Jesus Is an (Inaccurate) Simultaneous Translator

I am before the American people today through no inclination of my own but because of a deep-seated conviction that the country at large does not know the extent to which lynch law prevails. . . . I can not believe that the apathy and indifference which so largely obtains regarding mob rule is other than the result of ignorance of the true situation.
--Ida B. Wells

Eight Negroes lynched in one week. . . Nobody in this section of the country believes the old thread-bare lie that negro men rape white women. If Southern white men are not careful they will overreach themselves, and public sentiment will have a reaction. A conclusion will then be reached which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women.
--Ida B. Wells

Sometimes I will half jokingly say to [my Philosophy 101 students] as they hand me their tests after an exam, "Did you believe what you wrote?" And they all smile. Because they know that the important thing is not to believe what you write but to write the “right answers.” And unfortunately that is a very encapsulated way of indicating what happens when we lose truth. When we lose truth, there's nothing left but conformity.
--Dallas Willard

Ida B. Wells and Dallas Willard were born 73 years apart. She’s an African American woman; he’s a Euro American man. And they both have the same concern that truth is lost without belief.

But if we talk with Wells or Willard a little longer, if we take time to slow down, to sit down, and to sip with them some Earl Grey tea and really listen, then we may just hear something more. Neither is insisting, legally or philosophically, on anything mechanistic. They’re not only wanting “accuracy” lest there be “inaccuracies.”

No, no, no. It’s “Truth,” yes. With belief, of course! And it’s the condition of the human embodied. You yourself have one, remember? Touch your face, then excuse yourself for a moment to believe what you see in the mirror. And then come back for more, to talk, to listen:

Rape of women. Lynching of negroes. Writing of vacuous right answers with a sheepish smile on one’s face.

So we, friends, broach the subject of translation. And accuracy. Remember how Kenneth L. Pike started his monolingual demonstrations? And how he ended them? He started by reminding us the whole affair of social intercourse might fail. He began by insisting only two things of the one with whom he’d speak: that they use their language only (not his), and that they’d be friendly. Pike wanted to listen to that person in her body, not to Aristotle’s fool-proof and accurate logic all over again. So he ended his demonstrations with a poem (not logical prose) for you and for me. We also could listen, in our bodies, profoundly. Truth, yes. Belief, of course. Something deep inside our flesh and bones, amen and amen.

So we, friends, broach the subject of translation. And accuracy. Accuracy’s not just Aristotle’s cold dis-embodied game. No, Robert Funk and the “Jesus” seminar play the game too. Those words that the canonized four of the church say were Jesus can no longer be believed; they’re not accurate. I’m not saying the color-coded Funky English translation isn’t beautiful but that it’s lost truth.

So we, friends, broach the subject of translation. And accuracy. Joshua (aka Jesus) was a simultaneous translator. He says he only spoke the words he heard from the sky, in his body standing on the earth. And he depended on a woman to convey his words about that body torn and emptied that stood up again after three days of being deep down. He didn’t have a concern for her accuracy but for the belief of men and women in their bodies, where they stood on this earth. (Check the epigrams below if you don't believe me.)

So we, friends, broach the subject of translation. And accuracy. The irony of the “Jesus” seminar is that they really are accurate, in a sense. But they say only 20% of the words of Jesus we think we’ve heard are his. But won’t we agree that 0% of the words of Jesus are “original”? That 100% of what we get from him we get in an unholy tongue, penned by translators none of whom ever went to SIL?

So we, friends, broach the subject of translation. And accuracy. When the stakes aren’t so high, when we’re just playing Plato’s academic games, when we’re talking about “rhetoric,” then we might relax a bit more. So what if we find one of the leading experts on Greek rhetoric today concerned with accuracy and precision in his translation of one of the leading experts on Greek rhetoric way back then? The “so what” is that the leading expert way back then was so unlike Ida B. Wells. No, I don’t mean that Aristotle was not a woman, and not black skinned, and not from the natural class of slaves, and not uneducated in the elite schools, and not a barbarian. I mean that he was not a translator, he was not one who could hear others in their bodies as they spoke believable truth. Or else he might have had to change himself, to come down, and to sip a cup of Earl Grey tea with them.

This may just be an epilogue for a series around Translation: 6 or 7 “Logical” Cases. But do catch the epigraphs below, if you can hear with ears and see with eyes and believe in your body:

Ἦσαν δὲ Ἑλληνές τινες ἐκ τῶν ἀναβαινόντων ἵνα προσκυνήσωσιν ἐν τῇ ἑορτῇ· οὗτοι οὖν προσῆλθον Φιλίππῳ τῷ ἀπὸ Βηθσαϊδὰ τῆς Γαλιλαίας, καὶ ἠρώτων αὐτὸν λέγοντες, Κύριε, θέλομεν τὸν Ἰησοῦν ἰδεῖν. ἐρχεται ὁ Φίλιππος καὶ λέγει τῷ Ἀνδρέᾳ· ἐρχεται Ἀνδρέας καὶ Φίλιππος καὶ λέγουσιν τῷ Ἰησοῦ. ὁ δὲ Ἰησοῦς ἀποκρίνεται αὐτοῖς λέγων, . . .
ἀμὴν ἀμὴν λέγω ὑμῖν, ἐὰν μὴ ὁ κόκκος τοῦ σίτου πεσὼν εἰς τὴν γῆν ἀποθάνῃ, αὐτὸς μόνος μένει· ἐὰν δὲ ἀποθάνῃ, πολὺν καρπὸν φέρει.

Now there were certain Greeks among those who were going up to worship at the feast; these therefore came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida of Galilee, and began to ask him, saying, "Sir, we wish to see Jesus." Philip came and told Andrew; Andrew and Philip came, and they told Jesus. And Jesus answered them, saying, . . .
“Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains by itself alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”
--John, Jesus, certain Greeks, Philip, Andrew, King James, certain other translators

So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive.
--Audre Lorde

Translation: "Logical" Case VI

This post won’t cover old ground on George A. Kennedy’s most recent translation of Aristotle’s Rhetoric. In a post called “eavesdroppings,” I’ve already discussed who the aimed-for audiences are (both for Aristotle’s treatise and for Kennedy’s translation of it).

But I’m bringing up again the fact that Kennedy explicitly identifies four particular audiences for his translation. I’m bringing that up again just to relay one thing that Brad McAdon writes in a scathing review: “What is noteworthy about this taxonomy of [four] audiences is that Kennedy does not explicitly situate himself with any one of these particular groups or offer his hermeneutical or methodological approach to the text.” (Rhetoric Review, 2007, Vol. 26, No. 3, page 342). Now, to be fair to Kennedy, McAdon does not explicity situate himself anywhere either. We know he’s the reviewer and guess he’s a rhetoric scholar, (and if you read his review, you understand exactly McAdon’s various gripes with Kennedy’s second edition of the translation); but we have no certainty of McAdon’s own expertise much less his “hermeneutical or methodological approach to the text.” I google. Find his web page. And see that McAdon himself “is now working on a translation and commentary of Aristotle's Rhetoric.” He’s listed the titles of several of his publications, all on topics of classical rhetoric and most of those on Aristotle’s. He’s a teacher of various courses in communication, composition, writing, rhetoric, and theory, and holds the positions of Assistant Professor and of Coordinator of Professional Writing in the English department of a U.S. university.

The big point I want to make is that both Kennedy and McAdon are playing Aristotle’s game. In other words, they’re pretending objectivity. They can and do observe subjects in nature coldly. They can and do employ the “either / or” binary to develop taxonomies. And they can and do find themselves above every subject, even the human subjects, put down on their hierarchical epistemological map.

What else would you do, in the academy, as scholars, and experts, who know their stuff? Do we really have to navel gaze? Do we really have to explicitly situate ourselves everytime we want to say something about nature and truth (when fantasy and falsehood seem to rule the day)? And what does any of that have to do with translation anyway?

Thanks for asking! Such good questions!

In reality, one of Kennedy’s colleagues outed him. And so I say that if McAdon hadn’t been so busy trying to throw up every ugly thing he could find as a bad revision in Kennedy’s translation (when the latter is in the twightlight of a bright and stellar career while the former is merely beginning to pledge to translate the Rhetoric), then McAdon might have known the self-identity Kennedy had embraced. In 1992, at the Biennial Conference of the Rhetoric Society of America in St. Paul, Minnesota (while the citizens of the United States were listening to the rhetoric of the presidential candidates), Thomas B. Farrell of Northwestern made these comments about Kennedy and his then-new translation:

May I begin by agreeing entirely with my colleague Michael Leff’s assessment of this work, that “it is virtually certain to supercede all previous translations and to remain the standard version for years to come.” [This is a prediction that remains true a decade and a half later]. Where the defiant text of the Rhetoric is concerned, it has usually been the Classicists who are best equipped to wrestle with the nuances of etymology and shades of meaning. However, these are persons usually least inclined toward the discussion of larger issues raised by this text. Philosophers, more attuned to larger concerns about practical reason, action, conviction, and value, are often least intersted in finer points about the meaning of this text, or even the text itself. This leaves rhetoricians, often ill-equipped in matters of Greek grammar and etymology, not terribly interested in issues such as the above, while bound by derived wisdom on both. Add to this the observations by Richard McKeon that most previous translators of the Aristotelian corpus have been Platonists and we get an inkling of the difficulties confronting those whose theory has been based on the Rhetoric. Kennedy brings to this text a familiarity with the larger issues confronting any serious student of this work. And yet his ultimate responsibility, as translator, is not to the sweep of issues, but to the range and fidelity and freedom afforded by Rhetoric’s original Greek language. Finally, on the strength of his recent essay in Philosophy and Rhetoric, there is obviously little danger of creeping Platonism in Professor Kennedy’s translation. In the aforementioned essay, he even suggests that there is a rhetoric of plants. And of course, a simple glance at the Presidential primaries will confirm the wisdom of this institution. So I can safely aver that Professor Kennedy is not a Platonist. I mean this to be a compliment. All of these strengths (of the philosopher, classicist, and rhetorician) show themselves in the way Kennedy’s translation presents Aristotle’s “philosophical” rhetoric to the student of rhetorical theory. (page 237 of the proceedings)

To sum up: Kennedy’s no Platonist (in contrast to previous, and therefore weaker, translators of the Rhetoric). And to that, Kennedy confesses:

. . . Our friends the philosophers have begun to take more note of the Rhetoric in their study of Aristotle, not out of a willingness to approach philosophy as a rhetorical discourse but in apparent hopes of weaving material from the Rhetoric more tightly into the network of Aristotle’s philosophy. All too many students of Aristotle are, in their hearts, Platonists. I am not only content, but delighted, when Professor Farrell proclaims that I am not a Platonist. Not everyone has noticed. . .

But suppose Aristotle had, as Plato did, explored the philosophical issues of rhetoric and inserted some such discussion into the text [of the Rhetoric]. We can reconstruct, either in his language or in postmodern language, what he might have said about political and ethical functions of rhetoric. If he had done so, I would suggest, some of us at least would now be engaged in deconstructing his remarks along the lines of Derrida’s deconstruction of Plato’s Phaedrus. That is to say, we would be exploring the slippages between a logocentrist position that gives some fundamental moral meaning to rhetoric in society and what Aristotle actually does in the text [of the Rhetoric] as a whole. Virtually every category and strategy discussed can be used for opposed moral purposes, and the only criterion we are offered is the parenthetical remark that we should not seek to persuade what is “base.” It is perhaps not too much to say that the central problem with the Rhetoric for those who approach it philosophically is that it comes to us already “deconstructed,” filled with différance, supplements, and “traces.” Ethical meaning is constantly differed, and key terms such as topos constantly repeat themselves both as the same and as different. . . .

My suggestion to the philosophers. . . is that instead of reading the Rhetoric as a work of philosophy they should try reading Aristotle’s major treatises on other subjects as rhetorical constructs. They might, for example, begin to observe the system of imagery prevailing in the Nicomachean Ethics, which is filled with teleological, emotionally based metaphors. What appear on the surface to be rational arguments are at the most usually enthymemes, not syllogisms, and their persuasive quality is often derived from ethos and pathos. They should explore also the concept of audience in each of the treatises, seen for example in the patterns in which Aristotle shifts from use of the first person singular to the first person plural. (pages 244-46 of the proceedings)

To sum up that: Kennedy says he’s no Platonist.

Enthymematically (not syllogistically), Kennedy also argues that too many of Aristotle’s students shouldn’t be the Platonists that they are. The bigger argument that we should follow is Kennedy’s contention that Plato’s student Aristotle is no Platonist. He’s not even syllogistically Aristotlelian. No, Aristotle’s already slipping from his “logocentric position” into what he’s “actually do[ing] in the text [of the Rhetoric] as a whole.” If Aristotle the rhetorician had even pretended to be Aristotle the philosopher, then he would have self-deconstructed long ago.

A very interesting perspective Professor Kennedy the rhetorician!

Are you going to be Professor Kennedy the rhetorical translator?

Might you even be Professor Kennedy the feminist rhetorical translator (admitting that that “a logocentrist position” is rather phallologocentric and downright sexist)?

Or will we find you, in the end, to be Professor Kennedy the Aristotelian philosopher (defining and classifying the nature of such subjects as “the Platonist” and even better “not the Platonist” and even better than all of that NOT a learner NOT a barbarian NOT a translator NOT ever a woman)?

Of course, there’s always hope. Perhaps Aristotle can listen (as Pericles and Socrates seem to have listened to Aspasia). Perhaps rhetoric (and even the Rhetoric) is a refreshing run from Plato and from Platonism and even from Aristotelian philosophy. Perhaps Aristotle hears Sappho and Eros and her appropriations of him. (“RhEros,” I hear Scooby Doo saying in Greek). Perhaps Professor Kennedy will translate that into English.

Here’s the Promise from Professor Kennedy:

Two features of my translation may be worth pointing out in advance. A major doctrine of On Rhetoric [Kennedy’s name for Aristotle’s treatise] is the use of the enthymeme, or rhetorical syllogism. In Aristotle’s own writing enthymemes often take the form of a statement followed by a clause introduced by the Greek particle gar, which gives a supporting reason. These occur on every page but are often obscured by other translators. I have kept them, using a semicolon and the English particle “for” as a way of drawing the attention of the reader and making the device familiar.

A second feature is the avoidance of some of the sexist language seen in older translations, which often speak of “men” when Aristotle uses a more general plural. I have used man or men only in those few instances in which the word anthrōpos or anēr appears in the Greek; otherwise I use someone, people, or they. On the other hand, to alter Aristotle’s many uses of he, his, or him in reference to speakers or members of a Greek assembly or jury would be unhistorical and would involve an actual change to the text. Aristotle usually envisions only males as speaking in public, but he clearly did not think that rhetoric was a phenomenon limited to males, for he draws examples of rhetoric from Sappho (a woman poet of the early sixth century B.C.E.) and fom female characters in epic and drama. In 1.5.6 he remaks that “happiness” is only half present in states where the condition of woman is poor.

(Greek nouns have grammatical gende, and as a result of the conventions of Greek word formation most rhetorical terms in Greek are feminine, as the glossary at the end of this volume reveals. The Greek words for city, political assembly, and law court are also feminine. It is not clear, however, whether the ancient [male?] Greeks were conscious of rhetoric as operating in feminine space.) (page xii of the translation’s Prooemion)

So we have to ask, does Professor Kennedy’s translation deliver what is pledged? Before we answer, we quickly say this: that promise doen’t matter at all. Our thesis is that neither Kennedy nor Aristotle gets around (A) translation or around (B) feminine discourse or around (C) the positive influence of women on men (despite Kennedy’s or Aristotle’s spoken or unspoken intentions to do so or not).

We do sadly say that Kennedy’s translation is inconsistent with regard to its intended “features.” There’s inconsistency wiith regard to that “second feature,” which is “the avoidance of some of the sexist language seen in older translations.” For instance, Aristotle writes this:

[16] καὶ ἐφ' ὅσοις τὰ ἀ̂θλα τιμή, καλά . καὶ ἐφ' ὅσοις τιμὴ μα̂λλον ἢ χρήματα. καὶ ὅσα μὴ αὑτου̂ ἕνεκα πράττει τις τω̂ν αἱρετω̂ν, [17] καὶ τὰ ἁπλω̂ς ἀγαθά , ὅσα τε ὑπὲρ πατρίδος τις ἐποίησεν παριδὼν τὸ αὑτου̂, καὶ τὰ τῃ̂ φύσει ἀγαθά , καὶ ἃ μὴ αὐτῳ̂ ἀγαθά: αὑτου̂ γὰρ ἕνεκα τὰ τοιαυ̂τα. [18] καὶ ὅσα τεθνεω̂τι ἐνδέχεται ὑπάρχειν μα̂λλον ἢ ζω̂ντι: τὸ γὰρ αὑτου̂ ἕνεκα μα̂λλον ἔχει τὰ ζω̂ντι. [19] καὶ ὅσα ἔργα τω̂ν ἄλλων ἕνεκα: ἡ̂ττον γὰρ αὑτου̂. καὶ ὅσαι εὐπραγίαι περὶ ἄλλους ἀλλὰ μὴ περὶ αὑτόν, καὶ περὶ τοὺς εὐ̂ ποιήσαντας: δίκαιον γάρ. καὶ τὰ εὐεργετήματα : οὐ γὰρ εἰς αὑτόν.

But Kennedy translates that this way, adding initial bracketed words to supply clarity, but also adding the genderless “someone” and “person” and “others” and “self” and “oneself” all of which contradict Kennedy’s intentions on the singular masculine words, his “his” (all of which I’ve bolded here to emphasize as male-gendered English pronouns with no good antecedents in the translation):

[16] [The following things are all honorable] things for which the rewards are a kala, especially those that bring honor rather than money; and whatever someone has done not for his own sake; [17] and things absolutely good and whatever someone has been done for his country, overlooking his own interest; and things good by nature and that are benefits to him, for such things are done for their own sake; [18] and whatever can belong to a person when dead more than when alive (for what belongs to a person in his lifetime has more the quality of being to his own advantage); [19] and whatever works are done for the sake of others (for they have less of the self); and good deeds done for others but not for the self and acts of kindness (for they are not directed to oneself);

So we might read Aristotle here and conclude he’s ambigously writing about men only or more inclusively about people, men and women. But we read Kennedy, and at first we think Aristotle is writing generically about women and men, and then it’s clear he’s referring to men only, and then it’s not clear again. A feminist translation would insist on the ambiguity in the English translation, or at least consistent reference to men only, if the writer’s made either clear in the text.

Now, with respect to the first of the two “features” of Kennedy’s translation, there are also problems. These problems center around (1) Kennedy’s precise understanding of “enthymeme” whether he applies that as he promises or not; and (2) Aristotle’s inadvertant, rhetorical, feministic indetermination of this frequent and central term, and other keys terms including what we transliterate “rhetoric.” On (1) I’m just going to refer interested readers to research I’ve done on the imprecision of “enthymeme” and the problem of making this a technical term; see the little essay linked called “heart,” which is my translation of what’s been transliterated “enthymeme.” On (2), let me just refer you to Not Exactly the Dictionary a series of acknowledgement by Aristotle Rhetoric experts that he fails to define his terms.

So why should translator Kennedy?

----

Now, that's all folks for now, unless we find an epilogue somewhere as ostensible symmetry to that introductory prologue; there were Case I, and II, and III, and IV, and V,

Translation: "Logical" Case V

V. Mi Tres Amigos

David Ker, Richard A. Rhodes, and Wayne Leman

(a trio of linguists who are Bible translation guides)

I have started this particular case study a thousand times. It’s most difficult for me. It’s the most difficult, I imagine, for David Ker, Wayne Leman, and Richard A. Rhodes (even if they haven’t waited to see what I’d write here).

Let’s try this opener: One Patricia posted one series of jokes, which Google Alerts sent to my email sometime around precisely 5:10am Central Time U.S. this morning. “Why did the chicken cross the road?” is the question. The answer varies by person. “Aristotle” responds to the question this way, according to his particular variant of the right answer: “It is the nature of chickens to cross the road.” Dr. Phil, Oprah, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Albert Einstein (to mention a few) also give their answers. In this particular case study, I give my answer and give away the answers of David, Rich, and Wayne.

No. Let us try again. It’s not that we shouldn’t attempt humor (but my daughters tell me I really shouldn’t, and my wife says I should trust them, and my son’s away at college so his consenting opinion doesn’t count anyway).

I do have this conviction that a case study is a parable. (Now I have this conviction that that last sentence contains at least one metaphor). Would you, then, let me start over with the previous case studies, and not be so eager to provide you with a “laugh track” along the way? Or to give the punchline so prematurely. Or to give it away at all? In any case?

As public as a blog post is on the Internet in the world wide web, please factor this also. David, Rich, Wayne, and I have had some rather private conversations. Yeah, facebook and/or email and/or blog-comment exchanges and/or mutual friendships and mutual teachers (both the living and the “no longer with us”) and/or talk about shared experiences in foreign lands with foreign tongues. Some of it’s profoundly personal; most of it’s part and parcel of the inside joke; all of it I pledge here publicly to keep in confidence. Those of you who are “in recovery” will understand and appreciate the value of “safety” in telling your story to others, to friends. All the rest of you can just ask any one of us “offline” so to speak, and we’ll put you “in” dialogue around what some of us have meant by that. In any case, again, I am being absolutely sincere in asking (as per Donald Miller’s prologue) your kindness. Regardless, you have my kindness. It’s really all you deserve and, much more, all I have to offer you.

I almost entitled this particular case study (my parable) something snobby like “Aristotle is a Pharisee.” (Now I’m going to do the candidate-Mike-Huckabee thing of reporting what I won’t report. He didn't trash other candidates for president. And I won't trash that other man Aristotle, or those other men, the Pharisees). I mean, on Aristotle, I'd never say in public that we should look at how the Pharisees mistreated women (as they prayed the daily prayer of thanks to God for creating them male and not female, and as they set up kangaroo courts with real rocks to trap and to execute adulteresses but not their adulterers). Look how they looked at the “nature” of things to divide into holy and hierarchical categories. Look how they’d come into darkness (whether at night to ask questions or at night to kiss as betrayer or in blindness while kicking against the goads). Look how they’d turn to text, to God’s words as God’s Word to them, to justify their patrilineal purity. Look how they’d refuse translation (and won’t we imagine they despised the LXX, as some today still do calling it coopted by anti-Semites of the Jesus-following sort?). Look how they’d use logic, the binary, to divide the world into two races, the circumcised Jew first, and then the Greeks (and, as noted, the males first and then the females). Then, I remembered, that the Aristotelians reading this would remember that Aristotle came before the Pharisees. I didn’t like the title “Aristotle is Abraham.”

So let’s try something else. My daily readings of Madam Jeanne-Marie Bouvier de la Motte Guyon require too much silent meditation. Unless any one of you wants to talk about what she might mean (in translation by François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon) when she speaks (through him to us English readers) of the Souls of the dead: “During their passage through the Way of Faith, they had nothing distinct, for distinctness is entirely opposed to Faith, and they could not enjoy anything of that sort, having only a certain generality as a foundation upon which everything was communicated to them.” And Julie’s rememberance of something this morning requires, just questions: she tells me she heard on the radio yesterday this clip of Dr. Laura Schlessinger telling a father who was not willing to confront his son that he (the father) was “talking like a little girl.” (Now, is that what we’re talking about?)

The other way I started my day is the way I think I’ll begin this post. Before I got to Patricia’s joke, I was looking at some Greek translation, that of Mark (or is it Peter) and of Matthew. Both tell a couple of stories (in Greek) in more or less the same sequence. I say it’s in translation too, because they have Joshua (aka Jesus) speaking in Greek. At least the first version (at verse 26 of chapter 7 of Mark) has him speaking, it seems, to a woman who is Greek: ἡ δὲ γυνὴ ἦν Ἑλληνίς. But even if she’s having to speak his mother tongue, the text is not in Mary’s Aramaic, it’s translated into Greek. And Joshua is persuaded by her womanly rhetoric (emotional, subjective, marginalized, at-the-end-of-herself pleas and all—not to mention a twist on some rather elitist exclusionary logic that he expresses first. Remember the Pharisees?). So the other thing that gets twisted around in the very next story is Joshua changes nature. We label that “miracle” because we have faith in constant logical nature (even if we’re evolutionists). But here the unthinkable happens. (Yes, I agree. A Jewish Rabbi talking in public with a foreign woman in the other’s language about her daughter with a Greek deity incarnated deep inside her is pretty unthinkable. And Mark adds the spit, and the Aramaic talking up at the sky and his Greek translation of all that. Unthinkable. It’s absolutely as amazing as the two story tellers say the crowd watching finds it to be). But Joshua goes on, and he’s sighing more, and saying he’s feeling something deep in his gut (which the story tellers tell us is σπλαγχνίζομαι, which some English translators have told us is profound “pit-y” or just “compassion.”) He sees a crowd with deep hunger and feeds each one more than was naturally there to begin with.

Now these stories have insiders and outsiders, central characters and the marginalized. The subjectivities are not unimportant. And I’m talking about your subjectivities and mine too, as we encounter the stories from within our very own stories. With the knowledge comes belief, profound stuff, inside stuff, stuff that unthinkably changes your very nature. None of this is anything much like Aristotle’s chicken crossing the road. And the only thing, really, that connects Bible translation with the translation of, say, Aristotle’s texts is that Aristotle has seemed to have had a bigger effect on contemporary translators than Joshua (or any of his translator story tellers) has had. The irony, of course, is that Aristotle despised translation. It is always second class to the Greek text (especially the Greek text authored by the free Greek male). So let’s qualify what I just said about contemporary translators. There are a few women, and men, on the contemporary scene who are conceiving of translation differently. (One of my friends, and maybe one of mi tres amigos, just emailed me an article written by translator Karen H. Jobes about the kinds of translation, of the Bible, that I’m calling more womanly, that use the kind of feminine, non-Aristotelian discourses we need to see more of. Just last sentence is the link to the whole article; and Professor Jobes, you remember, is the sole woman among the thirty men on the translation team for the New English Septuagint Translation).

But this case study is supposed to be about “logical” translation. And that sort of thing which David and Wayne and Rich are grappling with. One says: “Far better a translation that communicates as clearly as possible without creating deception (a la Challies) about what the original really says. . . We all long for a clearly communicative translation that richly reflects the beauty of the original message.” Another writes: “I would far prefer to call the original biblical texts themselves beautiful. The beauty of their figures of speech is found within their original languages. Figures of speech, for the most part, are language-specific. We can learn to appreciate their beauty by education, footnotes, other Bible resources that explain the meaning of the figures. But the purpose of translation is to enable a speaker of another language to understand the meaning of the biblical text, not to educate someone to the figures of speech uses in those texts.” And the third knows the precise name for everything linguistic (even “vagueness” and “ambiguity”) and is most willing to dialog with us rational people; for instance, here’s a request from a commenter on one of his posts, followed by his reply: [question] “I think I hear what you mean about the nuances in tone, phraseology, etc. But could you give me a non-scholar word or phrase for perlocutionary force?” [answer] “I was afraid that the technical terminology [in th post] would be a little off-putting, but there is no everyday word for perlocutionary force.”

And so I just wonder how Mark (or is it Peter) or Matthew or Karen H Jobes might translate David’s or Wayne’s or Rich’s English sentences into some classical (or common aka “koine”) Greek? Or in 1960s-70s Southern Vietnamese? Would deception be risked? Would the natural beauty of the English original sentences be retained? Could Mark (or Peter) or Matthew or Karen educate Greek speakers? Offer them footnotes and dictionaries and other resources that explain the meaning? Would their Greek translation help the Greeks of another day in another place to understand the meanings of any figures used in the original English? Would their Vietnamese have helped the Vietnamese who had to flee reeducation camps? Or why bother with the English figures if everything else, mainly the meaning of the text of David, of Wayne, and of Rich, is understood. How does Aristotle (or Ho Chi Minh) write the technical phrase “perlocutionary force”?

Let me just say I want to start all over, and that I’ll keep working on this case a long time. (Do understand that translation is a missionary kid who grows up in two cultures--her parents' culture and the others' culture where the skin and eyes of people are darker usually, so that her siblings and MK cousins learn to coin hybrid words of a third culture. And who's to say which is more original or beautiful or natural?) I’m most grateful to David Ker, Wayne Leman, and Richard A. Rhodes (who have given birth to translations and whose wives may have, like my mother, given birth to MKs) for their willingness to converse with any of us, much less with me about others’ misunderstood feminist translation methods (and how I think we men, including Aristotle and them, can’t get around the discourse).

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One more case study at least to go. Ready or not, it’s linked here.

Here’s the introductory prologue, and Case I, and II, and III, and IV.

Translation: "Logical" Case IV

IV. Alan Lightman

Alan Lightman authors both ways. That is, he’s both a very serious science writer and a world renowned artistic writer of poetry and novels. Better than that, he can write and talk about authoring both ways.

When he addressed the Honors students here at TCU at the 40^th Honors Convocation, he talked. “Scientists write to name things. They want you to know things. They use their heads. Artists, in contrast, write to get your belief. That is, they really unname things so that you’ll go along with the narrative or the new categories in the poetry. They use their hearts and their stomachs.” Now, I got to hear Lightman even more. At the Q & A session, he graciously responded to a couple of my questions. (Oh the other thing to note at the Q & A is this: Professor Miller, one of our physicists, held up one of Lightman’s astrophysics textbooks used here. Other people brought their copies of his novels for his autograph. And the flyer circulating around noted that his novels have been translated into 30 different languages. Today, we know that at least one of his novels has been transposed into more than two dozen theatrical and musical productions, and has inspired much more music. Anyway.) Lightman confessed that he had known as a youth that he wanted to be a writer but that he knew making a name for himself, giving his abilities and intelligence, would be easier if he became known first as a scientist. (That was his answer to my first question. Now my second question to Professor Lightman was this:

“Professor Lightman, If you have read any of the translations of any of your novels [and he confessed he hadn’t before I finished my question], or even if you have not, then would you rather the translators be scientists, using their heads, or artists, using their hearts and stomachs?”)

Lightman didn’t flench. And his immediate answer is brilliant: “Both.”

Lightman who authors as a scientist and who authors as an artist, and who can talk and write about doing both, wants the translators of anything he writes also to do both. (In the book, The Future of Spacetime, edited with his very famous friend Stephen William Hawking and others, Lightman concludes with his own essay “The Physicist as Novelist.” Lightman does some brilliant stuff.) But instead of just doing what he does, his translators do more. That is, instead of alternating between science writing and artistic writing, or even talking or writing about the difference as he does, Lightman wants translators to translate both as scientists and also as artists at the very same time.

Lightman didn’t say this, but what he’s imagining is womanly discourse. Translators who simultaneously name and unname, who use their heads but always do so while they believably use their hearts and their stomachs and other inside parts of the body (shall we add, the womb?), those translators employ the method of believing and believability (not just the method of knowing) that we’re calling the feminist binary.

You’ve noticed that we haven’t yet mentioned Aristotle explicitly in this Case Study IV on the “Logic” of Translation. I’ll let Lightman write about Aristotle. Here’s from page 185 of his book with Hawking, from the essay by Lightman:

Scientists often wish powerfully for some theory to be true that is later proved wrong by the facts. Aristotle’s idea that the planets move in perfect circles was simple and elegant, but proved wrong by Brahe, Kepler, and Newton.

A novelist's story or characters cannot be proved wrong, but they can ring false and thus lose their power. In this way, the novelist is constantly testing her fiction against the accumulated life experience of her readers.

Now, let’s only remember this, and experience it if we will: Lightman writes here as a scientist, with his head. He’s writing a scientific book with other scientists, and he's writing the anchor-leg essay about “the scientist, as artist.” One comes first, then the other. One, in the male's mind, is primary and necessary; the other is secondary, even in his own life story. It’s the very logical "either-or" masculinist binary Aristotle used to come up with his idea, his disproven idea, his idea that wasn’t true.

So as much as Lightman would think of the novelist as “her” (in contrast to any scientist such as Aristotle and the other men), he’s still not doing what he asks his translators really to do. Do you see what Lightman is doing? He's using Aristotle's binary all over again. He (Lightman, the science writer naming the difference between science writers and artist writers), he Lightman is inviting us to prove his statement untrue. But whoever uses the feminist binary finds truth within belief only, and never truth without it.

(A) Science authors and artistic writers, neither one, can get around translation.

(B) Science authors and artistic writers both do well with the simultaneous subjectivity of feminine discourse.

(C) Lightman the man (the brilliant author in science, then in art, and now about the difference of both) is no doubt highly influenced by women. That he’d use the feminine pronoun above is some a testimony to his convictions. That he’s speak so highly of Jeanne Garretson (his mother, who translates words into dance and sounds into Braille) says more.

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Are you ready for Case V? Look, the link's here.

Here's that prologue/introduction for this series.
Here's Case I, and II, and III.

Translation: "Logical" Case III

III. The Representers of Sojourner Truth

Let’s let translator Karlyn Kohrs Campbell lay out some evidence.

Last post I sort of promised that this post would start how it has started. Did that startle you? Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, a translator? Let’s do label correctly please. Especially women. And she is a woman, right? And not a translator, right? At least at wikipedia today she “is” labelled this way: she “is an American academic specializing in women’s studies at the University of Minnesota.” Now, I’m not disputing the correctness or incorrectness of this label. And I’m not making anything of the point Professor Kohrs Campbell made Friday in response to a question someone asked her: “After fifty years of teaching, what can you tell us about students, and about what you’ve learned the most about teaching.” (At this point, in reply, Kohrs Campbell said she loved all students, and struggles to generalize anything common about any of them, and recalls a favorite teaching post in the Bronx where the most supposedly unlikely students were most curious and taught Kohrs Campbell many things about students—which we inferred to include that fact that students even break our stereotypes about students. Anyway, she added that wikipedia has its limits as a research tool—which I say is no small point coming from such a researcher as Kohrs Campbell.) My point about labels (correct or incorrect) is that they are not sufficient research tools. But that’s not an original point with me either. Listen!

Kohrs Campbell’s research has helped us listen to many (women) who we’d otherwise never even label.

A bit of that research includes the following article:

“Agency: Promiscuous and Protean,” Communication and Cultural/Critical Studies, 2 (March 2005): 1-18. NCA Golden Anniversary Monograph Award, 2006.

Is it an article related to “women in communication”? Yes. To “rhetorical theory and criticism”? Yes. To “presidential rhetoric”? Yes. To “political campaigns”? Yes.

Does it have anything to do with “translation”? Why are you asking me? Let’s do some research. Listen. Read. Let’s wean ourselves away from wikipedia just for a bit.

“Whatever else it may be,” Kohrs Campbell writes (on page 3), “rhetorical agency refers to the capacity to act, that is, to have the competence to speak or write in a way that will be recognized or heeded by others in one’s community.” She’s opened with the Presidents again (with Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan) and their speech writers, and has mentioned her early research “in which [she] attempted to show how a rhetorical theory could be derived from works in which rhetoric and rhetorical theory were not mentioned,” noting then the contemporary “struggle to produce rejoinders to claims about the ‘death of the author’ by Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault, among others, and to retain a sense of agency that makes sense in rhetorical terms.” She goes on to say some of the things Socrates says and Themistocles illustrates. And what Michelle Ballif “offers” as a “powerful critique of this kind of communal agency, particularly in its links to patriarchy and gendered binaries”; and she gives us some of “Judith Butler’s words.” And more. Much more.

After four propositions, and in her “fifth,” she has us listen more. This time it’s Sojourner Truth and her famous speech “A’n’t (or aren’t) I a woman?”. Listen: “Well, chilern, whar dar is so much racket dar must be somethin’ out o’ kilter. I tink dat ‘twixt de niggers of de Souf and de womin at de Norf, all talkin’ ‘bout rights, de white men will be in a fix pretty soon. But what’s all dis here talkin’ ‘bout?”

Except we find out that that really isn’t the original “text” of Sojourner Truth. It’s the original text of Frances Dana Barker Gage. And, nonetheless, “the arguments, evidence, and metaphors that it includes are supported by contemporaneous newspaper accounts that constitute the fragmentary text that Truth ‘authored’ and that attest to her rhetorical skill.”

But can that really be the “text that Truth ‘authored’” if Truth’s “words appear in the argot of blackface minstrel shows” of Gage? And is this really Gage’s text or technique anyway? Isn’t her transposition really an unoriginal page from the originally authored “racist caricatures of writers such as Thomas Dixon and Thomas Nelson Page”?

Now Kohrs Campbell confesses translation: “When the text of Gage’s version of Truth’s speech was published in Man Cannot Speak For Her, I removed the dialect that smothers the speech with racist stereotypes.”

Kohrs Campbell continues: “I now believe that it was wrong to do so, although it could not and should not have been published as originally written without the kind of analysis done here. But agency is perverse: the stereotypes that gave rise to penning the speech in this demeaning argot ironically give the text special force. Admittedly, as Truth herself illustrates, not all former slaves spoke in such language, but the women she most represented, the experiences and history she most embodied, are rendered more perfectly in language that expresses so painfully the terrible costs of slavery—the loss of literacy, the loss of education, the loss of access to public dialogue that, even when overcome, is constrained by being rendered in language that ridicules and demeans.”

(A) Thomas Dixon and Thomas Nelson Page can’t get around the ironic power of ridiculing and demeaning translated racism to render more perfectly the original.

(B) Thomas Dixon and Thomas Nelson Page can’t get around the feminine discourse of either Frances Dana Barker Gage or Sojourner Truth.

(C) We can’t get around the positive influence of Frances Dana Barker Gage and Sojourner Truth and Karlyn Kohrs Campbell on men and women.

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Ready for Case IV? It's linked here.

--the intro / prologue to these cases is here;
--Case I is here.

--Case II is here.

Translation: "Logical" Case II

update: the source for this post is Anne Carson's talk on "The Question of Translation."

(also in a print version online called "Variations on the Right to Remain Silent")

II. The Inquisitors of Joan of Arc

Let’s let translator Anne Carson lay out some evidence.

Carson recalls the trial of Joan of Arc (with my emphases added sometimes by colored and bold font):

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. . . . 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.

Carson makes clear that “We all feel this rage at some level, at some time. The genius answer to it is catastrophe.” And I want us to know that “We all feel” certainly even includes Joan of Arc’s logical male inquisitors.

And she continues:

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. Like Homer's untranslatable MVLU it seems to come from somewhere else and it brings a whiff of immortality with it. We know that in Joan's case this turned out to be a whiff of herself burning. Let's pass on to a less dire example of the escapade of translation, but one that is equally driven by the rage against cliché – or, as the tranlsator himself in this case puts it – “I want to paint the scream not the horror."

Joan's inquisitors cannot get around at some level, at some time their own rage against cliché.

(A) These male inquisitors can’t get around translation (although they would have the voices speak to them and not to be translated by a medium, by her transpositions).

(B) These male inquisitors can’t get around the feminine discourse (that resists the controlling binarying male logic).

(C) They finally burn her as a heretic, but these male inquisitors can’t get around her positive enduring influence on men either.

If you’re a man who’s appreciated Anne Carson’s works in translation, then you’ll appreciate Joan of Arc’s influence on her and now you (by reading more here).

Ready for case number III? We’ll work on it this week, and it should start like this:

III. The Representers of Sojourner Truth

Let’s let translator Karlyn Kohrs Campbell lay out some evidence.

--the intro and prologue to these cases is here;
--Case I is here.
--Case III is now here.

Translation: "Logical" Case I

I. Aristotle

Let’s lay out some evidence.

We recall that Aristotle wrote this: ἔστι δ’ ἀρχὴ τη̂ς λέξεως τὸ ἑλληνίζειν. It’s this key sentence in the 5^th chapter of the third book of his Rhetoric in which Aristotle defines a goal of logic. Depending on our goal, we could translate the first part of the sentence into English this way: “There is a top goal for a text:” We’ve already noted that the last phrase has been variously translated as “correctness of language,” or “grammatical correctness,” or “purity.”

Sounds like Aristotle is after some good stuff. We’re talking rationality. Definition by binary. Hierarchy by binary. logic. correctness. purity. the top goal. Good rules for text authorship. (Remember, rule 3 of 5? “avoid ambiguity”). Good rules for translation. But remember, because we’re looking for the really good, let’s put person above logic. What’s the person Aristotle up to with his logic? We’ll come back to the key, meaningful sentence above in a minute. For now, let’s back up a bit:

Here’s Aristotle in his first book of the Rhetoric, Chapter 9. (as translated and transliterated by George A. Kennedy, whose case we’ll review in Section VI below.) Aristotle is defining terms again:

“Prudence [phronēsis] is,” he defines logically, “a virtue of intelligence whereby people are able to plan well for happiness in regard to the good and bad things that have been mentioned earlier.”

And drawing conclusions, he adds:

“for it is clear that things productive of virtue are necessarily honorable. . . things for which the rewards are a kala, especially those that bring honor rather than money; and whatever someone has done not for his own sake. . .”

And as he conclusively defines, Aristotle is also classifying by hierarchy:

“Again, one quality or action is nobler than another if it is that of a naturally finer being: thus a man's will be nobler than a woman's.”

To define and to classify hierarchically is Aristotle’s game. And it helps Aristotle assume or presume (and pretend) that he’s coldly objective. When he finally and conclusively comes to his subject, “woman,” he finds that his binary logic and our observed nature finds “man” not only to be “a finer being” but also a “nobler” being than “woman.” The goal of objective hierarchy is part and parcel of his method. In other words, Aristotle’s define-and-classify method suppresses feminine discourse; and his divide-and-conquer goal suppresses women and their voices.

So now let’s come to some conclusions of Aristotle’s own. First, woman is less noble and less fine than man. Second, non-Greeks are lesser than Greeks. Third, translation is not good. Sexism? Okay. But racist elitism? What? And textual authoritarianism? What? How does Aristotle get those second and third conclusions? He does so by his top goal for a text: which is τὸ ἑλληνίζειν. We like to pretend that the accurate translation of τὸ ἑλληνίζειν might be “correctness of language,” or “grammatical correctness,” or “purity.” But to get to such subjectivities, we have to assume that we Barbarians are equal to those ancient Greeks. Aristotle says just the opposite. We have to imagine that “purity” is something the author of the Greek text we’re reading really wants for us to imagine. It’s not. (Kennedy actually has to transliterate τὸ ἑλληνίζειν and to add special translation notes for his readers: “To Hellēnizein, or Grammatical Correctness. . . what Aristotle calls ‘speaking Greek,’ by which he means observance of the rules of grammar and the conventions of idiom of the language, but much of what he says really relates more to clarity than to correctness.” We’ll come back to the case of Kennedy, his own logic over rhetoric; )

We’re now more than a little suspicious of Aristotle. But what I really want us all to see is this:

(A) Aristotle can’t get around translation.

(B) Aristotle can’t get around feminine discourse (aka Dame Rhetoric).

(C) Aristotle can’t get around the positive influence of women on men either.

(A) Aristotle continues by quoting the female poet Sappho. And in quoting her poetry, he quotes a dialog (as between Alcaeus and Sappho). And in quoting the dialog, Aristotle adds to and interprets the text, translating it from her less clear language to his τὸ ἑλληνίζειν, an admittedly all-Greek new text but a translation of female to male register and of clarity of nothing else:

ὥσπερ καὶ Σαπφὼ πεποίηκεν,

εἰπόντος του̂ ̓Αλκαίου

θέλω τι εἰπη̂ν, ἀλλά με κωλύει

αἰδώς,

αἱ δ’ ἠ̂χες ἐσθλω̂ν ἵμερον ἢ καλω̂ν
καὶ μή τι εἰπη̂ν γλω̂σσ' ἐκύκα κακόν
αἰδώς κέν σε οὐκ εἰ̂χεν ὄμματ',
ἀλλ' ἔλεγες περὶ τω̂ δικαίω.

(B) Aristotle can’t get around feminine discourse (aka Dame Rhetoric). He has Sappho’s poetry interpret his logic (both Aristotle’s definition and hierarchical classifications and also Alcaeus’ poor example of τὸ ἑλληνίζειν).

(C) Aristotle can’t get around the positive influence of women on men either. He has the woman Sappho say something corrective back to the man Alcaeus.

Ready for case number II? Here it is. (And here's the prologue and intro).

Translation: 6 or 7 "Logical" Cases

Prologue

“I’ve never written a prologue before, but near as I can tell this is where an author explains a book’s shortcomings and asks the reader’s kindness,” so starts Donald Miller in his latest book, his public “reflections on growing up without a father.”

Please understand. I myself have never written a prologue (much less authored a book, although some of you have noticed my blog posts are often book length, and you may think I’m working for some record). So (unoriginally), I just want to ask anyone who reads on to show a little kindness. (My own father, who grew up without a father, just read Miller’s book and passed it on to me. Patriarchy does try to make up for its gaps.)

Now, I’m asking for your kindnesses. (Feel free to read some, all, or none of this. Feel free to object to any of it).

Special kindnesses are requested from those of you who read the Bible as God the Father’s authored word.

Special kindnesses are asked of all of you who could care less about rhetoric and would much more rather practice logic without caring so much, necessarily, about reflections on either rhetoric or logic.

Special kindnesses, please, from women.

You all may be reading this because, really, I’m aiming this equally at both you men and you women.

Two more things: First, Miller vs me. Donald Miller puts his more original, his more logical, his absolutely “male” apology this way. Hear Miller (also as a fatherless not-just-logical but-also personal-experiential writer); he writes:

“I also want to say something to the women who will attempt this book. I am delighted you have chosen to join us, and you are more than welcome, though you must kindly accept my apology for aiming the text at less agreeable creatures. It is not that I think women are less affected by the absense of a father, only that I have relied on personal experience. I think we would all agree inking a stroke toward the feminine would have been a financial move rather than a personal exploration of the issue. I might have sold more books but it would have exposed the fact I know nothing about women, save their lovely smell. So, the decision to target a male audience will explain the simple vocabulary, short chapters, and bathroom humor. I only hope when you come across the latter, you will be honored to remember I would never have been so offensive if I’d known you were in the room.” (pages 11-12)

“In the absence of a real father, . . . My first father was a black man [and Miller leaves us to assume he’s white] . . . . My mom was great, don’t get me wrong, but the only guests we ever had at our house were from the singles group at church, and none of them ever whipped out a trombone to play ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’ or tap-danced in the living room or recited a piece of epic prose about the underground railroad on which ‘our people’ had traversed from oppression and slavery to freedom. Our guests, rather, ate meatballs on paper plates and talked bitterly about their ex-husbands [and Miller leaves us to assume he himself doesn’t mind eating meatballs].” (pages 13-14)

Second, me vs. Miller. Today, I’m writing about Father Aristotle again. the surrogate father for far too many of us. for too many of us, that is, who would give more favor to the original text by the author than to a translator’s translation. Or to give more favor to logic than to rhetoric. Or to males than to females. Read on, please, only if you’ll attempt kindness.

Translation: 6 or 7 Logical Cases

Depending on whether we think of Donald Miller as doing anything whatsoever around “translation,” this series of blog posts reviews 6 or 7 “logical” cases of translation. The other six are these:

I. Aristotle;

II. The inquisitors of Joan of Arc;

III. The representers of Sojourner Truth;

IV. Alan Lightman (the science writer who’s a novel writer);

V. David Ker, Richard A. Rhodes, and Wayne Leman (a trio of linguists who are Bible translation guides);

VI. George A. Kennedy (the rhetorician who’s a translator of Aristotle’s Rhetoric)

Now, just to be clear, here’s my thesis statement. Here’s the scientific hypothesis to test by the cases. Here’s the resolution for debate, and I’m arguing the affirmative:

For translation, we should be suspicious of those who resort to rationalism without any willingness for their method to be unmasked as masculine-logic.

Attempts at translation by objective logic betray an elitist and masculinist project. Despite their intentions, men or women by their rationalism do not easily suppress feminine discourse. (Another way to say that is this: translators can’t get around subjectivities and must pretend pure objectivity in their attempts at it.) This is not the same thing as a man who would easily suppress a woman’s voice because she’s female (although the two kinds of suppressions might be inseparable in method and in goal).

Ready for case “number I”? Here it is.