦ τέκνου ὃν ἐγέννησα ἐν τοῖς δεσμοῖς Ὀνήσιμον 11 τόν ποτέ σοι ἄχρηστον νυνὶ δὲ καὶ σοὶ καὶ ἐμοὶ εὔχρηστον 12 ὃν ἀνέπεμψά σοι αὐτόν τοῦτ' ἔστιν τὰ ἐμὰ σπλάγχνα 13 ὃν ἐγὼ ἐβουλόμην πρὸς ἐμαυτὸν κατέχειν ἵνα ὑπὲρ σοῦ μοι διακονῇ ἐν τοῖς δεσμοῖς τοῦ εὐαγγελίου

14 χωρὶς δὲ τῆς σῆς γνώμης οὐδὲν ἠθέλησα ποιῆσαι ἵνα μὴ ὡς κατὰ ἀνάγκην τὸ ἀγαθόν σου ᾖ ἀλλὰ κατὰ ἑκούσιον 15 τάχα γὰρ διὰ τοῦτο ἐχωρίσθη πρὸς ὥραν ἵνα αἰώνιον αὐτὸν ἀπέχῃς 16 οὐκέτι ὡς δοῦλον ἀλλ' ὑπὲρ δοῦλον ἀδελφὸν ἀγαπητόν μάλιστα ἐμοί πόσῳ δὲ μᾶλλον σοὶ καὶ ἐν σαρκὶ καὶ ἐν κυρίῳ 17 εἰ οὖν με ἔχεις κοινωνόν προσλαβοῦ αὐτὸν ὡς ἐμέ 18 εἰ δέ τι ἠδίκησέν σε ἢ ὀφείλει τοῦτο ἐμοὶ ἐλλόγα

19 ἐγὼ Παῦλος ἔγραψα τῇ ἐμῇ χειρί ἐγὼ ἀποτίσω

ἵνα μὴ λέγω σοι ὅτι καὶ σεαυτόν μοι προσοφείλεις 20 ναί ἀδελφέ ἐγώ σου ὀναίμην ἐν κυρίῳ ἀνάπαυσόν μου τὰ σπλάγχνα ἐν Χριστῷ 21 πεποιθὼς τῇ ὑπακοῇ σου ἔγραψά σοι εἰδὼς ὅτι καὶ ὑπὲρ ἃ λέγω ποιήσεις 22 ἅμα δὲ καὶ ἑτοίμαζέ μοι ξενίαν ἐλπίζω γὰρ ὅτι διὰ τῶν προσευχῶν ὑμῶν χαρισθήσομαι ὑμῖν

23 ἀσπάζεταί σε Ἐπαφρᾶς ὁ συναιχμάλωτός μου ἐν Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ
24 Μᾶρκος Ἀρίσταρχος Δημᾶς Λουκᾶς οἱ συνεργοί μου

25 ἡ χάρις τοῦ κυρίου Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ μετὰ τοῦ πνεύματος ὑμῶν

FROM:

1 Smally -- A Chained Prisoner of Anointed Joshua
and God Guy -- A Brother

TO:

Buddy – Our Loved-One and Co-Worker
2 and Loveless – Our Sister
and Horseman – Our Co-Warrior
and the Entire Group Called to Your House, Buddy

TO YOU ALL:

3 Favor and Peace

FROM:

God – Our Father
and Joshua Anointed – Our Master

4 Blessed favor goes to my God when my memories of you, Buddy, are made vivid in my prayers. 5 I keep hearing about your love – and your belief, which you hold in your possession before Master Joshua – for each one made supremely special. 6 So I’m praying that your partnership in belief is actively birthed – in the expansive knowledge of everthing that’s good in each one of you – for our Anointed One.

7 What I hold in my possession is joy, and much of it -- not to mention a call from beside you to be encouraged – and that’s all because of your love Buddy. And that love through you, Brother, refreshes the supremely special ones to their gut-level core. 8 Now, much of what I hold in my possession – from the Anointed One – is boldness: a boldness to order you to do the right thing. 9 Through love, there’s much more: a call to you alongside, to encourage you, Buddy. This is Smally here, the old guy; and now I’m even a chained prisoner of Anointed Joshua. 10 I’m beside you, calling you around now to my child -- the one I birthed in my chains -- I’m talking about Handy. 11 He’s the one who was useless to you once, but who is now -- to me and to you -- very useful in the most blessed ways. 12 He’s the one I’m sending back to you, Buddy. He’s my gut-level core. 13 He’s the one I had been counseled to hold in possession for myself, so that you, Buddy, could serve me in these chains of that Blessed Announcement to the World.

14 Apart from your knowing all about it, though, I didn’t have any wish to make a single move. I did wish that -- by no obligation -- there’d be that goodness of yours, rather by your own free will. 15 Perhaps, in fact, he was apart from you an hour, so to speak, so that for ages to come you’d hold him in your possession -- 16 no longer as a slave -- rather, as above a slave: a loved brother -- especially to me -- but so much more to you, Buddy, not only in the flesh but also in the Master. 17 If you hold onto me now as a partner, then take him back as you’d take me. 18 If, however, he’s committed some injustice, or has a debt, against you, then state that on my bill.

19

I will repay so that there’s no statement of your debt, Buddy: that you owe me your own self. 20 Yes, Brother, I myself need something handy from you as you’re in the Master: refresh me to my gut-level core in the Anointed One. 21 Persuaded by how you’ve heard me before, I’m writing to you now, Buddy, seeing once again that you’re going to go above and beyond to make good on this statement. As you’re doing that, please get a guest room ready for me. 22 I’m expecting, in fact, that the requests each one of you is making will bring favor to you all.

23 GREETINGS TO YOU BUDDY FROM:

Aphrodite’s Guy – my co-inmate in Anointed Joshua
24 And my co-workers – Warrior, Valorman, PopulaceMan, and Lukan

25 WITH THE BREATH OF EACH ONE OF YOU:

The favor of the Master – Joshua Anointed

Listening into Translation

It’s fascinating to hear what is important to Bible translators.

One of our problems, however, is that we academics all too often fail to listen to others outside our own little society of specialists. We feminists of all sorts don’t find particularly interesting what a bunch of Bible blogging men say to one another (especially when those guys diss “gals” using the F-word). We rhetoricians generally do get enjoyment out of contemplating the various lines of argument spewing out of the mouths and flowing down from the pens of religious types who must start and finish with a monolithic text that talks in one language (i.e., English, if they could ever settle on whose Anglo Saxon) despite the fact that what “the Word of God” says are as diverse as Kefa’s Pentecost long after Babel (making it imperative for the religious types to jump all over the “fact” that their singular subject “Word” does not agree with my “are”). We classicists eagerly translating Homer, Hesiod, and Sappho but more (reluctantly) Plato and Aristotle may be amused by the Bible translators’ clashes over their Greek Septuagint, which stands in the room centrally like an awkward rabbi - preacher of an elephant who, trying not to draw attention to himself, must pronounce to the most reluctant Hebrew scriptures of the Jews, “You may now kiss the bride,” when the unveiled turns out to be the Greek New Testament. (The Bible translators must, rightly, accuse me, right here, of mixing metaphors but that’s because they have a very hard time marrying poetry with prose, even though “The Bible” does. And they haven’t been able to see that LXX is the name of Little aleXander of aleXandria, the grandchild of Aristotle. But I digress, a bit).

Listen in. And learn a bit. Here’s Richard A. Rhodes (at Better Bible Blogs) and John F. Hobbins (of Ancient Hebrew Poetry) and David Ker (aka Lingamish) in snippets on just a few verses of Matthew 23. (If you’re patient, and still curious, I’ll link to their full posts below. And more, I’ll clip in what Willis Barnstone says about Matthew 23, inviting these three to get their own copies of his translation and commentary).

Rhodes writes:

In the Greco-Roman world the frame that goes with the piece of furniture we would call a chair includes power, wealth, and authority. In Matt. 23:2, the chair is mentioned as a way to convey the notion of Moses authority. It’s not about the furniture.

Matt. 23:2 "The teachers of the law and the Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat. 3So you must obey them and do everything they tell you. (NIV)

To communicate the same idea in English where there is no corresponding frame associated with chairs the passage has to rendered something more like:

Matt. 23:2 The teachers of the law and the Pharisees bear the authority of Moses. 3So you must obey them and do everything they tell you. (NIV modified)
If you fail to make the adjustment, it makes no sense to the English ear. The Koine speaker did the mental calculation from chair (καθέδρα) to authority (ἐξοθσία) as quickly, subconsciously, and wordlessly as you did in the Barbie text. To translate this reference to authority with the use of a Greek frame is utterly misleading to English speakers. It doesn’t matter that you can teach them to understand it. The fact that the connection between the wording and the concept is not instant and subconscious shows that the transparently literal translation is wrong.


Then Hobbins objects:

In settings like the one I spend my days in, in which the imparting of a global religious culture is a pursued goal, it does not make sense to read from a paraphrased Bible. To take Rich’s example (from Matthew 23:2), it makes sense to invite and expect readers to understand a phrase like “the seat of Moses,” rather than paraphrase it by something like “the authority of Moses.”

Too much inner-biblical resonance is lost if the paraphrase is adopted. People sit and teach in the Bible. People, God, sit and judge. People sit and pontificate. “The seat of Moses” connects up with passages which describe those things, such as Psalm 1:1; 9:7; Job 29:7; Luke 5:3; and Rev 4:2.

Rich’s paraphrase severs the one who adopts it from a rich series of associations far beyond the pages of the Bible. A phrase like “the seat of Moses” echoes through western and eastern literature with a biblical substrate. The elimination of what has become a literary topos by paraphrase cuts off the rivers of a tradition from its source.


And Ker maps out the battlefield before he takes his own shot:

But Matthew 23 is not a nursery rhyme. Jesus was speaking to be understood and so we should expect a Bible translation of this passage to be understandable. If he used idioms of his era, they were used to bring impact to his message not mystery. I can imagine that while Jesus was insulting the Pharisees and scribes there was a lot of laughter in the crowd. Jesus uses the same verb tense for “sat” that is used in Little Miss Muffet! And the order of the constituents in Matthew 23:2 is dramatically arranged for comedic effect:

On Moses’ seat sat… [This is the set-up]

…the scribes and Pharisees. [This is the punchline]

In this passage, going back to the end of Matthew 22, the idea of a seat is established information. Jesus has just finished quoting Psalm 110 and applying it to the Christ.

The Lord said to my Lord, “Sit at my right until I put your enemies under your feet.”

So when Jesus goes on to say that the scribes and Pharisees have sat on Moses’ seat, the new, and shocking, information is that the scribes and Pharisees have sat down in a seat reserved for the Messiah. Such a transgression in a shame-honor culture is exceedingly embarrassing. He is not acknowledging their authority but rather accusing them of usurping authority that belongs only to God.

Jesus was a rebel. He saw the power structure in place and he sought to overturn it. Don’t let anyone call you teacher. For you have only one teacher. Don’t let anyone call you father. For you have only one father. Don’t let anyone call you leader. For you have only one leader. Jesus was a revolutionary. He was speaking to the common people and utterly rejecting anyone who would try to impose a level of hierarchy between Abraham’s descendants and Abraham’s God.

And it is for this reason that it’s appropriate for a debate about Bible translation to be fought on the battlefield of Matthew 23. For those who would try to impose “formal” translations on the populace are the scribes and Pharisees of our day. Jesus said, “You bar the door to the Kingdom of Heaven to others and you yourself don’t even go in.” This message is as appropriate to the formalists as it was to the religious leaders of 1st century Palestine. Why do scholars and preachers prefer a formal translation? Because then they decide what it should mean1. If the “riches of the original” are inaccessible to the illiterate then they must bow to the authority of those who claim that they understand the original. A nursery rhyme at least sounds nice even when it is incomprehensible. But formal translations are nonsensical without euphony. And so the average Joe votes with the remote. He shuts the Bible and switches on the TV. At least the sitcoms make sense.

In answer to my rhetoric, you might argue that relying on translators is just another form of turning over authority to someone else. But there is a difference between translators whose stated purpose is to be faithful to the original and those who want to communicate in natural language. Look at these versions of Matthew 23:4:

NASB: They tie up heavy burdens and lay them on men’s shoulders, but they themselves are unwilling to move them with so much as a finger.

NIV: They tie up heavy loads and put them on men’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them.

CEV: They pile heavy burdens on people’s shoulders and won’t lift a finger to help.

NLT: They crush you with impossible religious demands and never lift a finger to help ease the burden.

While the wording of NASB, NIV and CEV is accurate to the form of the original, NLT communicates the meaning of what Jesus was saying. An average reader of Matthew 23 will not assume that it is talking about religious demands. It sounds like the scribes and Pharisees were putting people to forced labor. I think any of these translations is acceptable provided that they have a footnote. If you want to approximate the form of the original you should footnote the meaning. And if like the NLT you give the meaning, I think you should footnote a literal translation2.

But here’s the deal. People don’t read the Bible for a lesson in ancient history and language. They want to hear from God. And in the case of Matthew 23, Jesus is giving a liberating message to the oppressed. But asking people to read a translation full of bizarre vocabulary like “phylacteries” and “tassels” and “Rabbi” is a burden too heavy to bear.

Read the original posts here:

* Rich Rhodes: Do we think in words?
* John Hobbins: Do we think in words? A Reply
* and David Ker: Excuse me, I think you’re in my chair

Now, lest we care to hear more (otherwise), here’s Barnstone (a comparative literature scholar, a Jew, not a Christian translating the Bible but a Bible translator nonetheless). Here’s some of his commentary on Matthew in The New Covenant Commonly Called The New Testament:

YESHUA BEN YOSEF

There are and always will be many tones and ways, from Milton to Cole Porter, of making poems and writing down words. I prescribe to no single way but hope, in my own attempts, for plainness and lyrical clarity. Despite the dissuasions of missing line breaks, it is clear that one of the world’s major poets is and has been for two millennia Yeshua the Messiah. His pen was in the hands of others who recorded and translated his words into Greek.

We are accustomed to believe that poetry resides in the Hebrew Bible and that the New Covenant is a story and a play, a fabling narration and a drama, but that the only poetry in it are snatches from the Hebrew Bible, unassigned to a specific prophet, which are essentially cited in Greek from the Septuagint translation of the Bible. Yet Matthew, the gospel with the most dialogue, anthologizes the diverse wisdom talk and prayers of Yeshua from the other gospels into the Sermon on the Mount, a string of poems that includes the psalm of the Lord’s Prayer. Matthew is mainly poetry.

The poet of the New Covenant is invisible, obscured in prose. And we do not know the voice and identity of the recorder or recorders. Yet hear that voice and hear a poet. Few have recognized the poet, because they were not led, by the shape of the print of the page, to use their ears, although Yeshua’s voice (except in brief dialogue) came uniformly and sonorously in verse sayings. The poems remained confined to lucent and fluent English prose of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but no matter. So were Job and the Song of Songs until their release into verse in the English Revised Version (1885). Once released, the tradition of verse was settled. Now there is a sound of poetry in the air for the Greek scriptures. It has been slow and irregular in coming, but with new versions the sound will prevail. It is time to hear the poet.

The concentration of poetry in the New Covenant is commonly called “Jesus’ sayings,” a phrase that ignores or fails to recognize the poetry. The Jerusalem Bible, a Catholic translation, translates much of John and most of Yeshua into verse. Curiously, it does not render Apocalypse into verse, which is the single long, indisputable poem of the New Covenant. Where the Jerusalem version found poetry, however, is not astonishing. And yet, the translators failed to make it sing. By contrast, the Tyndale and King James prose renditions of the passages are charged with poetry. Other standard modern versions of the poetic speech in the New Covenant, with the marked exception of the Lattimore, are largely without brightness of word.

The poems in the gospels are clean and incomplete and their endings elusively open. Even the most gnomic couplets are concentrated wisdom sayings, which, though proverbial, do not limit by finality. They are not conclusions but a hint for further meditation. Some longer ones ramble magnificently in the form of parable narrations. Some aphoristically take a moment of nature, using only images and shunning abstraction, to give the metaphysics of life on earth and of eternity. . . (pages 29 – 30)

Barnstone cites particular examples of Matthew translating Yeshua and compares instances with Sappho’s poetic texts. But let’s hear Barnstone’s blank verse translation of the first of Matthew 23:

Then Yeshua spoke to the crowds and to his students, 2 saying,

On the seat of Mosheh sit the scholars and Prushim.
3 Do and observe all that they tell you,
But do not do as they do. They speak and do nothing.
4 They tie up heavy bundles
and lay them on the shoulders of other men,
but will not lift a finger to move them.
5 All they do is for show.
They spread their tephillin and lengthen their tassels
6 and love the foremost couch at the dinners,
the front seats in the synagogues,
7 to be greeted in the market places
and to be called rabbi by the people.

8 But you must not be called rabbi,
for you have one teacher and are all students.
9 On earth call no one father. You have one father
in heaven.
10 and do not call yourselves instructors.
You have one instructor, the mashaiah.
11 The greatest among you will be your servant.

12 Whoever raises himself high will be brought low
and whoever is brought low will be raised high.

Here, I’m inviting Rhodes and Hobbins and Ker to get their own copies of Barnstone’s translation. And I am inviting them to compare their own particular views on Matthew 23 with his.

(I do hope one of them will say the Barnstone needs footnotes. In fact, it does; and thankfully Barnstone provides a helpful note, in this passage, on Mosheh, on Prushim, and on tephillin.

I also want them to suggest that the Barnstone would best be published side by side with the Greek. In fact, it would be. Barnstone is refreshingly intent on bringing the poetic Hebrew voice of Yeshua back into the Christian text. Unfortunately, he looses the Greek voice of Matthew, a voice akin to that of the Septuagint translators, who speak both Hebrew and Greek, the Hellene of the poets who have been disparaged by Plato and Aristotle. A diglot would cure the ailment of the monotonish Hebrew-English. But let's all admit that monotonishness is the ill of most English versions of the Bible today: there’s no immediate interlation provided by translations side by side.

But, then, that would require our listening across our own small and special domains. And none of us is liable, at least not very readily so, to do that kind of very kind listening that makes a difference.)