Unholy and Hallowed Whore Words: Part II

You may have seen my post entitled, "Unholy and Hallowed Whore Words: Part I" and wondered -- with all the Greek and English horse words and whore words and slave and Master allusions but no religious references -- what Unholiness and Hallowedness may have had to do with it.  

In Part II, here, let's get to that.  But let's go back to the Greek.  Then we'll get to the unHoly and Hallowed.

THE GREEK

I learned something reading a comment by Theophrastus at BBB.  He said:

“hallowed” [the English word for the Greek] (ἁγιάζω) does not mean “honored.” It means “separated.” 

Well, that's not exactly what I learned from Theophrastus.  What I learned is this:

(The Hebrew word, קדשׁת is the same root as קדשׁה — which means prostitute — see Genesis 38:21 — the point being that cult prostitute is “separated”, not that she is “honored”).

(So let me make a couple of parenthetical comments of my own here.  First, I've studied an awful lot of Greek but far too little Hebrew.  So I'm quite familiar with the connections between and associations around “hallowed” (ἁγιάζω), as “separated.”  And, in fact, in my own comments at that thread where Theophrastus made his comment, I was suggesting these are words with Jewish and religious connotations, but Hebraic words for translation, Hellene and English translations of something Jesus said in a poetic prayer.  However, I've only taken one graduate level course in Hebrew and have since mainly been reading Hebrew as Greek and as English mirror the language.  So somehow, I missed what Theophrastus was pointing out:  the root of קדשׁת as קדשׁה.  I missed this even though I've read through the translations of Genesis from Hebrew -- sometimes Greek -- into English.  By the way, two of the best translators of Genesis ever are Everett Fox and Robert Alter.  Second, the way most of us learn, I think, is by connections and associations.  Translation, when done well, mirrors this process.  And it works, when done well, as appositives work in our English language.  You know.  If we want to say what something is [metaphorically or even syllogistically] or what something's kind of like [with a simile], then we can't shortcut these more direct processes but just smashing one noun right up to another [without even using an adjective].  It's one thing, for example, for me to say precisely, "Bdelycleon is an elite Aristocrat in Athens."  And it's quite another thing to leave things rather undefined when saying, "Xanthias, a slave."  When jammed together, the phrases "Xanthias" and "a slave" change with respect to one another, because they're now associated and cross-fertilizing meanings, but they also are still what they were before the jamming together.  When we move now to Hebrew, I'm going to suggest this sort of appositive stuff might be important.)

When playwright Aristophanes used the Greek word πόρνη [pórnē] in his plays, the word for him and his audiences always referred to "whore."  And we all know that it's a word with the same root as the word we use to refer to pornography, or porn for short.  But for the play audiences of Aristophanes, we might want to know, the word was rare, was un-common.  Yes, it's true.  The word's only used twice in The Wasps and just once in The Acharnians.  And the related form πόρνα is only used eight times in six different plays.  And, for all of the un-lost plays of his, that's it.  And none of his contemporaries used the word much either.  Lysias, the logographer, the speechwriter, used it but one time in his many many speeches.  The point is, the word πορνη wasn't in anybody's dictionaries.  Today, some Greek etymologist speculate it could be related to the more common Greek word for "selling" (πέρνημι) since these women were sold by men to other men for sex.  But we just don't know for sure.  It was just something uncommon jammed up against other more common words.  For example, in The Wasps, the Aristocrat Bdelycleon promises to take care of his father Philocleon, and he says:  "I will feed him, I will give him everything that is suitable for an old man; oatmeal gruel, a cloak, soft furs, and a wench (πόρνη [pórnē]) to rub his tool and his loins."  Here, Eugene O'Neill is translating the word "wench."  πόρνη [pórnē], wench, whore.  The word just caught on.   It was a rare word, but men didn't have to be educated to learn it.  

THE unHOLY AND HALLOWED

An equally rare word is the one Theophrastus pointed out.  "The Hebrew word, קדשׁת is the same root as קדשׁה — which means prostitute — see Genesis 38:21 — the point being that cult prostitute is 'separated'...."

Now, this word is so un-common, so rare, that in the whole of Genesis, it's only mentioned in 38:21 and 38:22.  In the whole of the Torah, it's only mentioned again once, in Deuteronomy 23:17.  And elsewhere, it's only used again in Hosea 4:14.  So, if there were no dictionaries, how did the original readers of ancient days, read and understand?  And how do the current etymologists and scholars and lexicographers and rabbis and preachers know?  Is it kind of like Matthew's readers knowing what ἁγιασθήτω meant when no one ever before had used such a special and specialized form of this Greek word before (and without even pronouncing the name of G-d)?  Is it sort of like readers of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows getting what Hallows means?  Well, yes.  And, yes.

So how did I miss this?

Well, maybe it's the fault of translators who feel like they need me to have my own Bible in my own language and not in such a foreign and strange tongue as, well, as rare Hebrew.  The Greek Septuagint uses Aristophanes's once-rare Greek word, πόρνη [pórnē].  The "Bible in Basic English" gives the word to me as "the loose woman."  Young's "literal" Bible gives it to me as "the separated one."  Other translations make it "the harlot."  Most have "the prostitute," and many of those have some adjective like, "temple" or "shrine" or "cult" prostitute.

Fortunately, in contrast to all of the above, two of the best translators, ever, see fit to hyphenate the word.  They bring it across in English as one-word, as punctuated-apposition.  (Maybe I should have read their footnotes and their translations more carefully.)  Everett Fox has the Hebrew word as "that holy-prostitute." Robert Alter has it as "the cult-harlot."  The ambiguity is so very important.  The word can go one way, or the other, and in this case both ways at once.

So let's hear a bit more from the good translators, in some of their footnotes on this word.  Fox has:

prostitute:  Heb.  kedesha, which in cognate languages may indicate a "holy" official, here seems to describe a woman who is similarly outside the usual constraints of family.

 Alter, at Deuteronomy 23:18 has:

cult-harlot . . . cult-catamite.  The precise meaning of these two terms, qedeshah and qadesh, is diputed.  There is no clear-cut evidence that ritual prostitution was practiced in the ancient Near East, though it remains an undeniable possibility....  Exceptionally, the female qedeshah is presented here before the male qadesh suggesting she was the more familiar type.  The story of Judah and Tamar in Genesis 38 makes it clear that qedeshah was some sort of more refined or dignified designation for a prostitute:  Judah takes Tamar for a "whore" (zonah); Hirah his emissary then refers to her more decorously as a qedeshah.  Since the root means "sacred," it is a reasonable inference that the qedeshah was either a woman who prostituted herself as part of the cult (in this case, a fertility cult) or a prostitute working near the site of a santuary who devoted part of her professional income to the sanctuary.  Since the pilgrim obligation to participate in the temple service was laid upon the males, the qadesh would in all likelihood have been a homosexual prostitute, as the translation "cult-catamite" is meant to indicate.

So, knowing what we don't know and the little bit we do know, then how would we like to read a Bible that tells us we're reading about Tamar, as "the loose woman" or as "the separated one" or as "the shrine prostitute"?

A better question is how would we like a translator like Everett Fox and Robert Alter to translate Hosea 4:14?  They haven't yet.  So why don't we in the mean time?  Here's the MT and then a Fox-and-Alter-like modifying of the Jewish Publication Society's translation:

א־אפקוד על־בנותיכם כי תזנינה ועל־כלותיכם כי תנאפנה כי־הם עם־הזנות יפרדו ועם־הקדשות יזבחו ועם לא־יבין ילבט׃ 

I will not punish your daughters when they commit harlotry, nor your daughters-in-law when they commit adultery; for they themselves consort in un-holiness with lewd women, and they sacrifice with the hallowed-harlots; and the people that is without understanding is distraught.

As we look at the various ways men have used women, and have used language to use women, it's somewhat curious how the language, as if it were un-holy, is sometimes so hallowed.

Unholy and Hallowed Whore Words: Part I

κἀμέ γ᾽ ἡ πόρνη χθὲς εἰσελθόντα τῆς μεσημβρίας,
ὅτι κελητίσαι 'κέλευον, ὀξυθυμηθεῖσά μοι
ἤρετ᾽ εἰ τὴν Ἱππίου καθίσταμαι τυραννίδα.

Me at least, to my Whore yesterdy, were comin at noon.
She at me, Sir Steed of Speed, were eruptin in outrage
At Bronco Buckin. Like she were sittin on her Horse, like a tyrant!

  --Xanthias, a slave
   (in the play "The Wasps," line 500, by Aristophanes,
   in Greece, in 422 BCE,
   translated here by J. K. Gayle)

What's meant to be funny about the line above is that it's out of the mouth of a mere slave, who's been using a mere whore, to answer the elegant Bdelycleon.  Bdelycleon is an elite Aristocrat in Athens.  He not only owns many horses but he also owns several slaves, including Xanthias.  He had so many slaves, in fact, that they were like swarming wasps, after which the play is named.  Bdelycleon (as Eugene O'Neill, Jr. translates him in the play) has just complained aloud, with sophisticated rhetoric, about how others are accusing him of being a tyrant when he feels he's been more than fair and just:

Everything is now tyranny with us, no matter what is concerned, whether it be large or small. Tyranny! I have not heard the word mentioned once in fifty years, and now it is more common than salt-fish, the word is even current on the market. If you are buying gurnards and don't want anchovies, the huckster next door, who is selling the latter, at once exclaims, "That is a man whose kitchen savours of tyranny!" If you ask for onions to season your fish, the green-stuff woman winks one eye and asks, "Ha, you ask for onions! are you seeking to tyrannize, or do you think that Athens must pay you your seasonings as a tribute?"

This is what the slave replies to.  In a post yesterday, we saw O'Neill's rendering:

Yesterday I went to see a whore about noon and told her to get on top; she flew into a rage, pretending I wanted to restore the tyranny of Hippias.

But I wanted to show the playwright's play on the language.  And the connections between a mere whore and a ridden horse are clearer in the Greek.  What's supposed to be funny here (as the men laugh in the audience of the play performed in Athens) is that the mere slave of the sophistocated Aristocrat who owns him inadvertently compares his Master to a mere whore.  And he's put himself in the mere position of the horse.  Yes, the men are also laughing because of the sex play, the sexual role reversals, the woman on top.  And if we had more time, then we could investigate the playwright, and his choice of words, and realize how πόρνη [pórnē] was just coming into currency in Athens as a phrase for prostitutes.  If men in slavery had no rights, and if tyrants ruled like dictators, then at least all men had rights to these women.  And the reinforcement of the sexualized hierarchy -- all men over possessed women -- came in their laughs and language.

Ways of Translation: Part 4, Language as A(p)position

Amen, Amen, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat; but if it dies, it produces much fruit
--Jesus, as translated by John and now translated by somebody else


[A]s Julia Kristeva points out, female subjectivity, traditionally linked to cyclical and monumental time rather than to linear time, lies outside “language considered as the enunciation of sentences (noun + verb, topic – comment, beginning – ending).” Possessing an “irreducible identity, without equal in the opposite sex and, as such, exploded, plural, fluid,” a woman may be driven “to break the code, to shatter language, to find a specific discourse closer to the body and the emotions, to the unnamable repressed by the social contract.”   The difference that emerges here is not the polarity intrinsic in the dominant discourse, which reduces “woman to man’s opposite, his other, the negative of the positive.” No, this is an absolute and radical alterity that enfolds the other, as in pregnancy a woman’s immune system shuts down in such a way that she shelters and nourishes, rather than rejects and expels, the foreign body within her: “Cells fuse, split, and proliferate; volumes grow, tissues stretch, and body fluids change rhythm, speeding up or slowing down. Within the body, growing as a graft, indomitable, there is an other. And no one is present, within that simultaneously dual and alien space, to signify what is going on.” Feminine discourse is not the language of opposites but a babel of eroticism, attachment, and empathy.

--Nancy Mairs, voice lessons: on becoming a (woman) writer (pages 40-42)

With this post, I'm closing a series of posts on Ways of Translation. But this post - "Part 4, Language as A(p)position" - may open a can of worms.


Most of us in the West tend to view 1) Language as Proposition, or to use 2) Language as Imposition, or to work through 3) Language as Transposition.  In other words, Language works like 1) precise Logic; or Language functions as 2) a limited or a strong Force; or Language is 3) the shadow of Truth. These were how 1) Aristotle; 2) Alexander the Great; and 3) Plato and his teacher Socrates conceived of Language or "logos." And most of us in the West who have ideas about and practice with Translation will find ourselves appropriating one or more of these conceptions of Language.

However, Language for the women around the men Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Alexander conceived of "logos" much differently. And beyond the Western male tradition, we can find other ways of talking about Translation.

I'm not saying that men or even men in the West cannot conceive of Language as say Asapasia of Miletus did.  For example, Kenneth L. Pike, an American linguist, was able to view language as "N-dimensional" as infinitely-dimensioned.  I remember as one of his graduate students in a seminar on his views of language hearing Pike quote Nelson Goodman:  what we need, Pike paraphrased, is "radical relativism within rigid restraints."  And for Pike both the relativism and the restraints were human.  He said that the observer of language not only changed the observed data but was also changed himself or herself in the process of observing.  He'd tell the story of how one of his early teachers complained, saying "We need for a language to have one and only one meaning for each single word"; young Pike, the older Pike told us, then replied:  "but, sir, how then could we learn language"?  Pike understood that meanings flowed like Heraclitus's river, and that the river was the same river because of the same Heraclitus.  "Person," Pike would insist, "always is above formal logic."  And he'd talk of peoples whose languages don't have the many numbers that ours do.  Who needs 'em all?  I much admire Pike because he was not only a language scientist but he was also a poet.  At the end of his famous monolingual demonstrations (in which he, the observer of and listener to of a language of somebody else, a language he'd never heard nor encountered in any way before), Pike would tell a poem.  It was almost as if he knew the linguists in his audience watching were focused too narrowly on one thing or another, and his poem would help them observe differently, and change profoundly, if by some small degree.  Pike was also a rhetorician and a compositionist and has had an impact on humans writing computer language as well.  It's a shame that so many around us have not heard him much these days -- as a fledgling rhetorician, not too long ago, I complained some.

Let me mention others' conceptions of Translation now, and then talk about Language as A(p)osition.

Lydia H. Liu, who is a Chinese scholar living in America researching Chinese appropriations of Western modernism, says that Chinese translators tend to view Translation as a host (language) and a guest (language) coming together sharing.  Theirs is not the view of a source (language) penetrating a target (language). Tony Barnstone and Chou Ping, in their book of English-translated Chinese poetry, compare translation to auto-bodyshop work. Mikhail Epstein prefers to think of translation as interlation, as two languages contributing new things to one another. The UN simultaneous interpreters give Karen Jobes a fresh way to think about Bible translation, as "bilingual quotation." Mary Daly puns words and reads double intentions into many.  My missionary-kid siblings and I would make up Vietnamese-English that mainly we would understand but that our Vietnamese friends and English speaking family members would struggle over as insiders the other way (and since my brother who lives in London was here in the Fort Worth for my dissertation defense, I shared some of this -- the language as ap(p)osition -- with committee members and the rest of the audience).  Several feminist translators in Canada tend intentionally to "overtranslate," that is to make themselves present in the translated text, and to make silences and margins a bit more noticeable. Translators of Jesus in the gospels, the gospel writers themselves, would follow him in using hyperbole, parable, not just metaphysics but hyperphysia, and humor -- things not allowed in Aristotle's Language as Proposition or needed in Alexander's Language as Imposition, though often a part of Socrates's and Plato's Language as Transposition.  When John the gospel writer and translator started his gospel, he startled the world of Greek language by saying "In the beginning was the Logos."  Which logos?  That's the question, exactly.  (I think it's funny that the Jesus Seminar folks believe that John never told of Jesus telling a parable.  The epigraph that starts this post is sort of a parable that ends Marks, in Mark 4.  Oh, and we should mention that Robert Quinn's 4th CEO change strategy is the self-transformation strategy, that he gets from Jesus, and from Gandhi and MLKJr.  And George Steiner says the fourth poetry reading difficulty is the ontological difficult, something about the poem changing the reader, and such.  And then Mark goes crazy with the fourth sower/soil in the parable, and gets wild saying that Jesus says by a rhetorical question that the parable's the parable of parables.  Now this is not the language of most linguistics or theology classes.)

So now Language as A(p)position. I'm coining a phrase to highlight some ambiguities.

"An appositive is a noun, noun phrase, or noun clause which follows a noun or pronoun and renames or describes the noun or pronoun. A simple appositive is an epithet like Alexander the Great."  I'd say an appositive works much like a parable, a story throw beside your own that makes you (want to) change a little.  You might also say that an appositive works like the linguist who observes data but changes, changes herself or himself and the observed data too.  This is how Language as A(p)position works, how it does things.

But a-position is my mix of Greek and Latin to say there's No Position at all.  This is where Aspasia of Miletus finds herself, not a citizen of Athens, not a member of any (proper) Greek city state, not a male, and not even a marryable wombman.  Nonetheless, she stands next to the greatest philosophers and rhetoricians and writers and linguists of all time, and she learns from them but they also learn from her.  Hers is the kind of outsider translingualism here that people like Lydia H. Liu and Steven G. Kellman study much more recently.  "Translingual, transport, transplant, translate . . . a crossing over, a movement into a new state, a transformation," says Martha J. Cutter as if describing language in a(p)positive ways.  If we just had more time, we might say more and listen more.  Someone might listen and write a dissertation, a blogpost, or something.