Possessions and Positions of the Translator

In this post, I want to do three things: 1. to recognize a few outstanding people who are translators. 2. to rank order the best English translations of a short Greek passage. 3. to offer a bit of Bible translation by a feminist method.

1.

It’s one thing to evaluate translations; it’s quite another thing actually to translate. And there’s more: it takes great courage and skill to do both. Great coaches are not the world-class athletes; and the competitors are not always doing what they intend to do, even at their peak, as the coaches’ video tapes later prove. Nonetheless, there are rare individuals who, as C. S. Lewis puts it, “play both sides of the net.” That is, people who translate not only do something but they also can reflect on what they’ve done and what they must do. I’m thinking now of exceptional persons, some of whom are well known and others less so. I’m thinking of Willis Barnstone who translates into English from Greek, from Chinese, from Hebrew, from Spanish, from the classics, from the Bible, from poetry, from novels, both as a talented individual and as a skilled collaborator; and of the same Barnstone who writes translation theory, history, and practice, and related histories of cultures and language, and related literary criticism. I’m thinking of Anne Carson who translates and speaks of theory of translation, and who writes poetry and essays on the classics and on comparative literature. I’m thinking of Karen H. Jobes who has translated books of the Bible both individually and in collaboration; and who is theorizing textual translation by analogies with oral translation. I’m thinking of Kenneth L. Pike, the maker of a theory of language that has had wide application in more than twenty different disciplines, that insists on “person above logic,” that is demonstrable monolingually, that is constantly aware of whether the person is an outsider going in or is already some sort of an insider; Pike’s a poet, a polyglot, and a practitioner of his translation theory. I’m thinking of Carolyn Custis James, Suzanne McCarthy, John F. Hobbins, Michael Pakaluk, Tyson Hausdoerffer, Bob MacDonald, and April DeConick, who not only blog and dialog with other theorists about translation but who also actually do translating, sometimes translation that is a bit different, that makes a good bit of difference. Pakaluk actually invites others in through his challenges.

Today, I want especially to recognize Wayne Leman, Peter Kirk, and one blogger named Nathan. They’ve responded to a translation challenge of mine of a previous post:

What’s the best English translation of the following Greek phrase? What’s your method of translation? How and why is your translation one of the best?

Ἰάκωβος θεοῦ καὶ κυρίου Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ δοῦλος

Wayne, at his Better Bibles Blog, has been outlining a method of translation he’s calling “translation equivalence” (aka a new phrase for “dynamic equivalence” or DE). Lately, he’s focused readers on “possession” or “possessives” marked in English, Hebrew, and Greek. (Wayne’s post actually inspired my challenge.) When he stepped up to my challenge, Wayne has admitted that neither “formal equivalence or dynamic equivalence are particularly relevant concepts here.” (We’ll come back in a moment to why there’s particular distancing from DE and why there’s no mention of Kenneth Pike’s methods.) He then gives us two brilliant translations:

“‘James, God and Jesus Christ's servant.’ Or for those who prefer to include the possessive suffix on both possessors, ‘James, God's and Jesus Christ's servant.’”

Peter likewise offers us the following wonderful translation, and an explanation:

“James, a slave of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ.”

Peter does not label explicitly his methods for the translation. (He does begin parenthetically by noting that “Wayne omitted ‘the Lord’ presumably by mistake,” which would make Wayne’s translation “James, God's and the Lord Jesus Christ's servant”). In contrast to Wayne, then, Peter gives three reasons to explain why he does not “use the English possessive here” (i.e., possessive marked by apostrophe). First, such a possessive punctuation in English “makes this sentence unwieldy.” Second, “and more importantly, the rendering with the possessive suggests a definiteness not in the original or in the context, as if James is the only servant/slave or some special servant/slave of God and Jesus rather than one of a large number. Thus ‘Millie is Mr Smith's servant’ suggests that she is the only one, in a way ‘Millie is a servant of Mr Smith’ does not.”

Finally Peter appeals to, but almost only hints at, another reason, the reason I think is his most important of all: “this may be partly a matter of my English dialect.” Such an appeal forms a more implicit contrast to Wayne’s explicit statements on method. Peter is, rightly I say, personally constrained by how his own English sounds to him. Peter is as astutely attuned to how “James”’s own Greek may sound to the original writer. As understated and apologetic as Peter’s appeal to his own lect is, the constraint of his own subjective position frees him (1) to embrace the longer prepositional phrases instead of punctuated apostrophes for possession, and (2) to leave indefinite the personal possessiveness. The most important aspect of this subtle appeal to personal lect is that it leaves both to the original author and to the translator’s readers a kind of invitation to subjectivity. That is, Peter’s using his own English admittedly allows “James” to use his own Greek, and this allows readers to supply “more importantly” the indefiniteness which the context suggests. But Peter’s method is not far in approach from Wayne’s. Both are pragmatic.

Wayne is all for “simply matching the meaning of the Greek form to an English form that has the same meaning”; in contrast to Peter, Wayne assumes and works from a much more general, abstract, and universal “Greek” albeit a Greek full of “the meaning.” Wayne’s method also assumes a universally normal, native “English”: “How do native English speakers normally express the meaning of the Greek?” He muses whether his method, therefore, is to be classified a “literary translation,” and he wants to “assume so, since it is how native English speakers would say and write that English.” What general English “possessive syntax [is there] for that same possessive relationship” in Greek? He explains that such questions “would be an example of simultaneous translation and translation equivalence, at a minimum. I forget what bilingual quotation is, so it might be that also.” The thing is, he’s already said very clearly that he is not employing either “formal equivalence or dynamic equivalence,” which are two debated methods among Bible translators. Such translators have been distancing themselves from Eugene Nida’s DE, and have abandoned Pike’s monolingual demonstration and tagmemics. The pragmatics of the day is “relevance theory” as developed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson and applied to Bible translation by Ernst-August Gutt. Karen H. Jobes's invocation of simultaneous interpretation and bilingual quotation is much in contrast to relevance theory. Nonetheless, it’s the distancing from Nida and the absence of Pike that are most interesting. Pragmatics seems to allow Bible translators not to have to be accountable to formal equivalence or to literary issues or to theological constraints. (For all you non-linguistic rhetoricians, “relevance theory” and pragmatics are analogous to Aristotle’s “enthymeme” as a “rhetorical syllogism.” Sperber and Wilson are interested in “how what is only implied in a statement contributes to determining the meaning of what is explicitly said.”) But I’m digressing.

Before we move on to our third translator, let me just say this. The world class athletes may review the video tapes after they get the gold medals; they don’t always use the exact methods they’ve intended but look at what they’ve done! Bravo Wayne and Peter!

Nathan takes two days and works through four translations. They are these:

“James, slave to god and master Jesus the anointed one;”

“Yakob, slave to god and master Yehoshua the anointed one;”

“From: Ya'akov, a slave of God and of the Lord Yeshua the Messiah;” [from the Complete Jewish Bible (Stern), to compare with Nathan’s previous two]

“Jacob, slave to god and master Joshua the Anointed;”

By way of method, Nathan wants to “offer something out of the norm.” And he likes to “label it ‘contextual translation’ or something along those lines.” Now his truly is a “literary translation”; Nathan is after both the “Jewish context” of names and also the Greek “word-play of master/slave; and perhaps theos [a]s not implying Father and Son but rather that Jesus is master/god.” The final translation Nathan provides is to avoid “a transliteration from either language” and to offer “purely English terminology” only. I have to say I really like Nathan’s English (non-transliteration) translation of Jacob’s Hebraic Greek; and I’ll say a bit more on that when I offer my own translation at the end of this post.

2.

In addition to Wayne’s, Peter’s, and Nathan’s translations, I list below here some 48 other translations all published at one point or another. (Does anyone have a copy of Julia Evelina Smith Parker’s translation, the first complete translation of the Bible by a woman ever--in 1855, in the United States?) The other translations below are listed in rank order of my preference.

My first and most important criterion for a translation is that it makes and keeps as many personal connections as possible. The connections may be between the writer and the reader, between the translator and the new readers; between the denotations and connotations that make for word play (i.e., playfulness and wiggle room). The best translations are presented with both languages side by side for a trans-translation, or an “interlation” in the “stereotext” as Mikhail Epstein coins it. But I also think any “shock” (as Richard A. Rhodes and I both are very much for) must not just be the shock of the text (either original or translated) but must also be the shock beyond the text (as something the text or its author or translator cannot easily predict or precisely intend); now I’m talking about the subjective effect that a parable-heard has; or that an inside joke involuntarily laughed-at has; or that a hyperbolic statement makes; or that a miracle in nature effects. In section 3. here, I’ll say just a bit more about methods.

Without further ado then, here’s the list:

translation	translator	my ranking
From: Ya'akov, a slave of God and of the Lord Yeshua the Messiah	NJPS	1
From Jacob, a slave of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ:	Hackett	2
Ya`akov, a servant of God and of the Lord Yeshua the Messiah,	HNV	3
JAMES, SLAVE OF GOD AND OF THE LORD Jesus Christ	Lattimore	4
From James, a slave of God and the Lord Jesus Christ,	NET Bible	5
From: James, a slave servant of God and of the Lord Jesus the Anointed One.	TSNT	6
This letter is from James, a slave of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ.	NLT	7
I, James, am a slave of God and the Master Jesus,	TM	8
James, a slave of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ:	HCSB	9
JAMES, a slave of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ,	Moffatt	9
From James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus, the Messiah,	ISV	10
From James, servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ.	NJB	11
From James, a servant of God and of our Lord Jesus Christ.	CEV	12
From James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ:	GNT	12
From James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ.	GW	12
From James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ.	NCV	12
FROM James, a servant of God and the Lord Jesus Christ.	REB	13
James, a bond-servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ,	NAB	15
James, a bond-servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ,	NASB	15
James, a bondservant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ,	NKJV	15
James, a bondservant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ:	Weymouth	15
James, servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ	JB Philip's	16
James, of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ a servant,	Young	17
James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ,	21st Cent	18
James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ,	ASB	18
JAMES, A servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ,	Amplified	18
James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ,	BEB	18
Iames a seruaunt of God, and of the lorde Iesus Christ,	Bishop's	18
Iames the seruaunt of God and of the LORDE Iesus Christ	Coverdale	18
James the servant of God, and of our Lord Jesus Christ,	D-R	18
James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ,	ERV	18
James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ,	ESV	18
Iames a seruant of God, and of the Lord Iesus Christ,	Geneva	18
Iames a seruant of God, and of the Lord Iesus Christ,	KJV	18
James a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ,	Mace's	18
James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ,	NIV	18
James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ,	NRSV	18
James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ,	RSV	18
James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ,	Third Mill	18
James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ,	TNIV	18
Iames the seruaut of God and of the Lorde Iesus Christ	Tyndale	18
James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ,	WEB	18
James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ,	Webster's	18
This letter is from James. I am a servant owned by God and the Lord Jesus Christ.	New Life	19
James, bondman of God and of [the] Lord Jesus Christ,	Darby	20
James, the servant of God, and of our Lord Jesus Christ,	Wycliffe	21
I, James, am writing this letter. I serve God and the Lord Jesus Christ.	NIrV	22
One of Jesus’ followers named James wrote the following letter	BLB	23

3.

Now just a bit more about the feminist method of translation. (Then a translation is offered.) I’m just going to refer readers to other places in this blog, to Nancy Mairs’ statements on women’s discourse. Or find Mairs’s books, or Karlyn Kohrs Campbell’s or Cheryl Glenn’s or Andrea Lunsford’s or Sonja K. Foss's or Patricia Bizzell’s. They’ve all written much very well on the personal, even sometime physical, nature of rhetoric that women employ. (And I think I’ll add, since half of us are men, that I’ve written here in this blog elsewhere a bit on how Jesus, C.S. Lewis, Kenneth Pike, Barack Obama, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr. have used such rhetoric in contrast to cold logic and objectivity). Personal position in and during and after translation cannot be avoided.

Now, when we’re talking about possession, we think also of the possession of one human by another. Slavery is one label for that. And when we talk about God, we think of a being who is over us earthlings, a person who created us even. Again, position, ours and the others’, is not unimportant.

And when we talk about James, we think of several in the New Testament who might have written the Greek words we’re translating into English. There’s great ambiguity here. Not only is this a human being who’s not claiming to be in the position of master; not only is he not God; but he’s also one of possibly many different men. In the gospels, if he’s not Jesus’s brother, then maybe he’s John’s brother, one of the two sons of Zebedee who’s wife brings them to Jesus to talk about being his right hand and his left hand men, to which Jesus replies something about being slaves. But whichever one in the New Testament he is (or is he Josephus’s scribe? Anyway!); anyway, whichever first century man he is, his namesake is also one of many Jacobs. And Josephus the historian does not distinguish between the Jewish patriarch and this letter writer, by name anyway: and so there’s this literary connection to twelve tribes (both from the heel wounded wrestler of God and from this letter writer). And just to be clear, A. T. Robertson, John Painter, and other contemporary scholars of the church writings agree that Ἰάκωβος and Ἰάκωβ (as a Greek transliteration without the later Greeky inflection) are variants of the same name. (Thanks to so Michael Kruse for bringing our attention to Jacob and the Prodigal: How Jesus Retold Israel's Story by Kenneth E. Bailey. I also like Gary Amirault's observations on Jacob for James).

So since we’re rambling a bit about Greek: the Jewish writer of this letter knows his Greek. Many theologians say he’s arguing with Paul over faith. But rhetoricians could just as easily contend he’s arguing with Aristotle over belief, a central concern of Greek rhetoric. Thus, blogger Nathan who claims his Greek and Hebrew aren’t very good does himself make very important, very personal connections, between the people who are Greek and Hebrew speakers and their God and his anointed one. Enough. Here’s an attempt at another translation, by a feminist method of humility, ambiguity, and personal positions of subjectivity and equal inclusivity:

Ἰάκωβος θεοῦ καὶ κυρίου Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ δοῦλος

FROM: Jacob, slave, of God, and of Master Anointed Joshua

TO:

PIMPING, ACADEMICALLY

We academics use funny language. We use methods ironically. Some Hellenists in ancient times called what we do with language ῥητορική (or potion cookery) and what we do methodically ὑποκριτική (or pretending ourselves so we can judge others). So we feminist academics tend to hate that exposure by dead Greek men. What we refuse to believe is this: we feminists in the academy often like to switch places of power with masculinist sexists.

For example, we feminist academics use funny fancy words for the whore, and for the pimp and the john: she’s “an odalisque” or “the harem girl”; and they’re the “objectifying” males; if they’re gay men, and if at least one is bisexual, then the man sleeping with the female “odalisque” is also the pimping man’s “arrogant, dissolute, untrustworthy love object..” That’s our “rhetoric.”

The method that we then claim as “ours” is this: While we despise how bigoted European men portray and use “the harem girl,” we “refigure” her but we ourselves pimp them. We wear the feminist mask so no one (not even ourself-s) will easily see that we're as interested in the whore (so we can pimp the pimp) as any john. (Just to be clear, nonetheless, several afrafeminists and Hellefeminists choose kinder, gentler methods than our “hypocrisy.”)

Let’s see if I can illustrate. And then, dear reader, please consider with me whether we (you and I) are (in our bodies) ourselves not also pimping our own whores, academically.


HOME WORK

Enter the academic world. Read the following very important works of academic feminists. Then let’s talk.

Carol Poster’s “(Re)positioning Pedagogy: A Feminist Historiography of Aristotle's Rhetorica.”

Gesa E. Kirsch’s and Joy S. Ritchie’s “Beyond the Personal: Theorizing a Politics of Location in Composition Research.”

Elizabeth Fletcher’s “Women in the Bible.”

Cheryl Glenn’s Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity Through the Renaissance.

Patricia Bizzell’s “Feminist Methods of Research in the History of Rhetoric: What Difference Do they make?”

Marjorie B. Garbor’s Academic Instincts.

Nancy Mairs’ Voice Lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer.

Jacqueline Jones Royster’s “When the First Voice You Hear Is Not Your Own.”

A FEMINIST PIMPING OF ARISTOTLE

Now, I know I sound harsh, but some of the feminists whose work you’ve just read have sacrificed their heroism for whoring.

Look at Carol Poster’s own masculinist methods. Look at what she calls for. She calls for this:

. . . for “displacing Aristotle’s philosophical treatise [on rhetoric] to the margins of the discipline” (328)

. . . because, Poster says, “Aristotle has not, and in my opinion, should not be appropriated for feminist rhetoric” (343).

Poster’s opinion is that

recovering Aristotle for rhetoric would be to use his prestige to authorize the marginalized discipline of pedagogy. The notion that rhetoric needs some canonical patriarch as an originary figure in order to legitimize itself within the academy is utterly antithetical to feminist ideals. For feminist rhetoric to reclaim Aristotle as some sort of male mother would be, ipso facto, for rhetoric to accede to the traditional patriarchal judgment of its (feminine) inferiority, and to rely on the reflected prestige of Aristotle to associate itself with the higher prestige, traditionally masculine discipline of philosophy rather than asserting the (perhaps separate but) equal validity of the traditionally feminine discipline of pedagogy. Relying on Aristotle to authorize feminist rhetoric would be to participate in a cultural logic that denies the legitimacy of areas of cultural and economic production traditionally associated with women. (343)

Funny how Poster ignores that Aristotle is a great champion of “the marginalized discipline of pedagogy.” Hypocritically, Poster herself actually uses “the reflected prestige of Aristotle” in order “to authorize feminist rhetoric” by her portrayals. In writing her article as the representative of rhetoric among feminist academics (in Cynthia Anne Freeland’s otherwise fine book, Feminist Interpretations of Aristotle), Poster actually relies on “Aristotle” and participates in his “cultural logic” to attack reliance on Aristotle and his method.

WHEN THE (CHRISTIAN) PERSONAL GETS TOO PERSONAL AND EQUALITY GETS TOO EQUAL

Now recall how Gesa E. Kirsch and Joy S. Ritchie argue that feminist academics must often go beyond the personal. Kirsch and Ritchie would rightly have us all tear down the dividing walls of cultural and gendered constructs.

We argue that it is not enough to claim the personal and locate ourselves in scholarship and research. In doing so, we risk creating another set of “master narratives,” risk speaking for and essentializing others, and risk being blinded by our own culturally determined world views. . . . (8)

It is not enough, then to begin locating ourselves and our experiences. In doing so naively, we risk ignoring hierarchies and creating the same unifying and totalizing master narratives that feminist scholars have sought to revise and oppose. More specifically, we risk defining gender biologically rather than recognizing it as a varied set of relationships. We risk limiting our definitions to a binary of male and female as opposite, inherently different human beings, without seeing the multiple permutations of gendered experience. (11)

But Kirsch and Ritchie (“naively”?) erect their own totalizing walls of difference when they express concern that one of their students became “increasingly committed to a Christian perspective and was, therefore, uncomfortable with the feminist theoretical framework the other two of us favored” (12). Kirsch and Ritchie conclude, “therefore,” some logical cause and effect: that the student cannot be comfortable as a feminist if more comfortable as a Christian.

The academic feminists, Kirsch and Ritchie, reject what first-wave (Christian) feminists including Elizabeth Cady Stanton worked so personally for: equality endowed by their Creator.

Read again Kirsch’s and Ritchie’s conclusions:

[W]e prefer, along with Tronto, ‘a moral theory that can recognize and identify these issues [i.e., problems of otherness, privilege, and paternalism]…to a moral theory that because it presumes that all people are equal, is unable even to recognize them’ (Moral Boundaries 147) (22).

In presuming to go beyond the personal, Kirsch and Ritchie must go beyond the feminists who insist on equality despite personal difference. Such feminists include the first-wave feminists who insisted on equality. And such feminists also include notable, contemporary feminists such as these:

Phyllis Chesler, “a liberal feminist second-waver who's the author of a book called The Death of Feminism,” and who opposes those who “oppose the ideals of dignity and equality for women” [Kathryn Jean Lopez]

and Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards, who model their “Third-Wave Manifesta: A Thirteen Point Agenda” after the equal-rights document, the “Declaration of Sentiments”).

Christian feminist Elizabeth Fletcher would surely find strange the “moral theory” of Kirsch and Ritchie. Their theory rejects the presumption that all people are equal; it is the theory of the pimp; in the case of academic feminists Kirsch and Ritchie, it tries to hold on, rather impersonally, to a “feminist theoretical framework” that they must force, by binary logic, to conclude this: that there has to be essential divisive differences between a Christian and a feminist.

CHRISTIANS ESSENTIALIZING HELLENISTS AS ANTI-WOMEN, ANTI-SEMITES

But look again at how Fletcher erects her own binary logic to divide Jewish / Christian feminism from Greek sexism. Fletcher essentializes the “Greek culture” as misogynistic when she discusses male portrayals of Mary Magdalene. The Greekish towns, “the ideal of Roman womanhood,” the anti-semitic male historians, all conspired with or bought (into) Plato’s “Platonic dualism” pimped by Alexander the Great. And the result of the conspiracy: “Throughout the centuries, Mary Magdalene was incorrectly portrayed in literature and art as a reformed prostitute.” Today, even, she’s Dan Brown’s Jesus’ woman, if a wife, the one buried in Brown’s “Da Vinci code.”

Fletcher does give a nod to how the Hellene language is used to write Mary’s story in the first place. Jewish, Greekish, Christian males write the following, as Fletcher explains it (from “John 20:11-18, Mark 16:1-11, Luke 24:1-11, Matthew 28:1-10”):

At the tomb, Mary was given instructions. She was told by Jesus or by the angel to “Go to my brothers and say to them….” Mary then ‘went and announced’. With these words Mary was commissioned as an apostle of Jesus (‘go and tell’ is apostellein in Greek). She was an apostle in the same way as the men (the Twelve and the other disciples) who were commissioned to spread the story of Jesus.

Until the third century, teachers in the Christian church referred to Mary as an ‘apostle’, and she is still called ‘apostle to the apostles’ by the Eastern Catholic churches. She has been one of the most revered figures in Christian history.

Here Fletcher praises Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John for using one “Greek” word for Mary. But Fletcher denigrates Hellenistic culture generally, and she blames other writers like Paul and Josephus for succumbing to the (supposedely) misogynistic, anti-semitic nature of Greek. (With reference to Josephus’ account of the Moses story, I wish Fletcher had observed how the Septuagint translators of the Jewish scriptures into the Hellenistic language had been much more inclusive of Moses’ sister than the original Hebrew text is! The book of Exodus--or "the Way Out" in Greek language--names Moses’s sister Miriam and his brother in Aaron in the Greek translation, but the Hebrew version only names his brother.)

Let me leave you in our discussion here on Christian feminist perspectives by quoting an academic who really maintains her feminist scholarship without assuming a merely masculinist position. Carolyn Osiek, New Testament historian, neither essentializes patriarchal cultures nor forces any one strain of them to objectivize women. Osiek writes:

Christianity, or at least the teaching of Jesus, contained a spark of new insight that led to the beginnings of an egalitarian movement. . . A danger here is to read Christianity as liberator of women from an oppressive Judaism.

In first century Roman society, a new movement was at work toward greater social freedom for women. Hellenistic Judaism and Christianity happened along at the right time to pick up on these trends which were already in the social air, and thus were not directly inspired by Jesus or Christian thought. I have more sympathy with this position.

We'll come back to Jesus (of Christian tradition) in a moment. If not all can agree that that man is a feminist, then we'll consider some feminist men to be "Jesusy," the term Anne Lamott bandies about.

RETELLING RHETORIC RETOLD: VOICE LESSONS

When you read the first few pages of Cheyl Glenn’s masterful Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity Through the Renaissance, then you surely recognized her as the one using the funny word, “odelisque.” And recall how she represents artist Jean-Leon Gerome as representing Alcibiades as representing Aspasia as his (Alcibiades’ and now Gerome’s and now our) “harem girl.”

As right as it is for Glenn to retell the history of Aspasia, to rescue her from mere whoredom, I wonder if we academic feminists would do well to give more voice to Hellenistic feminist men. What?! Yes, if we only pimp the Greek males to our students (our johns?), then what good does it do ultimately?

Yes, please consider with me what Marjorie B. Garbor says about the academic feminist needing the voice of the amateur professional and the professional amateur. Yes, take more of the Voice Lessons that Nancy Mairs gives on the “radical and absolute alterity” of those who refuse to pimp and rather give birth to people and to ideas. Yes, note how Patricia Bizzell writes herself into her academic musings on feminist methods, calling Jacqueline Jones Royster’s afrafeminist ideology our ideal method.

Yes, listen to Jacqueline Jones Royster’s voices, her many “own very much authentic voices” (37). Hear her speaking on her “moments of personal challenge that seem to have import for cross-boundary discourse.” Pay close attention to her saying “that the most salient point to acknowledge is that ‘subject’ position really is everything” (29).

Now let me confess to you, dear readers, I am an academic, I am a feminist, and I am a Euro-American man speaking out for men, especially Jesusy Hellenist feminists, who speak out for women and for men equally. Don't we see how our "subject" position (our afrafeminist ideology as equal to good Hellenist feminism) refuses to pimp? We speak and try to listen in cross-boundary discourse.
"Man cannot speak for her," Elizabeth Cady Stanton once declared. So we should acknowledge that woman cannot speak for him. To become a man who refuses to pimp, who insists on equality for men and women, man must speak for man. He clearly must listen to her (and she to him). As we listen carefully, considerately, we each individually have and must use our “own very much authentic voices.”