The Canon as You Read It

Dogma is what you have to believe, whether you believe it or not. And law is what you must do, whether it is good for you or not.
   -  Dallas Willard

One of the most subversive institutions in the United States is the public library. 
   -  bell hooks

And he said to him,
   What is written in the law of the Torah?
   How do you read it?
   -  Jesus (as translated by Luke, as translated by Willis Barnstone)

Lynn Z. Bloom is pretty smart.  And so are bloggers Henry Neufeld and Brian LePort.  They are particularly intelligent when it comes to what makes a real canon.  They understand the goodness of subjectivity.  And therefore, they resist the sort of teachers who - and that type of teaching that - would force on you the following: "What you must read" and "Which works you should read."  It's all very aptly personal.  Lynn is interested in the essay canon; Henry in the best Bible version; and Brian in the canon of the Bible.

I first met Bloom by email after reading something she'd written that I decided to read while doing early research in my Ph.D. program.  She was kind to me, enthusiastic about her own research, and excited at the prospect of the possibility of my expanding some on what she'd started.  Bloom had noticed "how the essay, a belletristic genre in the 18th and 19th centuries, became critically undermined in the 20th century as a consequence of pedagogy that emphasized its utilitarian rather than aesthetic and intellectual functions."  She noted:  

"Canon-makers make pronouncements and lists.  Although I am not now and never have been related to any other Bloom of canonical persuasion, neither Harold ('Read my list!') nor Allan ('Read Great books!'), I make the following claims.  This article [of mine] is the first to define this -- or any -- contemporary essay canon, the first to define that canon empirically rather than critically, and the first to discuss its formation, significance, status, and implications.  Whether or not critics pay attention to essays, teachers [like me] do, and consequently so do their students.  Thus this contemporary essay canon has profound implications -- intellectual, aesthetic, pedagogical, and political -- not only for what but also for how our [American] nation's 2.2 first-year college students read, and think, and write -- and for how they'll think about reading and writing for the rest of their lives.  The teaching essay canon may, indeed, constitute the core of a liberal arts education for many of these students."

I've just now quoted her own essays, or articles, entitled respectively, "Once More to the Essay: The Essay Canon and Textbook Anthologies" and "The Essay Canon."  In her anthology co-edited with Louise Z. Smith, Bloom builds her own essay canon for her own students.  As The Arlington Reader: Canons and Contexts, their publisher Bedford/ St. Martin's makes this available to any of us and all of us teaching.  In the Introduction, they write:  "A canon is a list or other compilation of the most important members of a particular group or category, developed through agreement -- either implied or explicit -- by people who know the subject."  And they go on to give examples:  "the biblical canon," and "the canon of rock musicians" and other "canons that reflect taste, influence, and popularity -- those applying to music, books, art, or cars...."

Neufeld is interested in the canon of Bible versions.  And personally he notes:

"[S]omething is always present in translation as well. The question is just what you’re looking for. For example, I prefer the more formal style of the Revised English Bible. I even like its Anglicisms. I spent much of my teens in a former British colony (Guyana), and I was born in Canada. Those things are comfortable for me and they give me a familiar feel.

Should I therefore recommend that everyone read the REB? Hardly! For others, features that make it work for me may be a hindrance to understanding. Then there’s the question of just what it is that I want to understand, or more importantly that you want to understand.

What seems to escape so many people who prescribe what a translation must and must not do is that it matters not what is there if the reader doesn’t understand. Admonitions to 'get a dictionary' are both pointless, and in my opinion, arrogant. This kind of talk suggests to people that if they would just put in enough work, they’d be able to understand–well–what the talker believes they should want to understand."

Do you see what he's done?  Neufeld has let you decide just has he has decided, rather subjectively and individually, what is best in a version, an English translation, of the Bible.

LePort acknowledges canons of the Bible of all sorts of people of all sorts of faiths.  Then he does something starting.  He suggests that it's okay to fess up to the fact that, even in your own community, you have a different canon, or, as he puts it, a canon-within-the-canon.  He recalls and advises, practicing what he preaches:

"A couple of years ago I shared a chart that compares the biblical canon according to the following forms: Samaritan, Hebrew/Jewish, Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Syriac, Ethiopian, and Protestant (see here). If you are part of one of these groups you likely adhere to the canon as understood in that tradition. Yet practice is often a more trustworthy sign of what you believe than mere confession, so even though I am an evangelical it would be a bit disingenuous for me to act as if the canon influences me equally."

He then goes on to say what he reads and what he does not read so much of in his evangelical [Christian] Bible.  What about you, he asks.  

If I had more time, maybe when I do have a little time to spare, I might share my canons, my essay canon, my Bible version canon, and my canon within the biblical canon.  I might share in comments below.  If you have the time and inclination to share, then I think that'd be just fine.  It would certainly be as smart and as encouraging as Lynn Z. Bloom and bloggers Henry Neufeld and Brian LePort.

about biblioblogging...? Jacqueline Jones Royster's voices

I don't know why you read my blog. It's a strange mix of feminisms, translation stuff, rhetorics, and because of that sometimes often it's bibliobloggish. I know, doesn't make sense much to the pure or the purists of any sort.

So let me offer at least 2 reasons why you might read this particular post:  1 - you might have read something yesterday here about April DeConick sounding rather like Moses (moses, the male, I mean) when I was hoping she might just also speak with another voice of hers;  2- you might be holding me to my promise (sort of) that I'd say something more about why afrafeminist Jacqueline Jones Royster has very much influenced how I read the bible.

1- DeConick does not disappoint.  Look at the whole post What is it about biblioblogging...? But at least read two central paragraphs:

As for the historical-critical approach and feminism. There is nothing anti-feminist about the historical approach in and of itself. What is anti-feminist is its application which has been controlled by white (mainly European) males since only recently. So the kind of history that has been recovered and written has been the history of the dominant group, and it is the history that justifies and sustains that group. Here again we are talking about white males who are in power and who wish to remain so. When our histories, whether religious or social or political, have been written and put into text books and taught to our children, it is the history of the dominant group - their master commemorative narrative - that we are disseminating. Now this is not new news. It is ho-hum by now and I imagine you are yawning.

So what have we done about this now that we have recognized it because feminist scholarship and literary critical methods have brought this to our attention? We have gone back and added a paragraph about important women in our textbooks and we have minted coins with Anthony's face on it, coins that we never use! But we haven't rewritten our histories to reflect what we are learning about the hidden histories and the marginalized past nor have we commemorated it as a society (this is especially true of our religious histories - which is why I am writing Sex and the Serpent). Why not add a paper dollar to those we use already, and put Anthony on it? Why not make a government holiday commemorating the Suffrage movement? Why not rename important boulevards with the names of women we wish to commemorate? Etc.

Doesn't she sound wonderfully like Patricia Bizzell?  And if you're a (feminist) rhetorician you should know how she sounds.  For example, in her speech and in her writing (“Feminist Methods of Research in the History of Rhetoric: What Difference Do They Make?”), Bizzell asks,

Have [Jacqueline Jones] Royster, and other feminist scholars for whom she has now more completely articulated methodologies already in practice, departed radically from the rhetorical tradition?

So Bizzell answers:

Yes, and no. No, because their work relies upon many of the traditional tools of research in the history of rhetoric. No, because the rhetors they have added to our picture of the history of Western rhetoric seem to me to be working within this tradition and enriching it, rather than constituting utterly separate or parallel rhetorical traditions. But yes, because in order to get at activities of these new rhetors, researchers have had to adopt radically new methods as well, methods which violate some of the most cherished conventions of academic research, most particularly in bringing the person of the researcher, her body, her emotions, and dare one say, her soul, into the work.  From my [Bizzell's] perspective as editor of an anthology called The Rhetorical Tradition, contemplating the major changes in scholarship over the last ten years, these new methods have made all the difference.

2 - Now you've noticed my little segue into talking about Royster.  I don't think I can say more really than Bizzell has.  I do think Royster herself has lots to say.  The best place to start, if you're starting to read Royster, is her essay, "When the First Voice You Hear is Not Your Own."  There, she talks about her many voices, and she does so using her "academic voice."  She's writing (also) as a woman, as an African American, as one often talked about by other experts on african american women, experts who themselves are neither women nor african americans.

Royster, you may also want to learn, is an "English" academic professionally, not a bible scholar.  But as such she is a historian, a feminist, a rhetorician, a literary scholar.  Royster has a fabulous book she's entitled, Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change among African American Women. If you haven't caught on, then you might want to understand that Royster finds herself in the historical stream of women she's researching and writing about. This is objective but subjective stuff.  Two of my favorite paragraphs are these (from pages 254-55):

     My role as researcher has been to look theoretically and philosophically at the data, to bring meaning to it.  The very first order of business by necessity has been to establish an interpretive viewpoint that clearly places African American women at the center of our own story.  The assumption is that viewpoint matters.  As Anna Julia Cooper stated in 1892 in A Voice from the South, "What is needed, perhaps, to reverse the picture of the lordly man slaying the lion, is for the lion to turn painter!"  (1988:222).  In scholarly research and analysis, the question to be addressed is more than whether African American women occupy a passive position of object or an active position of subject.  Rather, the question, at the level of interpretation, is how--as objects or subjects--we are placed on a landscape or within a material reality.

     In this analysis, I rejected images of African American women that would position us interpretively as a mirror or a reflection of others, or as a room accessed by other people's doors and windows, or even as a backdrop against which other stories are told, invigorated, or clarified.  Instead, this analysis positions African American women as the "lions" in a "lion's tale."  My intent has been to consider African American women as the embodiment of our own dreams and aspirations, our own created and re-created selves, in a world with others, certainly, but without the need at critical points in the analytical process (that is, in the initial stages) to be filtered through the experiences of others, no matter how resonant or dissonant those experiences might be.  In making such a commitment to creating a working space amid dualities, I believe I have acquired an understanding of both scholarly positioning and knowledge production in this arena from which advice to others might be abstracted.  In choosing an appropriate mechanism for sharing advice in a more direct manner, however, without suggesting the notion of easy prescriptions, I realize once again that theory, like history, also begins with a story.

Let me quote three paragraphs more, and then say something about the bible and about my reading (and some blogging about) it.  Here's from Royster's preface to Calling Cards: Theory and Practice in the Study of Race, Gender, and Culture (page x):

     Colleagues in mainstream and not so mainstream academic circles have learned to focus more acutely on what it actually means to carry out a research agenda that is defined and substantively directed by schemata (race, gender, culture) that have traditionally been marginalized and disregarded.  We have learned to adapt and invent research and teaching strategies, and we have struggled to negotiate the social and political dynamics of academic lives that are so clearly tied to traditionally devalued interests.  In the main, there have not been road maps by which to determine appropriate and worthy pathways, since these interests actually go against the grain of many traditional practices.  We hear tales of colleagues who have worked without advocates, mentors, or champions to run interference or to keep resources enabling structures in place.  Personally and professionally, many of us have felt on our own, isolated, and struggling against the odds.  These are the facts of many lives.

And here's from Royster's preface to Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892-1900 (page vii):

     As complements to each other, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases and A Red Record clearly state Wells's position on lynching, revealing the insight and perception with which she was able to launch the most successful of the early anti-lynching campaigns.  Wells's courageous analysis helps us to understand the told and untold story of this sinister thread in the fabric of American life.  The third pamphlet, Mob Rule in New Orleans, is a case study that dramatically details an individual incident as it escalates in the absence of law, order, and the application of justice to become yet another striking example of "southern horror."

     I have also sought to establish an appropriate framework for understanding the personal achievements of Ida B. Wells.  Born into slavery, Wells went on to garner a place of respect as a nationally and internationally prominent journalist and as a leader in the black clubwomen's movement.  Wells was one among a relatively small but growing number of "public" women in an era when public arenas were not considered the place for women.  Going against this grain, Wells earned a reputation as an outspoken and steadfast crusader for justice, and the three pamphlets presented here are testimony to her achievement.

Now it doesn't take an entirely careful reader to see how Royster, historian, finds herself in the history.  Nor does it take a woman, or an African American, or an AfricanAmericanwoman to appreciate what she's doing, and the authority with which she does it.  The marginal voices of the "traditional" history speak.  They do not demand to be heard.  They deconstruct and reconstruct their histories before an expert not in the stream of history (not that history anyway) can construct them otherwise.

So, the bible.  It is history, re-presentations.  And most today doing scholarship on the Bible come at it as lion slayers in the painting, not letting the silenced lions paint, not listening to the voices, not standing themselves in their own margins where they belong.  Since I am not a Jew of old, not even one of those who spoke for or as Thomas or Mary, then I do better, I think, to listen to the stories not always told.  Royster reminds me of the horrors of the silenced in the south.  She reminds me that rigorous historical criticism (even in biblical scholarship) is too often necessarily done "without advocates, mentors, or champions to run interference or to keep resources enabling structures in place."  There are many (yet) unheard and overlooked.  The subjective perspective is most important when "being" objective.

 

 

beyond logic: language and discourse

"A particular language, of a particular culture, in relation to a particular person with [her or] his particular history constitutes an implicit theory for that person . . . . [T]he observer [whether a cultural insider or an outsider] universally affects the data and becomes part of the data."
--Kenneth Lee Pike,
Linguistic Concepts

"Using subject position as a terministic screen in cross-boundary discourse permits analysis to operate kaleidoscopically, thereby permitting interpretation to be richly informed by the converging of dialectical perspectives."
--Jacqueline Jones Royster,
"When the First Voice You Hear Is Not Your Own"

When we come to language, to discourse even, too often our temptation is to assume (as with Aristotle) that we ourselves are objective with no need to change because of anyone else.  Or we may read something written by someone like Aristotle or Saint Paul translated into our own language so (dynamically equivalent to their Greek) that we begin to think they've written to us or have something to say that sounds like Nature or nature's God so that to deviate from that would make us natural deviants, or something.

Here are three anecdotes from my experience to begin to illustrate.  One's a boring linguistics study; another is a poignant story from my doctoral studies in rhetorics and feminisms; and the third is from my work in adult language learning:

1

We don't always say what we believe:

As a linguist, I have used on occasion a technique for teasing out preferences and prejudices of people towards languages and speakers of those languages. (The technical name is the "matched-guise procedure" as developed by Wallace Lambert and Richard Tucker to get at attitudes in Canada towards speakers of French and English respectively). In one case, I was interested in how learners of English as a foreign language (in their own countries) might have attitudes towards native speakers of English (outside the learners' own countries). So, on a direct questionnaire, I asked scores of EFL learners, "Where is the best English spoken?". When the vast majority of this group declared either "the U.K." or "the U.S.A." - then I played for them tapes of native speakers of English talking about a benign topic. And then the EFL learners rated the speakers they heard in terms of intelligence, friendliness, clarity of speech, and so forth. (The guise, or the trick, was this: The English speakers were actors I had hired to speak in various varieties of the language. They talked using American English, they talked using British English, and they talked using other Englishes as well.  These actors, by putting on the different Englishes, had managed to fool not only all the members of the British Club in Dallas but also all of the professional linguists who listened to tapes of the actors played at a nearby US university as well). Here's the other bit of detail; all of the EFL learners were ethnically Chinese (from China, from Taiwan, from British Hong Kong, from Singapore, from Malaysia, and from Brunei). They'd all read or been told by someone that the best English was spoken in the USA or the UK.  (Aristotle and Saint Paul were not the ones who wrote the facts about the location of the best English, but someone or another on the Voice of America or the BBC had discussed the nature of good English within earshot of the Chinese listeners - and hearing they had believed).  Not surprisingly, all of the EFL learners from former British colonies (Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, and Brunei) declared that people in the UK used the best English. But to my great surprise, this same group unanimously and anonymously did not rate English speakers from the UK nearly as high as they rated speakers from the USA. In other words, those persons of Chinese ethnicity raised in and around British school systems (and more likely to listen to the BBC than to VOA) were predisposed to public praise of the "Queen's English." And yet privately they betrayed a preference for the American superpower style of the English language.

The observer, the listener, may say they believe one thing but will, at times, contradict their statements with a more profound, more deeply hidden belief.  What is "objective" for these observers?  And are they being honest in the first place, or more honest in the second instance of confession?

2

We often want the privilege of hearing authoritative canonical texts as applying to us, especially when they authorize us to speak about those "others" whom the same text silences naturally:

Just weeks into "Composition Theory," in my first semester of doctoral coursework at Texas Christian University, the prof assigned Jacqueline Jones Royster's, "When the First Voice You Hear is Not Your Own." The essay is a call to scholarly subjectivity, to willingness to use one's own voice (and voices) when speaking about one's scholarly interests.  It's also a call to those who study and speak about groups of people they themselves are not members of.  For example, a white male scholar may write with some authority about black women who may not be as scholarly.  Royster, the author of the essay, researches and teaches using various voices.  These voices include those of the (1) expert in her discipline and of (2) the subjects she studies in her discipline. Her discipline is English studies, with particular focuses in rhetoric, composition, and literacy studies.  One of Royster's books she has titled, Traces of a Stream:  Literacy and Social Change Among African American Women.  By now, you may have guessed she's a researching, published and teaching scholar.  And you may have realized she's African American, a woman in the stream of the group that she studies.  Well, in the course I was taking, the prof had asked the class to write a response to Royster's essay.  And the prof had asked me to read my response aloud to the class.  To respond to Royster's essay calling for subjectivity, I had written some of my own story.  And, at the end of my response, reading aloud unrehearsed as instructed, I began to become emotional, because I was (in part) acknowledging a mentor whose sexual orientation is different from my own and was acknowledging his passing after nine faithful years with his partner, who had two years prior, died of AIDS.  My mentor died of AIDS too, so I was trying to read what I'd written of the influence that this former boss of mine had had on me.   And how his partner's death and his own dying had figured, also, into his enduring influence.  I could hardly read as tears edged their way past the mop of my own fingers on my face.  But to my great surprise, another student in the class took great offense.  He'd read (he said) that discussions of homosexuality (when our class was reading on race) was inappropriate; that my reading of my own paper was maudlin; that the professor by calling on me did not know how to profess; and that, frankly, Jacqueline Jones Royster was sentimental, unobjective, and ironically exclusionary.  (The reactionary classmate marched off to the English Department chair and filed a formal complaint.  He also sent an email to Royster, demanding that she clarify how his white male voice was any less valid than hers.  Unfortunately, and this is one of the lessons for me in all of that:  the dominant white male had heard from someone - maybe Aristotle, maybe Saint Paul - that his voice was objective, and was to be heard.  But, of course, as much as Aristotle taught objectivity to his elite Greek male students, and even though Paul urged λογικὴ or "logike" of some of readers (first Jews then Greek), my classmate seems to have understood this as applying directly to himself.  The Nature of Reality as Written was firm, and firmly coldly objective - to think otherwise would require a change or a mess of changes within oneself.  (And it was too close to qualifying exams for that nonsense).

3

We can't always predict how much change (and how quickly and how sustained) our subjective experiences will effect.

Every once and a while, those of us working in the university level program for learning English as an additional language will meet remarkable learners.  "Sasha" is one of the remarkable ones.  Having studied no English prior to arriving in the USA from her Eastern European home, she needed only 6 weeks to become proficient enough in English to pursue a degree program full-time using that new language only.  For most people beginning in English, it takes from 9 to 12 months to do what Sasha did in a month and a half.  Sure, we experts in language learning and acquisition and teaching gave all the students our best.  But what made Sasha do remarkably and measurably better than her classmates?  She fell in love.  And she would only speak in English with her new friend (and would only correspond in English writing with him).  She fell in love with her textbooks and the multimedia surrounding them too.  She'd read books that had been translated, sometime variously translated, into English from her Eastern European language.  She'd compose poetry, in English, English as she was growing to know it.  She'd speak with a flawless American English accent the last time I saw her, four years later at her undergraduate graduation before she left again for home.  She was an adult human convert.  (I did my best to get my staff of instructors to get the other English students paying attention to Sasha and her learning.  Based on all of our expert learning and research about language acquisition and learning, how could we have predicted what she did and who she was?  What's love got to do with it?  There have been other Sasha's and not all with a first language that's IndoEuropean.  And it sometimes is love of music, and love of dance, and love of sports, as much as love of that boyfriend or girlfriend that seems part and parcel of the deep change.  But really, what's love got to do with it?)

Reading Joshua in Greeky Hebrews

Is it absolutely necessary to read Hebrews 4:8 in the Greek (as perhaps once upon a time a translation of Hebrew into Hellene) and to conclude absolutely that the text must only refer to Joshua of the Book of Joshua? Sure, the verse comes right after the two quotations of Psalm 95:7. (The first quotation begins that discussion of Moses and the people unable to enter "rest" in the promise land; and the second directly precedes verse 8 of Hebrews 4.) Sure, the writer most definitely intends "Joshua" when using the Greek name Ἰησοῦς. So I'm not asking what the writer intended, or what the text directs all readers to.

Rather, I'm asking if there can't be a second meaning here. Could there be a meaning that the writer never intended at least not at first? And could there be a second meaning that all readers won't quickly get but that some might agree to? Could it be a meaning that the writer (or that the Greek translator of the Hebrew writer) would concede?

You know, we tend to think that Thomas Jefferson would concede to Elizabeth Cady Stanton that "All men are created equal" is a text that allows later readers to see that "All men and women are created equal" is a second possible meaning.

And C.S. Lewis thinks, likewise, that Plato would concede that he was writing also about the suffering and death of Jesus when he wrote about the unfair suffering and death of Socrates. (Lewis thinks that Virgil might deny he was writing about mother Mary and baby Jesus when he prophesied of a virgin birth - and yet, Lewis believes Virgil's text has this second meaning).

And readers such as Mary Daly get us seeing positive meanings in "eavesdropping" and unintended sexist meanings in "the-rapist" (once the "therapist," for example) and in "stag-nation" (first intended perhaps benignly as only "stagnation").

But would the language of the Bible, the Christian part of it no less with the Hebrews name nonetheless - would that language really ever have wordplay which racists or sexists might try to eliminate? I think the game of many male Christian Bible translators today is to "disambiguate," which means to declare for the reader that there must be only one meaning, and then to declare in the same breath what the single meaning must be. (No one often thinks that this is Father Aristotle's game too - the sexist, racist Aristotle one might add).

What I'm trying to ask also is whether translating Ἰησοῦς as "Joshua" in Hebrews 4:8 but as "Jesus" in Hebrews 2:9, 3:1, 4:14, 10:10, 10:19, 12:2, 12:24, 13:20, and 13:21 robs the English reader? Willis Barnstone thinks "Jesus" actually robs this Jew of his Jewishness and that this English transliteration of the Greek transliteration of the Hebrew actually robs Jews of this Joshua. And Barnstone, himself a Jew, is also an acclaimed Greek classicist, a brilliant translation theorist and historian, and an outstanding translator of many texts including the gospels of the New Covenant. Barnstone wonders what would happen if the world of translators, by analogy, made Socrates not Greek by transliteration and in an anti-Hellenist move then turned the world against all Greek people who are responsible for his death. That, I think, is often a bit much for anglo-centric Western Bible translators of the Christian church of this century to take in.

So I'm just asking: What's the problem for readers really when the translator is brave enough to avoid what Robert Alter calls the "heresey of explanation"? And what's the benefit if the English Christian "Jesus" in Hebrews were always "Joshua"? And might ever the reader be able to see the play when Joshua (as Jesus and / or as Joshua) can be the one(s) who did not give the people God's rest way back then?

Here's the verse, and I'd love to hear what you think:

If, in fact, they by Joshua had been given rest,
there wouldn’t ever have been another spoken of after that day.

If, in fact, they by Jesus had been given rest,
there wouldn’t ever have been another spoken of after that day.

εἰ γὰρ αὐτοὺς Ἰησοῦς κατέπαυσεν,
οὐκ ἂν περὶ ἄλλης ἐλάλει μετὰ ταῦτα ἡμέρας.

Hitler Translates Hebrews

In the previous post here, I began translating the letter to Hebrews. Before I go on, there's a bit to say.

First, Hitler translates Hebrews. His is an entirely neutral and benign and objective translation too. His supreme German is dynamically equivalent to the original Greek. There's not a hint of a whiff of the horrors of holocaust in it. No propaganda. No agenda. No bias. No racism. No rhetoric. No sexism.

No? You don't believe that?

Well, did you believe Donald Trump last night on his (taped reality tv show) Celebrity Apprentice, giving Joan Rivers a pass although she calls Annie Duke worse than Hitler? Nely Galán blogs that she can't believe it (although she says nothing about Trump in real reality, off last night at the Miss USA pageant, which he really sponsors).

Which reminds me, second, how Allan Bloom, declaring The Closing of the American Mind two years and two decades ago, used to ask his American college students, "Who do you think is evil?"; and Bloom noted:

"To this there is an immediate response: Hitler. (Stalin is hardly mentioned.) After him, who else? Up until a couple of years ago, a few students said Nixon, but he has been forgotten and at the same time is being rehabilitated. And there it stops. They have no idea of evil; they doubt its existence. Hitler is just another abstraction, an item to fill up an empty category." (page 67)

So could Hitler translate Hebrews with his own categories? I believe he could although he'd not want the world to know exactly what his own categories were. At least, he'd want everyone to think, at first, that he was objective. That he was only following nature, as cold as his decisions ever seemed. That he was without bias.

Hitler's American translator (James Murphy) worked with him on rendering his autobiography into English rather objectively, so that Americans could really believe what he was really up to. I've blogged on this some here and here but want not to forget one chilling phrase (by which he establishes one category of people, and Hitler with Murphy denigrates many - even some non-Jewish Germans - by it):

Es ist immer der gleiche Jude.

He is always the same Jew.
(Hitler's statement as translated by Murphy, which begs the question who "he" is.).

My point is this: it is to suggest very strongly that subjectivity is part and parcel of translating. And when one begins to pretend rather objectively to categorize another human being or the sexed bodies of half of the human race or an entire race of humanity, then there are problems.

Aristotle's taught us in the West to do this: to declare convenient natural categories for humans with social consequences that are to be viewed as only natural. Our problem is that we justify this by cold logic, not by admittedly personal translation.

Third, learning from Aristotle and his method, for example, Martin Luther would say,

And the Jews in mockery said to Him when He was crucified: "If Thou be the Son of God, come down from the cross." If God thus willed it with His son on earth, we [i.e., German non-Jew Christians as if objective observers] need not wonder if the Christians have a similar experience. Christ says: "The servant is not above his master, if they have persecuted me they will also persecute you." And in the epistle to the Hebrews the apostle says very appropriately: "But if ye be without chastisement, whereof all are partakers, then are ye bastards, and not sons." Thus we see how Scripture and examples fully agree in this regard, wherefore we ought to recognize in our sorrows and sufferings God's good and gracious will, and not for a moment think that He has forsaken us [i.e., German non-Jew Christians as if objective observers]. (Hauspostille , here from page 346 of an English translation)

The huge bias here is that Luther is not considering "the epistle to the Hebrews" to be exactly a Christian canonical Bible book, but he's not considering Jews to be part of Jesus or Jesus to be a Jew either.

Now, look at the transliteration difference in Hebrews 4, as Luther translates it. Listen to it. The original says in verses 8 and 14, respectively, the following:

εἰ γὰρ αὐτοὺς Ἰησοῦς κατέπαυσεν

Ἰησοῦν τὸν υἱὸν τοῦ θεοῦ

Of course, the passage is referring to two different people, and yet both are Jews and both have the same name (even when transliterated into Greek from the Hebrew). But Luther renders the German differently, so that one is Jew, the other is Christian, and the different names differentiate, as follows:

Denn so Josua hätte sie zur Ruhe gebracht

Jesum, den Sohn Gottes

Luther, of course, is not original in translating this way. He was a disciple of Aristotle (a scholar of aristotelian logic) before he famously renounced both the philosopher and the Pope. What his Christian German translations show, however, is that the abstracting of humans continued to be a part of Luther's practice.

Translation is bias, if you will. It's certainly the subjectivity that Aristotle failed to rid his world of with his method of logic. But to pretend that translation is coldly objective, especially translation of the text of a particular people not your own, is highly problematic.

Fourth, I'm out of time, but want to end with a couple of paragraphs of Elie Wiesel as translated by Marion Wiesel (from his French into her English [with my gendering marks]). I don't think I'll be able to translate any more of Hebrews, especially the Joshuas part, until we read this (from Messengers of God: Biblical Portraits and Legends):

The Jew is haunted by the beginning more than the end. His messianic dream [and hers] is tied to the kingdom of David and he [with her] feels closer to the prophet Elijah than to his next-door neighbor [who might be her neighbor too].

What is a Jew? Sum, synthesis, vessel. Someone who feels every blow that ever struck his [and her] ancestors. He [and she] is crushed by their morning and buoyed by their triumphs. For they were living men and women, not symbols. The most pure, the most just among them knew ups and downs, moments of ecstasy and confusion; we know, for they are described to us. Their holiness was defined within human terms of reference. Thus the Jew remembers them and sees them as they were at the crossroads of their own lives: troubled, exalted, marked. They are human beings: people, not gods. Their quest rejoins his [and her] own and weighs on his decisions [and hers]. Jacob's ladder rends his nights [and hers]. Israel's despair burdens [her solitude and] his solitude. He knows [as she does] that to speak of Moses is to follow him to Egypt and out of Egypt. To refuse to speak of him is to refuse to follow him. (pages xii - xiii)

At the foot of the mountain, shrouded in fog, the children of Israel wept. And all of creation wept. And in his sorrow, Joshua forgot three hundred commandments and acquired seven hundred doubts. And the bereaved people, blinded by grief, wanted to tear Joshua to pieces for having succeeded Moses, the saddest and loneliest and the most powerful prophet of Israel and the world. (page 204)

biblical schmiblical

I'm stealing the title of Suzanne's post Biblical schmiblical and urging you to read it.

Now my Jewish neighbor tells me last night at sundown that he and his wife have had to go to three different stores in Fort Worth, Texas USA (the buckle or a major loop of the Bible belt) to look for kosher. The Walmart and Target managers both apologized, and the latter explained, "The demographics just don't allow us profitably to stock these items on our shelves anymore." And my friend just laughs that he's going to have to open his own store, "because that little section of passover preparations at Albertsons is just, well, it's just little." (I joked that we really should have voted Kinky Friedman as Governor of this Lone Star State. And I started thinking about whose book this Bible of our post-Christian nation really is).

Every Bible translator who is not a Jew would do well to read Jacqueline Jones Royster's little essay, "When the First Voice You Hear is Not Your Own." Of course, Royster is not a Jew. She's a different minority - with a majority of experts about her and about her kind all around her: she's African American. She's also a woman. A double minority. And she's also a scholar, an expert on African American women and their literacy practices. She doesn't say that you can't be an expert on African Americans if you're not African American. She doesn't say that you can't be an expert on women if you're not a woman. (She doesn't even say that you can't be an expert on literacy if you're not literate!) But she does tire of hearing others who are not her and are not her "kind" speak as if they are her and are her kind.

This is exactly the kind of tiresome affront bible bloggers and bible translators and bible experts who are not Jews can be to the Jews. I don't care if you know something about the New Testament because you're Christian (and one of the goyim). Now, I'm ranting. Read Suzanne's post, and read Jacqueline Jones Royster's essay. And, if you like, read my feminist rhetorical translating of the Jewish sexist text we call Numbers 5:1-4. I'm reading as a complete outsider, listening in, overhearing, eavesdropping, listening not just to the author's intent (not just to the authors' intents and not just to the other translators' intents) but also listening (as Krista Ratcliffe says Aristotle wouldn't) - listening with intent. Suzanne and Jacqueline and my friend having to visit three stores to prepare his family's passover are all suggesting subjectivity trumps Aristotle's aim for stand-offish and stand-above and stand-abstractly objectivity. The subjective personal counts more and counts for more than anything an objective expert on the bible can explain to you. "But but but it's Biblical!!" biblical schmiblical

"Against the patriarchal backdrop": the Bible's "Private, Complex Subjectivity"

This is a post of two long but important observations of Carolyn Custis James and Tod Linafelt, respectively, about the literary play in the Bible. By "play," I mean both interpretive "wiggle room" and hermeneutic "playfulness." It's the kind of "reading" against which Aristotle taught. It's the kind of perspective that feminists tend to find useful in overcoming profound misogyny and gynophobia in texts that would perpetuate sexist or racist inequalities.

James is a speaker, researcher, and writer who is the founder and president of the Synergy Women’s Network, Inc. Linafelt is an associate professor of biblical literature at Georgetown University and a humanities professor in the English department at Loyola College in Baltimore.

James writes in The Gospel of Ruth (pp 30-33):

I once asked a seminary professor if he saw a pattern in the biblical text where men interacting with strong women become stronger themselves. I'll never forget the blank look I got in return. In Christian circles, there is sometimes an assumption that when women step into the spotlight, the men will pay a price. The spotlight of recent research may train its sights on Naomi and Ruth, but until now this beam of light belonged to Boaz, the Kinsman-Redeemer Christ figure, traditionally identified as the hero of the story. . . .

[A] Western, American, middle-class point of view can actually interfere with our understanding of God's Word.

The story of Naomi and Ruth takes place against the backdrop of an ancient patriarchal culture. If we want to grasp the message, we must enter Naomi's world. We can do this better with the help of our sisters in the Third World whose cultures more closely resemble the ancient biblical culture. The payoff is well worth the effort, especially in biblical passages that focus explicitly on women, as we are about to see. Against the ancient patriarchal backdrop, the Bible's strong message for women packs a punch that we completely miss when we ignore the [male-dominant] cultural context. . . .

In five short verses, death wipes the men off the scene, leaving three grieving widows behind. In a male-centered culture that ascribed value to women based on their relationships to men, these husbandless, sonless women hold no interest to anyone. In many minds, especially in the minds of the three women themselves, the story is over. Nothing is left to tell. Yet ironically, this is where the narrative heats up as the biblical spotlight settles on Naomi and an all-female case. Now the real story begins.

And so we begin our journey by entering a downward spiral of suffering with Naomi, the female Job, who from ground zero of her own life wants to know, "Is God good for women?"

Linafelt writes in "The Bible's Literary Merits":

David's sexual taking of Bathsheba . . . is indeed reported [in the Bible] as [his] seeing Bathsheba bathing and then [his] acting to bring her into his bed. David's thinking isn't reported, but the reader is nonetheless encouraged [by the silence in the text] to imagine what David is thinking. After seeing Bathsheba, David pauses and considers his next action: He sends to "inquire about the woman" and learns that she is "the daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite." Only after learning those things does David carry out his act of adultery.

Why? Well, he learns that the woman's husband is a Hittite, and so perhaps we are to understand David as having fewer scruples about taking the wife of a non-Israelite. (There is irony in the fact that, as the story unfolds, Uriah in fact proves a much better keeper than David of Israelite law.) David learns too that Bathsheba is the daughter of Eliam, who in turn, the attentive reader will notice, is the son of Ahithophel, one of the court counselors who will soon betray David by siding with David's son Absalom in his attempted coup.

What, then, motivates David's taking of Bathsheba? [One easily] assumes that David is "instantly struck with lust" upon seeing her. Perhaps, but in fact the narrator never reveals whether David lusts after Bathsheba or not. And it is possible to imagine his taking of Bathsheba as a calculated political act against a rival faction within the court. Besides, lust and political ambition are far from being mutually exclusive. The point, in any case, is that though we are not told David's motivations, he clearly has some.

In biblical narrative, such examples of unstated but important character motivation abound. What are Eve and Adam thinking when they reach for the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil? What is God thinking in forbidding that fruit? (Despite Christianity's long tradition of original sin, the answer to neither of those questions is immediately clear, and both prove quite interestingly complex if taken seriously.) Why does Moses kill the Egyptian who is beating a Hebrew slave in Exodus 2? (It is not clear whether Moses, raised an Egyptian, knows that he was born a Hebrew; and so his motivation might range from an elemental sense of justice, unrelated to ethnicity, to a specifically ethnic identification with the victim.) What is going through Aaron's mind when his two sons are burned alive with fire from God in Leviticus 10? (The narrator reports only that "Aaron was silent." Does that indicate mute acceptance? Crippling grief? A barely controlled anger? Pure shock?) Why does Naomi try to send Ruth back to her Moabite family in the first chapter of the Book of Ruth? (Is she genuinely concerned for Ruth's welfare, or does she simply want to be rid of the burden of a non-Israelite woman as she returns from Moab to Bethlehem?)

As those examples show — and there are many, many more that could be adduced — biblical narrative counts on and exploits . . . a genuine inner life and a private, complex subjectivity.

Interpretation Hurts

When I was a white kid in Vietnam during the war, the women at the market would argue with Chị Năm about who my mama was. "Mỹ lai không?" they'd ask rhetorically (which, between spits of saliva-mixed betelnut, is the impolite equivalent of "Isn't this infant an Amerasian whose foreign-daddy paid a careless-lucky whore in Xã Chín?") They'd pinch my cheeks until my face wore rouge and pulled on my fair hair until my head hurt. That's not the whole story, of course, nor the only one, but it is the start.

When I teach in the university in America now, why would I want to suppress the ambiguities? I'll often start an ESL course with the "old woman / young woman" optical illusion. Except I'll print it on a piece of paper, cut off the corners of the picture to make a perfect circle, wad it up, and toss it to a volunteer who opens the thing and works with the entire class to describe, in English, what they see. Usually, they have no trouble orienting the drawing so that the top is the top. Eventually, they begin to see the artist's intended contrast between "old and young." Invariably, with luck, they see more: "These are females." "They are white." "Maybe American women." "They have a rich husband, a father with money." "They are educated." "They speak English." "They have nice clothes." That's not the whole story, of course.

When I checked out Toni Morrison's Beloved from the library and listened to her narrating her novel on audiotape, Sethe had a different voice from the one I'd heard when I read the book before. She still said, "I got a tree on my back and a haint in my house, and nothing in between but the daughter I am holding in my arms. . . . A chokecherry tree. Trunk, branches, and even leaves. Tiny little chokecherry leaves. Them boys found out I told on em. and when it closed it made a tree. It still grows there still." [They used a cowhide on you?] "And they took my milk." That's not the whole story, of course.

The start is invariably your own subjective perspective, your perspectives. Of course, "not anything goes" in your interpretation, or in mine. Of course, the story continues. Of course. But why ever . . . how really . . . do we prefer cold objectivity to life, to living, even if it's painful?

Sweetest Downfall / Black As Ink

She did it again, left her iPod shuffle in my car. So here's what I overheard this time:

Regina Spektor singing her Samson. Sounds better than it looks. But have a look at her amazing lyrics. Don't you love her subjectivity, her keying in on the profound pathos in the story? Herstory?

Don't you remember when Larry Norman asked Would Samson razor with Gilettes? He too wanted change in America, in 1968.

Just keep scrolling because then you'll see Vachel Lindsay's ("negro sermon") which he called "How Samson Bore Away the Gates of Gaza." Watch the subjectivities there too. Deep tragic stuff in 1919 that resonates all the way from that bible story to 2008.

Samson
by Regina Spektor

You are my sweetest downfall
I loved you first, I loved you first
Beneath the sheets of paper lies my truth
I have to go, I have to go
Your hair was long when we first met

Samson went back to bed
Not much hair left on his head
He ate a slice of wonder bread and went right back to bed
And history books forgot about us and the bible didn't mention us
The bible didn't mention us, not even once

You are my sweetest downfall
I loved you first , I loved you first
Beneath the stars came falling on our heads
But there just soft light, there just soft light
Your hair was long when we first met

Samson came to my bed
Told me that my hair was red
He told me i was beautiful and came into my bed
Oh I cut his hair myself one night
A pair of dull scissors and the yellow light
And he told me that I'd done alright
and kissed me till the morning light, the morning light
and he kissed me till the morning light

Samson came back to bed
not much hair left on his head
Ate a slice of wonderbread and went right back to bed
Oh, we couldn't bring the columns down
Yeah we couldn't destroy a single one
And history books forgot about us
And the bible didn't mention us, not even once

You are my sweetest downfall
I loved you first


How Samson Bore Away the Gates of Gaza
by Nicholas Vachel Lindsay

Once, in a night as black as ink,
She drove him out when he would not drink.
Round the house there were men in wait
Asleep in rows by the Gaza gate.
But the Holy Spirit was in this man.
Like a gentle wind he crept and ran.
("It is midnight," said the big town clock.)

He lifted the gates up, post and lock.
The hole in the wall was high and wide
When he bore away old Gaza's pride
Into the deep of the night: —
The bold Jack Johnson Israelite, —
Samson —
The Judge,
The Nazarite.

The air was black, like the smoke of a dragon.
Samson's heart was as big as a wagon.
He sang like a shining golden fountain.
He sweated up to the top of the mountain.
He threw down the gates with a noise like judgment.
And the quails all ran with the big arousement.

But he wept — "I must not love tough queens,
And spend on them my hard earned means.
I told that girl I would drink no more.
Therefore she drove me from her door.
Oh sorrow!
Sorrow!
I cannot hide.
Oh Lord look down from your chariot side.
You made me Judge, and I am not wise.
I am weak as a sheep for all my size."

Let Samson
Be coming
Into your mind.

The moon shone out, the stars were gay.
He saw the foxes run and play.
He rent his garments, he rolled around
In deep repentance on the ground.

Then he felt a honey in his soul.
Grace abounding made him whole.
Then he saw the Lord in a chariot blue.
The gorgeous stallions whinnied and flew.
The iron wheels hummed an old hymn-tune
And crunched in thunder over the moon.
And Samson shouted to the sky:
"My Lord, my Lord is riding high."

Like a steed, he pawed the gates with his hoof.
He rattled the gates like rocks on the roof,
And danced in the night
On the mountain-top,
Danced in the deep of the night:
The Judge, the holy Nazarite,
Whom ropes and chains could never bind.

Let Samson
Be coming
Into your mind.

Whirling his arms, like a top he sped.
His long black hair flew round his head
Like an outstretched net of silky cord,
Like a wheel of the chariot of the Lord.

Let Samson
Be coming
Into your mind.

Samson saw the sun anew.
He left the gates in the grass and dew.
He went to a county-seat a-nigh.
Found a harlot proud and high:
Philistine that no man could tame —
Delilah was her lady-name.
Oh sorrow,
Sorrow,
She was too wise.
She cut off his hair,
She put out his eyes.

Let Samson
Be coming
Into your mind.

Brokenness Owned: Cracks in the Code Words of Culture

[a bit more from Brennan Manning]:

I grew up in a lily-white neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, where code words in our Christian culture routinely included "nigger, spic, kike, wop, sheeny, faggot, swish, and queer." . . . it was the language of stereotype, the American shorthand still raging today--Willie Horton, law and order, welfare cheats--that whips up fear, ignorance, and votes and keeps discussion, dialogue, and minorities circumscribed.

Since my childhood, prejudice, bigotry, false beliefs, racist and homophobic feelings and attitudes have been programmed into the computer of my brain along with orthodox Christian beliefs. They are all defense mechanisms against loving.

The wounds of racism and homophobia from my childhood have not vanished through intellectual enlightenment and spiritual maturity. They are still in me, as complex and deep in my flesh as blood and nerves. I have borne them all my life with varying degrees of consciousness but always carefully, always with the most delicate consideration for the pain I would feel if I were somehow forced to acknowledge them. But now I am increasingly aware of the opposite compulsion. I want to know as fully and exactly as I can what the wounds are and how much I am suffering from them. And I want to be healed. I want to be free of the wounds myself, and I do not want to pass them on to my children.

I have tried to deny, ignore, or repress racist and homophobic prejudices as utterly unworthy of a minister of the gospel. Moreover, I felt that to acknowledge their existence would give them power. Ironically, denial and repression are in fact what gives them power.

The impostor starts to shrink only when he is acknowledged, embraced, and accepted. The self-acceptance that flows from embracing my core identity as Abba's child enables me to encounter my utter brokenness with uncompromising honesty and complete abandon to the mercy of God. As my friend Sister Barbara Fiand said, "Wholeness is brokenness owned and thereby healed."

A Strawberry, and (Blogger-like) Gaseousness

[another excerpt from Brennan Manning]:

[Too often I use] the gaseous language of the impostors who hide in evasions, equivocations, and obfuscations.

Several years ago, in the heyday of my impostor, I wrote a book review for a fellow impostor's first published work. I defended his prose style saying, "His floridities are merely orotundity. Nevertheless, his unremitting gaseousness has an organic fluidity and turgescence difficult to duplicate and oddly purgative for the reader." Whew.

I began a lecture on the eleventh step of the AA program with a story about a man in crisis who notices and eats a strawberry. I was emphasizing his ability to live in the present moment. Then I launched into what I considered to be a dazzling explanation of the step, an interpretation filled with profound ontological, theological, and spiritual insights.

Later, a woman approached the podium and said to me, "I loved your story about the strawberry." We agreed that one humble strawberry had more power than my pompous inanities.

The impostor's vocabulary abounds in puffy, colorless, and self-important words. Is it mere coincidence that the gospel lacks self-conscious, empty language? The Gospels contain no trace of junk words, jargon, or meaningful nonsense at all. Unharnessed and untamed, the impostor often sounds like a cross between William Faulkner and the Marx Brothers. His unctuous pronouncements and pontifications are a profusion of half-truths. Because he is master of disguise, he can easily slip into feigned humility, the attentive listener, the witty raconteur, the intellectual heavy, or the urbane inhabitant of the global village. The false self is skilled at the controlled openness that scrupulously avoids any significant self-disclosure.

Walker Percy captures this evasiveness in a chilling scene from his novel The Second Coming: "She spoke with the quietness of people after a storm which had drowned out their voices. What struck him was not sadness or remorse or pity but the wonder of it. How can it be? How can it happen that one day you are young, you marry, and then another day you come to yourself and your life has passed like a dream? They looked at each other curiously and wondered how they could have missed each other, lived in the same house all these years and passed in the hall like ghosts."

The Ordinary Self

[excerpts from Brennan Manning]:

The ordinary self is the extraordinary self--the inconspicuous nobody who shivers in the cold of winter and sweats in the heat of summer, who wakes up unreconciled to the new day, who sits back before a stack of pancakes, weaves through traffic, bangs around in the basement, shops in the supermarket, pulls weeds and rakes up the leaves, makes love and snowballs, flies kites and listens to the sound of rain on the roof.

While the impostor draws his [or her] identity from past achievements and the adulation of others, the true self claims identity in its belovedness.

When is the Puzzle(r) Sexist? Ask Your Daughter

Using subject position as a terministic screen in cross-boundary discourse permits analysis to operate kaleidoscopically, thereby permitting interpretation to be richly informed by the converging of dialectical perspectives.
--Jacqueline Jones Royster
“When the First Voice You Hear is Not Your Own”

Sometimes a man’s ostensible attempts at objective representation is more problematic than just a jigsaw puzzle.

My daughter has her Honors Biology final today. Last night, she asked me to help her review the material. Much in the textbook, explicitly, is directly from Aristotle. In fact, he’s given credit for the classifications and the classification system as a “scientist and philosopher.” The test is over various Phyla and Classes of lower level species, and the textbook is fairly thorough, just as is Aristotle. What the book leaves out, is Aristotle’s discussion of females. He claims females leave a lot out that whole males complete. My daughter, in talking about that, has lots of questions about the credibility of Aristotle, and of his observational method. So do I.

Then, this morning, I read David Ker’s latest post on puzzles. It’s another fantastic one, asking about what people in Mozambique (professor Ker’s students) have to interpret when they read certain things and when they look at what a particular artist “represents” in a picture. David gave his students a picture puzzle, and now he’s been giving his blog readers in English the same puzzle in series. Early on, he asked blog readers: “What do jigsaw puzzles have to do with the discussion . . . ”? Now he guides us to answers:

What's wrong with this picture? It's pretty unlikely that . . . ! Imagine the art director for . . . [the] Magazine talking to the illustrator and saying, “For this story we want a picture of . . . ” Then the illustrator went to the drawing board and thought to himself, “What kind of picture can my young readers understand?” The result was this . . . . Does this image have any relation to the actual historical event?”

Now some questions that David Ker doesn’t ask, but our daughters do.

1. Isn’t it ironic that men feel like they have to conceive of biology or history as a jigsaw puzzle, and yet some of the biggest pieces left out are females?
2. Why in our imagined hierarchy is there an “art director” directing art to “the illustrator” who directs the representation of some “actual historical event” to “my young readers”? Why, along the hierarchical chain here, must we imagine the “illustrator” to be a male by default, who must represent down to children?
3. Why does a King trying to solve a puzzle at his own dinner table say to his own child, “You son of a perverse and rebellious woman!” Why is the story, in history, represented this way by the male historian? And why don’t we, whether in the West or in Mozambique ask ourselves where is she, this woman? And why can’t she represent herself? Is she just a missing piece of our puzzle, to represent a father, a son, and another man who would be king?
4. And when professor Ker has us blog readers “Imagine the trouble we had several years ago translating this [other] strange scene . . .,” why do we not by default find it unimaginable that the very strange thing is that the woman in this history is always unnamed (to this day!)? Why is she always the representative “sinner” in the story, and represented as “at his feet, weeping, and began[ing] to bathe his feet with her tears and to dry them with her hair”? Is she just a missing piece of our puzzle really only, mainly, to represent our Western or Mozambiquan or Jewish imaginations of him?

I suppose this is very difficult for some of us. Not because it’s some puzzle of history, or of art. But because we are so reflexively trained to ask certain questions, and not others. We think with our “objectivity” (i.e., from the perspective at the top of the hierarchical heap) as the best way to solve our problems. Are we afraid that our subjectivity is going to miss something? Or, really, is it just maybe we are afraid that subjectivity’s going to knock us down off our (male, Western, interpreting and translating for others) high horse?

My daughter asks me, “Why don’t I get to study psychology in high school?” And she, just completing her first year, is starting to see that there are some things very personal that biology, Aristotle-style, just leaves missing. She’s also in Honors Bible at her private Christian school. Can you imagine her questions about that subject? “Why do men say so much about women without letting the women say much of anything?” Good questions for us men and women to ask.

What’s the Point of Feminism? The (Original Greek) Dialogue

What’s the point of feminism?

ARISTOTLE:

>>Ἔχουσι δὲ πλείους οἱ ἄρρενες τῶν θηλειῶν ὀδόντας καὶ ἐν ἀνθρώποις καὶ ἐπὶ προβάτων καὶ αἰγῶν καὶ ὑῶν· τὸ γὰρ θῆλυ ὥσπερ ἄρρεν ἐστὶ πεπηρωμένον· Τοῦ δὲ θήλεος ἴδιον μέρος ὑστέρα, καὶ τοῦ ἄρρενος αἰδοῖον,

>>τή γυναικική ἐστιν τῶν θηλειῶν

>>ὅμοιον γὰρ κἂν εἴ τις ᾡ̂ μέλλει χρη̂σθαι κανόνι, του̂τον ποιήσειε στρεβλόν.

ASPASIA:

Sir, would you care to say that in English for the audience?

ARISTOTLE:

Οὒ!

PLATO:

No, Aristotle says. My pupil doesn’t believe in translation. For him, it’s the denigration of our language by the BarBar-ian tongues of the La-La-lands. (He does chuckle when I tell him that those uncivilized Dutch men named the blacks in the remotest part of the dark continent the “Hot-Ten-Tots.” And he’s trying to convince his Great little pupil Alexander to make Jamie Uys translate “The Gods Must be Crazy” into Greek for us.) I’m hoping to persuade Aristotle that Barbarian tongues can be the shadows in the cave, reflections however imperfectly and inaccurately of his original Greek and his logical syllogisms in Greek.

SOCRATES:

“The shadows prove the substance,” my good Plato. But don’t the shadows prove the sunlight?

ASPASIA:

Thanks gentlemen. Today our discussion is placed (“topically”) around our personal politics with respect to our respective genders here. Isn’t it important for the world to know what Greek men and women think? Is there really much value in thoughts if they are only translated in one direction?

PLATO:

Right, Aspasia. I see some of what you mean. But let me take a crack at translating Aristotle’s logic here into English for our wider, worldly audience.

[His major premise here is this. And, mind you, he gets all of his premises from observing hard-fact nature objectively:]

>>Ἔχουσι δὲ πλείους οἱ ἄρρενες τῶν θηλειῶν ὀδόντας καὶ ἐν ἀνθρώποις καὶ ἐπὶ προβάτων καὶ αἰγῶν καὶ ὑῶν· τὸ γὰρ θῆλυ ὥσπερ ἄρρεν ἐστὶ πεπηρωμένον· Τοῦ δὲ θήλεος ἴδιον μέρος ὑστέρα, καὶ τοῦ ἄρρενος αἰδοῖον,

>>Males have more teeth than females in the case of humans, sheep, goats, and swine. The female, in fact is, as it were, a mutilated male. The respective part of a female is an emptiness, a uterus, and of a male is a spear, a penis.

[Now that the male/female binary is set, and the hierarchy of classification of male / female is established, the minor premise is this:]

>>τή γυναικική ἐστιν τῶν θηλειῶν

>>Feminism is female.

[Necessarily, all of Greece, someday the world, must follow this conclusion]:

>>ὅμοιον γὰρ κἂν εἴ τις ᾡ̂ μέλλει χρη̂σθαι κανόνι, του̂τον ποιήσειε στρεβλόν.

>>Therefore, [feminism without much teeth] is like making the stick crooked [and thereby pointless] which is intended for use [straight use straightaway].

ASPASIA:

So that’s Aristotle’s logic, huh? Is it always so pointed? And Plato, isn’t your translation revealing of your own personal politics? Did you read Toni Morrison's essay Home yet? Can you distance yourself from your student’s sexist words, or are you making them your own here, and making them the words of men, despite the tongue?

ARISTOTLE:

Ἀσπασία, Ἔστι δὲ καὶ δύσθυμον μᾶλλον τὸ θῆλυ τοῦ ἄρρενος καὶ δύσελπι, καὶ ἀναιδέστερον καὶ ψευδέστερον, εὐαπατητότερον δὲ καὶ μνημονικώτερον,

PLATO:

[My apology for him. That would be:]

Aspasia, you ignorant slut. I see what you’re doing here, You’re twisting my language, putting things in my mouth. It’s postmodernism and feminism veiled.

SOCRATES:

Now, now, my pupils. Do you see any reason to choke on hemlock now? Pericles listens to Aspasia, and I think you’ll want me in one of your dialogs one day, listening to both of them. What do you think, Plato? And is that really an accurate translation of what your student said? And do you let him speak so? Forgive us, Aspasia!

PLATO:

No, O Socrates, my teacher. I was just practicing dynamic equivalence translation. And I’d been watching too many SNL reruns. Dan Ackroyd is the one calling her a slut in public if after ten o'clock in the evening; Jane Curtin is her I mean.

[What Aristotle is really saying is the following, when to translate his original words by “formal equivalence,” which may be more like your dialectic, which is my ideal, less the realism of Aristotle’s logic anyway. So, literally, Aristotle is saying this in English]:

Ἀσπασία, Ἔστι δὲ καὶ δύσθυμον μᾶλλον τὸ θῆλυ τοῦ ἄρρενος καὶ δύσελπι, καὶ ἀναιδέστερον καὶ ψευδέστερον, εὐαπατητότερον δὲ καὶ μνημονικώτερον,

Aspasia, The female is more dispirited and more despondent than the male, more shameless and more lying, readier to deceive and possessing a better memory for grudges.

Now if I can get my student, Aristotle, to write that down in his treatise on “The History of Animals,” then you, O Socrates, and Pericles too deserve the center places in my “Menexenus” with both of you listening to Aspasia.

SOCRATES:

Thanks.

My dear Aspasia. Will you correct me if I’m wrong?

As for the “point” of feminism, my only question is whether there aren’t feminisms?

Until I get to Morrison, I’ve been musing about Helen Logino’s “Feminist Epistemology as a Local Epistemology” Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 71 (1) , 19–36 and how she claims that “many commentators take feminist epistemology to be a species of naturalised and social epistemology, but just as there are ways of naturalising and ways of socialising epistemology, so there are ways of doing feminist epistemology.”

And Aristotle, didn’t you yourself get away from the one single naturalizing epistemology “of nature” when you wrote the following?

>>“ἡ ῥητορική ἐστιν ἀντίστροφος τῃ̂ διαλεκτικη̂ ͅ: ἀμφότεραι γὰρ περὶ τοιούτων τινω̂ν εἰσιν ἃ κοινὰ τρόπον τινὰ ἁπάντων ἐστὶ γνωρίζειν καὶ οὐδεμια̂ς ἐπιστήμης ἀφωρισμένης :”?

PLATO:

[Excuse me, O Socrates. That would be this in written English]:

>>”Speakerism is a different creative turn from that “-ism” of talked-through truth. There are, in fact, around these two at least the very common turns that all make, men and women too, in order to know things, and not one of them makes tight precise boundaries around understanding anything.”

ARISTOTLE:

Οὒ! καὶ ναί

ASPASIA:

Thanks gentlemen. Thanks, Aristotle, for your question. So, do feminisms need to be as pointed as your question today seems to be? Is sexism always as logically pointed? What is the male author’s intentions? And need a translation always and only veil any reader’s personal politics? Can we all agree that Plato is getting a little better with his translating? This has been a most revealing discussion.

Tune in next time when Barbara Cohen and Bahija Taffuhi Lovejoy join us to talk about their book Seven Daughters and Seven Sons. Warning, at first glance, it’s a story of men, of men from the middle east, of men from the middle east who collapse the gods into one, a male One albeit with ninety-nine names; and they say that He is to be revered and that their daughters are to be veiled. Rather, if you can be conscious of your own readerly sexual politics--the marked and the unmarked--it’s a story, of women, a woman story, as heretical in Jerusalem, except to the women there and everywhere who under stand theology much differently than such theogic-logic allows. It is a book for children but profound enough for adults. It is not all Greek, and yet it sinks deep.

Here’s a sneak peak without giving away anything:

“I wore no veil. After all that had passed between us, to what purpose would I have hidden my face from him? Even my mother couldn’t insist upon it, though she and Darirah had covered theirs. So I didn’t have to answer him. The smile I gave him was enough. . .

‘O Mahmud!’ I exclaimed. ‘Can the son of the Wali of Tyre marry a woman whose name is tossed around in bazaars and khans?’

‘But Buran,’ Mahmud replied, his eyes, his mouth, his whole face smiling, ‘if your story hadn’t been known, my hair could have been white before I found you. . . It’s because of the story that I found you as quickly as I did.’ His hand reached out and grasped mine. ‘Besides how could such a thing be kept secret? Tell me that. How could such a thing be kept secret?’”