BLT: a new blog on the Bible, Literature, and Translation

- Racism in Translation

- an announcement of The Jewish Annotated New Testament coming soon from Oxford University Press

That's just a foretaste of what you're to find at BLTnotjustasandwich.com, a new blog on the Bible, Literature, and Translation.

The most informed and informative literary blogger, Theophrastus, is the one starting the blog.  (He's also the best biblioblogger with a pseudonym, although the Biblioblogger Library has yet to include him or his blog.  Likewise, he has more insight on translation theory and translation practice with respect to the Bible and other literature than many of us.)  He announces the formation of the blog, here and also here, where you are welcomed! 

Welcome to the blog named BLT. It is not just a sandwich.  It stands for a set of topics that we hope to discuss:  Bible, Literature, and Translation.  We’ll talk about the Bible as literature and the literature of translation and the translation of Bibles and the translation of literature and literature of translation and Bible as a translation and literary translations of Bibles and so on.  And we are certain to throw in the arts, the sciences, philosophy, mysticism, religion, and pretty much everything else.

The initial crew of bloggers represents a diverse set of viewpoints but one that is unified in our openness to new ideas and a fundamental belief in the dignity of all humans.  This blog is open to all: Jews, Catholics, Mainliners, Evangelicals, Eastern Christians, Atheists, Theists outside the Judeo-Christian tradition, etc.  For me a strong underlying theme of this blog is that  everyone has a voice — especially people that have been traditionally marginalized.

I’ll let my co-bloggers (currently J. K. Gayle, Suzanne McCarthy, and Craig Smith) introduce themselves, but I’ll simply mention that I am a professor at a US university with strong interests in applied issues in linguistics.

There won’t be any bacon or other treif meat in my posts, but there will be lots of substance.  I look forward to hearing from you.

Notice that Suzanne McCarthy, whom Theophrastus mentions, is the most current top and #1 Biblioblogger in the Top 10 Biblioblogs by the most recent vote among all bibliobloggers in the world, the most democratic measure of the Top.  Her blog, Suzanne's Bookshelf, is also #37, in the most current top 40 of the Top 50.

Notice that Craig Smith, whom Theophrastus mentions, blogs at Notes from the Dreamtime and is the only biblioblogger to have produced an entire translation of all the Hebrew and the Greek of the whole Bible, actually The First Egalitarian Translation ever, although he also is yet to be included in the Biblioblogger Library.

And Theophrastus mentions me.  But you already know me.  More importantly, you are invited to BLT!  Feel free to get the word out.

2 Stories: 1 Carter on Women; 2 Headlines

Here are two different stories.

First, Jimmy Carter earlier this week made several statements in praise of and in defense of women in "an interview with VOA." Voice of America's own Peter Clottey reported on this on Tuesday, April 5, 2011, and the report was posted here at voanews.com. President Carter said the following specifically to the VOA interviewer:

“The discrimination against women on a global basis is almost attributable to the declaration by religious leaders in Christianity, Islam and other religions that women are inferior in the eyes of God, and this gives men a right to abuse women, whether it’s the husband beating up his wife or depriving a woman of her basic rights.”

President Carter said a number of other things in praise of women. Here's the original headline out of VOA Africa:

Former US President Says Women 'Pivotal' in Uprisings

Please read the entire interview and news report for yourself here at voanews.com.

Second, some unnamed somebody at wnct.com picks up this story from somebody else somewhere else. It gets featured as an Associated Press article (but a search of www.ap.org shows that to be just bogus). The dateline is today, April 7, 2011, AP ATLANTA. And the full little article reads:

ATLANTA (AP) - Former President Jimmy Carter says much of the discrimination and abuse suffered by women around the world is attributable to a belief "that women are inferior in the eyes of God."

Carter said such teachings by "leaders in Christianity, Islam and other religions" allow men to beat their wives and deny women their fundamental rights as human beings.

The former president made the remarks Wednesday at a gathering of human rights activists and religious leaders from more than 20 countries at the Carter Center in Atlanta.

Carter said he doesn't fault religions for oppressing women, but blames men who selectively interpret the Bible and other scriptures. He suggested there are other, more flexible interpretations.

Carter called mistreatment of women "the most serious and all pervasive and damaging human rights abuse on Earth."

So Fox news online reposts it as a legit source. Some editor re-writes the headline as follows:

Jimmy Carter: Religion Makes Men Beat Their Wives

And now the Internet, the blogosphere, is just aflame with flamatory headlines and blogpost openers that disparage the former Presidents for these statements. When you google this ("Former President Jimmy Carter says much of the discrimination and abuse suffered by women around the world is attributable to a belief"), then just see what you get. Notice how many sexist bloggers are making disparaging comments as they post. Some are women bashing the former President in the name of conservatism. For example, here's a headline from the Diary of a Mad Conservative:

You handcuff your wife to a stove? New defense: It’s the Bible’s fault.

And commentary in red letters from the same:

Is this guy for real? Oh Lord, unfortunately he is.
Sorry to inform the former Dork-in-Chief, but Islam is the religion that abuses and denigrates women. There aren’t a lot of stories of Christians killing their daughters to preserve family honor. Or Christian men cutting the noses off their wives to make them “too ugly for anyone else.”

Another blogger who calls himself Noman (and who identifies as a Christian reading Ephesians 5), ridicules President Carter and concludes:

Should Noman ever slip up and turn into an abuser, he assures Jimmy that it will precisely be because he quit listening to his religious leaders, lost his faith, and left his religion, not because he misinterpreted it.

---

So we get two stories today. The real one from Tuesday and the inflamed fake, remake of that one from Thursday.

What We Heard from Karen Armstrong Last Night

"She was Pollyanna," my 17-year-old daughter told me after listening to Karen Armstrong speak to hundreds of us in a sold-out auditorium on the Texas Christian University campus last evening.  "She didn't express any healthy skepticism or cynicism in her realism."

So I wondered how many heard from Armstrong the way my daughter had.  Not many, so it seemed.  All stood quickly at the ovation at the end.  And at the beginning, at the start of her introduction by Dr. C. David Grant, Religion Professor and Chair of the department, we all heard how Armstrong's only-one-week-old book, The Case for God, is in the top 10 of the NY Times nonfiction bestseller list.

Armstrong's message was entitled, “Religion in an Age of Terror: Perils and Possibilities.” She began with the parable of the Buddha who became enlightened when he faced pain in the world. She ended by reminding us how he, as in our real histories, came down from the mountain and lived his eighty some years choosing to walk among people in the marketplaces and jungles of India.

The cause of religious fundamentalism, explained Armstrong, is modernity. Fundamentalism is not conservative, it is instead distortive as it attempts to survive modernity. And modernism with all of its good intentions - and for all the attempts at appropriations of modernism - is like a cake baked with the wrong ingredients. The problem of pain and of terror (especially by fundamentalists of any religion) is not religion but politics, although religion most often gets implicated for the wars of the world and religion often gets sucked in.

The solution is religion. It is the golden rule, first arriving in human history in Confucius but manifesting in Buddha, Leviticus, Jesus, Mohammad, and others. It even shows up in Aeschylus, whose Chorus in the play The Persians calls on everyone in the Greek audience to weep, Weep for Xerxes. And weep for this enemy of theirs they did. God need not figure first, or even last in the Golden Rule, because all religion is good because of this rule. Love is the operative word, Armstrong said. And she explained that love is not the "mishy mushy kumbaya" as she quoted a Nobel Laureate with whom she'd spoken a couple of weeks ago. Love is looking after the other, and kings can love one another in their politics.

Over the course of the hour, Armstrong gave a history of religion and of politics and of modernity and of love. She confessed that she is privileged, a woman of the modern world, and therefore extremely lucky. "I'd be a witch burned at the stake in most any other era," she added. She is clearly not a witch, clearly a proponent of religion for world peace; so Armstrong and hundreds of others around the globe have been actively working. In her talk, Armstrong advised us to learn more at charterforcompassion.org. And her message is clear: the essence of religion is charity, and by this, she noted, "we can save our troubled world. Thank you."

Now my daughter has not yet read and can't possibly yet have experienced The Spiral Staircase. Nor has she read The Case for God. But I've been thinking a lot in the minutes since we heard Armstrong about what she said.

Two Poems -- worth our reading

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

----

Keine Sandkunst mehr / No More SandArt   by Paul Celan

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

Tiefimschnee, 

iefimnee,
i-i-e.

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

eepinnow,
e-i-o.

(Carson on Celan's poem:

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

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

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

---------

SILENCE (VAYERA) by Rachel Barenblat

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

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

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

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

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

(Barenblat on Barenblat's poem:

This week's portion: silence

at her blog Velveteen Rabbit)

a (personal) progress report

Oy vey!

I have to tell you all this:

Should you not turn around to become children

you should not enter into the royal palace of the sky.

As you lower yourself to the level of this child here,

you are the greatest one in the royal palace there.

--Joshua, a Bethlehem baby and child of Egypt

just as we as society have begun to raise our daughters more like sons

–more like whole people–

we must begin to raise our sons more like our daughters

–that is, to value empathy as well as hierarchy;

to measure success by other people’s welfare as well as their own.

--Gloria Steinem, a whole person and feminist

Our family enjoyed the holiday celebrations together. But I did bring up presidential politics and religion and sex to the adults. And someone did ask me about the dissertation.

One of the relatives after a very short while declared that she may agree to disagree with me (on the candidates, on the church, and on the crises of sexism) but was most certain that neither of us would change the other’s mind.

Another asked in mocking disbelief: “how? why would you, a man, be a feminist? isn’t it kinda dishonest for you to translate anything of Aristotle as if you were his daughter?”

Now you might be asking me the obvious: “Why bring up taboo topics of conversation with family members during the holidays?”

So now I’m just asking these questions:

Whether we can dialog through Aspasia’s (aka Socrates’s) dialectic? Why do we have to think we have to change each others’ minds, when what I’m after really is my own very profound need to change? What if I refuse to turn around? Who will that help? And why your limited question focused on my gender, on my feminism? Where are the questions about my American barbarianism (not Aristotle’s Hellenism), my twenty-first-century academic learning (not his neo-Platonic teaching), my translated English (not his original Greek), my position of being a child (not his patriarchy), my repentance (not his rhetoric)?

And I'm still wondering about the antidotes to envy. What was Jesus after in talking to the men following him, those males each one wanting to be the top dog in the kingdom of heaven (as recorded in that epigraph above)? What was Gloria Steinem after (as in that other epigram, from “Supremacy Crimes”) when remembering it’s mostly those less-whole humans with penises who are the most violent, the most hierarchical? Doesn’t each one of us have a role to play, our own role to play out, in envy moderation? When will I know that I myself value empathy of others, and measure success by any other person’s welfare as well as my own?

Thanks to Molly and Suzanne for helping us ask the questions of envy, and of empathy, and of personal change.

My personal progress report on the dissertation is this: I've finished the interlinear Greek-to-English translation of the whole of the Rhetoric. Now, I've just about finished reworking John H. Freese's 1926 version. Each English word is being chosen for its ambiguity, for its relation to the body (mine mostly, but Pythias's empathetically), for its absolute refusal to sit as a static abstract transliteration of the Greek (no elite academic-rhetoric-ese here), for its transformative power (as if a conception, a pregnancy of sorts), for its regard for woman's discourse (as Nancy Mairs relates it), for its feminist binarying that values empathy as well as hierarchy. Some day or another in 2008, I'll post up some of this.