Literally Using vs Misusing "Literally"

Henry Neufeld has up an interesting post, worth more discussion:  "A Misuse of the Word LITERAL."  I remember once he said at one of my posts on a similar issue, "I'm surprised you haven't gotten any comments yet on this one."

The initial discussion gets us remembering that old construct among translation enthusiasts:  literal vs. figurative, or form equivalence vs. dynamic equivalence.  We're also talking about uses of words in critical writing commenting on the translation of the Bible vs. uses of the same words in fiction and in translated fiction.  Feel free to join in with your thoughts, if you like.

What Bible Translation Sounds Like

Sometimes Bible translation sounds like gibberish. But gibberish can sound really important, even condescending. Let's look at an example in a moment. Before we listen in on biblistic language, here are a couple of non-biblical true stories of mine.

First Story. Someone really important to me once questioned one of my words. That somebody is Carolyn Osiek, a New Testament scholar who is a feminist who served on my dissertation committee. As we were in the Greek restaurant of all places talking about how I was accusing Aristotle of coining technical-and-abstract words to box in others, she turned the conversation to me (on me?) to ask: "Are you coining the word feministic?" "What word would you use?" I retorted. "Something like, 'in feminist ways' or 'by means that are feminist'," she replied. And she could have explained, "feministic sounds like you're looking down on feminists"; but she didn't need to say anything. I stopped using the word for a while, and when I did use it tried to make sure no one mistook me for Aristotle. A little later, I blogged this post on how rhetorical "-istic" can be. How little parts of words sound like big, condescending stuff.

Second Story. My college roommate from Japan was a helpful tutor when I was taking classes in Japanese language. My private lessons included listening to and trying to say tongue twisters like, "なまむぎ　なまごめ　なまたまご." Of course, I heard that as, "namamugi namagome namatamago," which hardly rolled off my tongue. This, of course, means 生麦生米生卵. It might be something you hear in a kitchen (if not as a joke on Japanese language learners): "raw wheat, raw rice, raw eggs." Even if I'd wanted to make my roommate-tutor feel my pain, I couldn't. He didn't stumble over my mother tongue the way I tripped over his. He'd grown up bilingual, and he spoke his English Rs and Ls and Ws and Fs as fluently as I did. The lessons were playful ("-mugi, -gome, -mago") but pronounced a difference between us. How little parts of words sound like big, condescending stuff.

So, now, there's this story in the Bible. It's also become a story of bible translation. This is the example of gibberish I was talking about at the beginning of this post. Sounding really important and smart, the translation usually goes like this:

Jephthah captured the shallow crossings of the Jordan River, and whenever a fugitive from Ephraim tried to go back across, the men of Gilead would challenge him. “Are you a member of the tribe of Ephraim?” they would ask. If the man said, “No, I’m not,” they would tell him to say “Shibboleth.” If he was from Ephraim, he would say “Sibboleth,” because people from Ephraim cannot pronounce the word correctly. Then they would take him and kill him at the shallow crossings of the Jordan. In all, 42,000 Ephraimites were killed at that time.

This really is one of the best translations of Judges 12:5-6 in my opinion because it forgoes the really strange English word "fords" and uses the much-clearer phrase "shallow crossings" instead. This is the New Living Translation. But, like every other translation of the Bible I've heard, there's the weird "Shibboleth" / "Sibboleth" thing that seems give us English readers (especially non-Ephramites) some kind of insider track here. We'd more quickly side with the killers than the killed here.

What we don't get by the sounds-only translation is what the Hebrew word שִׁבֹּלֶת means to some of the early readers of the story. Quite literally, it's an ambiguous term that can mean either "corn stalk or grain waves" or "water flood or stream." And the Jews translating this word into Greek (in the Septuagint, "Judges A" AND "Judges B") make the Hebrew mean either σύνθημα or στάχυς [sun-thema OR stachys]. The first Greek word is just a signal to the reader who seems to know the story well:  it means something like a "theme together" or an "inside joke" (or a "password" -- which is how translator Philip E. Satterthwaite moves the Greek into English in the New English Translation of the Septuagint).  The second Greek word, in this context, is sometimes translated into English as "Stachys."  (And that's exactly how English translator Sir Lancelot Brenton translates it while Satterthwaite clarifies the word to mean "Ear-of-Corn"). The Greek word στάχυς, of course, is ambiguous. Greek readers know it means "ear of corn" but it also is used for the "lower part of the abdomen."

So if you read the story in Greek translation from the Hebrew, then it is funny because the Ephramites can't pronounce "corn stalk" and they get stabbed in the point of their body that looks like a corn stalk: they get a sword run through the lower part of their abdomen.  Or if you read the Judges A translation from Hebrew to Greek, then it's more serious because the translator is just reminding Jewish readers how one group used a password (an inside joke) on the other group, deadly serious stuff.  In both Jewish translations (from Hebrew to their Hellene), the reader never hears the Ephramites stumbling over the word (i.e., as if saying "Sibboleth").  The silence is important, I think, because the translators are giving a nod to their readers and not entirely trying to explain what would be understood if listening to the story in Hebrew.  (Sylvie Honigman, the scholar in Jerusalem who's looked at the legend of the Septuagint, says that the Greek here is in the Homeric not the Alexandrian [or Aristotelian] paradigm -- that's important to me as I look at how Aristotle abstracts language and the early Greeks refused to do that.  The Jews, with their scripture, are much more playful than many of our English translations - in Aristotelian fashion - give them credit for).

And if you read the story in Hebrew translated into as playful English, then it goes something like this. And here I give apologies to my good Japanese language tutor:

So they say to him,
"So say 'cornstalk rows like water flows'."
So he says "colnstark lows rike watel hrows."
So he can't rightly get it right.
So they seize him.
So they make his blood flow at the crossing of the Jordan.
So at that time some forty two thousand fall

some forty two thousand of the tribe

                                        of that twice-blessed second born of

fall

Now listen to the Hebrew:

וַיֹּאמְרוּ לֹו אֱמָר־נָא שִׁבֹּלֶת
וַיֹּאמֶר סִבֹּלֶת
וְלֹא יָכִין לְדַבֵּר כֵּן
וַיֹּאחֲזוּ אֹותֹו
וַיִּשְׁחָטוּהוּ אֶל־מַעְבְּרֹות הַיַּרְדֵּן
וַיִּפֹּל בָּעֵת הַהִיא מֵאֶפְרַיִם אַרְבָּעִים וּשְׁנַיִם אָלֶף׃

And hear the Greekistic translations:

Judges A
καὶ εἶπαν αὐτοῖς εἴπατε δὴ σύνθημα
[nothing's needed here]
καὶ οὐ κατηύθυναν τοῦ λαλῆσαι οὕτως
καὶ ἐπελάβοντο αὐτῶν
καὶ ἔσφαξαν αὐτοὺς ἐπὶ τὰς διαβάσεις τοῦ Ιορδάνου
καὶ ἔπεσαν ἐξ Εφραιμ ἐν τῷ καιρῷ ἐκείνῳ δύο τεσσαράκοντα χιλιάδες

Judges B
καὶ εἶπαν αὐτῷ εἰπὸν δὴ στάχυς
[nothing's needed here!]
καὶ οὐ κατεύθυνεν τοῦ λαλῆσαι οὕτως
καὶ ἐπελάβοντο αὐτοῦ
καὶ ἔθυσαν αὐτὸν πρὸς τὰς διαβάσεις τοῦ Ιορδάνου
καὶ ἔπεσαν ἐν τῷ καιρῷ ἐκείνῳ ἀπὸ Εφραιμ τεσσαράκοντα δύο χιλιάδες

Don't you hear how language keeps us out?  If it's "shibboleth" and we can say it, we think we're in.  But the Jews translating from Hebrew to their own Hellene didn't feel the need (in either Greek version) to separate out only the sounds of שִׁבֹּלֶת and σύνθημα or στάχυς.  The Hebrew writer of Judges seems to allow readers to play close attention to the interplay between the water crossing of the Jordan river and the word (i.e., water flowing like grain growing) used to trip up the Ephramites at that cross.  The Jews translating the Hebrew into their Greek, similarly, remind the readers that this is word play.  How it sounds can be fatal.  (In somebody's gibberish, that's just fatalistic?)

Bible Translation: Barbarisms, Solecisms, and Aristotle

This post is mainly technical. (Some of this is from a stuffy Ph.D. dissertation I defended nearly a year ago.) Here, I'd like us to look some more at the Bible, at its translation, and at a couple of words we tend to use in talking about translation without our recognizing we're using Aristotle's words. In using these words, so ostensibly benign, we might as well be using perhaps old “code words in our Christian culture” such as “nigger, spic, kike, wop, sheeny, faggot, swish, and queer.”

The two words I'm wanting to talk about here are “barbarism” and “solecism.” And we get away with using the words with no one protesting because 1) they have become precise and technical words; and 2) they are words to mark what others (and not we ourselves) have done wrong (i.e., “not right”) with language.

So, first, we may need precise definitions to remind us what we mean. We certainly do not intend to be mean, we tell ourselves. And rhetorician George A. Kennedy explains, succinctly and precisely, in a footnote of his translation of Aristotle's Rhetoric that a “solecism is a “mistake in usage or syntax; in later grammatical and rhetorical theory [the solecism is] contrasted to a ‘barbarism’ or mistake in the form of a word” (page 208).

Now, then, we can understand when John L. McKenzie in his exact Dictionary of the Bible observes how “The Gk of Ape is the worst of the NT, much inferior to Jn and 1 Jn. It abounds with barbarisms and solecisms. The author thinks in Hb while he writes in Gk” (page 41).  And, of course, we understand that Gk = Greek; Ape = Apocalypse or Book of Revelation; Jn = Gospel of John; 1 Jn = First Epistle of John; Hb = Hebrew; and “barbarisms and solecisms” = exactly what Kennedy says that Aristotle says they are, i.e. “solecism” = “mistake in usage or syntax” and “barbarism” = “mistake in the form of a word”.

Likewise, we now can view A. T. Robinson's Word Pictures in the New Testament and get exactly what he means when he finds "in Revelation 13:17 and certainly so in 1 John 5:20..., a solecism in late vernacular Greek" (as we read his commentary on Revelation 12:6). We can even read T. Cowden Laughlin's Princeton University Ph.D. dissertation, “The Solecisms of the Apocalypse.” We understand how the writers of The Catholic Encyclopedia do remember that “The Purists [among the Protestant Reformers] held that in the Bible there are neither barbarisms nor solecisms; that the Greek of the New Testament is [exactly] as pure as that of the classical authors.” And we follow the Essentials of English: A Textbook for Schools by George W. Rine, who concludes (following his precise definitions of solecism and syntax) the following that defends the once-pristine purity of the translation of the Bible: “Hence solecisms, taken collectively, are usually called false syntax. The few solecisms found in the King James Version of the Bible were not solecisms at the time that version was made (1611)” (page 7).

Yes, you're catching on.  So am I.

We're using Aristotle's words. We're using them whether in writing about the Bible and its translation or in reading what others have written. Aristotle was very concerned that Greek users use the Hellene language right. We don't even need to talk about his "logic," his method to avoid the imprecisions and impurities of the language of women, catamites, eunuchs, androgynes, slaves, poets, sophists, and even of his teacher Plato and his teacher Socrates (whose idealism and dialectic were mere counterparts to sloppy rhetoric).

Aristotle would write things like this to his elite male (and purely masculine) Greek students:

ἔτι τόδε ποιεῖ σολοικίζειν, τὸ μὴ ἀποδιδόναι, ἐὰν μὴ ἐπιζευγνύῃς ὃ ἀμφοῖν ἁρμόττει

Kennedy translates that into English (from the Rhetoric 1407b) as:

Further, the lack of correspondence creates a solecism (to soloikizein) if you do not join words with what fits both

And Aristotle would also write things like this to his elite male (and purely masculine) Greek students:

σεμνὴ δὲ καὶ ἐξαλλάττουσα τὸ ἰδιωτικὸν ἡ τοῖς ξενικοῖς κεχρημένη· ξενικὸν δὲ λέγω γλῶτταν καὶ μεταφορὰν καὶ ἐπέκτασιν καὶ πᾶν τὸ παρὰ τὸ κύριον. ἀλλ’ ἄν τις ἅπαντα τοιαῦτα ποιήσῃ, ἢ αἴνιγμα ἔσται ἢ βαρβαρισμός· ἂν μὲν οὖν ἐκ μεταφορῶν, αἴνιγμα, ἐὰν δὲ ἐκ γλωττῶν, βαρβαρισμός.

Gilbert Murray translates that into English (from the Poetics 1458a) as:

On the other hand the Diction becomes distinguished and non-prosaic by the use of unfamiliar terms, i.e. strange words, metaphors, lengthened forms, and everything that deviates from the ordinary mode of speech.--But a whole statement in such terms will be either a riddle or a barbarism, a riddle, if made up of metaphors, a barbarism, if made up of strange words.

Now, we should be able to follow here. Aristotle is advising his students to avoid "everything that deviates" from his standard of pure Greek. Translators Kennedy and Murry transliterate to avoid deviating from Aristotle's authorial intentions. The English translators are wanting to sound like Aristotle.

And, as noted, above, Kennedy takes the technical English terms from Aristotle's Greek so that a “solecism” is a “mistake in usage or syntax; in later grammatical and rhetorical theory [the solecism is] contrasted to a ‘barbarism’ or mistake in the form of a word.” Kennedy, when writing about the Bible and rhetoric, is always keen on making these terms clear. See his New Testament Interpretation through Rhetorical Criticism (page 27) and his Classical Rhetoric and Its Christian and Secular Tradition from Ancient to Modern Times (page 124), where Kennedy addresses solecisms and barbarisms.

What Kennedy does not say is that “barbarism” and “solecism” are Aristotle’s terms to denigrate whole groups of people. Barbarians were non-Greeks mocked by the Athenians for sounding foreign and funny, as if in their mother tongues they were saying, stuttering, “bar bar bar bar bar.” And the “Soloi” [Σολοι] were the people living in Soli, a Greek colonial city, on Cyprus. To the Athenians their speech sounded strange, not because of the bar-bar-ous sounds they made but because of their peculiar, non-standard Greek grammar of the people of Soli.

Aristotle, of course, was not interested in relativism of any kind, including linguistic relativism. He despised Δισσοι Λόγοι / Dissoi Logoi /. He advocated a centric position, an absolute prescription for Greek male students and their City States. For Aristotle, the Greek mother tongue purely consisted of his dialect alone, the one he taught logically to his elite male (purely masculine) students. More than that, Aristotle was threatened by women and their speech. He took their “logos” and reduced it to his “logic.” Thus, women rhetors and rhetoricians such as Aspasia were completely silenced by Aristotle because they were females. And yet, barbarisms in speech and solecisms in writing were not only frowned upon because they were contaminations from the foreigners but also because these foreigners - even males - sounded like the slippery women. Aristotle’s masculinistic, linguistic, and ethnocentric purity depended on and was reinforced by his phallogocentricism.

Now, when we return to the Bible and read it for itself, we hear authors there purely separating themselves from the Barbarians. Paul, for example, seems to call the Latin-using Romans in Rome βαρβάροις ("barbarians") when addressing his fellow Jews and the Greeks there. See Romans 1:14. The funny thing about that is Paul himself is a Roman (in terms of citizenship) and a Barbarian (in Aristotle's view); the silly thing is that Paul is using a solecism (in Kennedy's technical view of Aristotle's technical view). We wonder if any of the Greeks in Corinth or in Colossae laughed when Paul (the Jewish Romanish barbarian) so referred to Barbarians (in his Greek letters to Greeks and Jews). See 1 Corinthians 14:11 and Colossians 3:11. And we can only imagine how the Maltese in Malta felt when Luke (who was with Paul) referred to these "island people" as Οἱ βάρβαροι (the Barbarians). See Acts 28:2-4.

What I'm trying to get to in this post is all that gets lost when the translator follows the intention of the author too closely. When the translator is unwilling to let the author be ugly (or is not aware enough of the author's ugly language, whether intended or unintended ugliness), then much is lost. When the translator simply transliterates the sounds of the author's ugly words, then the author comes off sounding technical and not necessarily ugly at all. The author and the translator sound smart together. The meaning of the ugly word is no longer ugly but is something "original," something for the elite, the educated, the insiders, the linguistically astute.

Yes, I know, some do not want Aristotle to be ugly. I've posted what one of you wrote to me about my never really knowing "Aristote's heart." And there are defenders of Aristotle's scientific mistakes, such as Robert Mayhew (with his book The Female in Aristotle's Biology: Reason or Rationalization), whom I had to respond to in part in my dissertation.

And even more people, it seems, don't want Paul or Luke to use ugly Greek language or to commit Kennedy's Aristotle's "barbarisms" and "solecisms."  Who really wants to concede that Paul and Luke quoted the LXX translators who used an ugly Greek word that denigrates other human beings?  (See the Septuagint: Ps 113:1; Ez 21:36; 2Mc 2:21, 4:25, and 10:4; and 3Mc 3:24).

So the question for us reading translations of Aristotle and of Paul and of Luke is whether we have heard the barbarisms and solecisms?  Do we get the ugliness of σολοικίζειν and Οἱ βάρβαροι and ἐκ γλωττῶν βαρβαρισμός?  Are we willing to hear that as "the ignorant mistakes of the Cypriot colonists of Soli City" and "Those stammering stuttering strangers" and "what's born out of the mother tongue of those stammering stuttering strangers"?

Transitional Post: On Translation

The previous post was written very quickly, and I didn't take time to revise or edit what I'd written. Sorry about that to anyone who tried to read the post. I've now deleted one misplaced and repeated quotation. And here's what I've added:

Can we see how transliteration is a very direct gloss?  It gives help with the sounds of the source text, and in this post I'm talking about the Latin source word, translatio, and our English appropriation of that word, as a translation -- indeed, as the very word translation in English.

What I hope we can start looking at together in the next post(s) on translation are the following:  different and profound ways of epistemology.  By epistemology, we usually mean "ways of knowing what we know and what we think we know."  (Our English epistemology is a direct transliteration of a Greek word that meant "science" or "knowledge.")  I'm going to start saying in various ways the following:  the way any one of us conceives of "translation" is deeply influenced by the way we, as individuals, tend to "know" or to understand anything.

Here's a hint, a preview of sorts.  We tend to have one of these four focuses in knowing and in learning and in talking.  The four are:

1) "the right way";
or 2) "any which way";
or 3) "Why that way?";
or 4) the "significant way."

I'll try to get back to Willis Barnstone's thinking about registers in "translation."  For now, let me just say that the "extreme" view of "glossing" (i.e., as with an interlinear Bible with the English word glossing the Hebrew and/ or Greek) comes from the first focus mentioned above.  That is, to gloss is "the right way" to know or to understand the original language text.  A gloss will not get it "wrong."  And I'll let the cat out of the bag to say this:  that Aristotle was King of the "right way" -- he absolutely feared the logical opposite of the "right way" -- he was terrified of getting it wrong.  At some point, then, we ought to look at some of Aristotle's ways of getting language right (as when he rails against barbarisms and solecisms in Greek).  When we have more time, then, we'll say more.

Direct Translation is Transliteration

The most direct translation is transliteration. And I mean two things by that.

First, the English word translation is literally a transliteration. That is, our word brings across the sounds of a Roman word by means of our letters of our alphabet. For example, as early as 1388, John Wyclif and his followers, in The Holy Bible, made from the Latin Vulgate wrote "Thei setten in her translaciouns oneli the names of thre thingis, that is of water, of blood, and of spirit." Likewise, Miles Coverdale, in 1535, wrote "I thought it my dutye..to dedicate this translacyon vnto youre hyghnesse" and, in 1549, entitled his "translacyon," The Byble in Englyshe, that is the olde and new Testament, after the translacion appoynted to bee read in the Churches. Similarly, in 2009, Willis Barnstone quoted the aim of the 1611 King James Version of the Bible: "Translation it is that openeth the window, to let in the light"; and then he wrote his own aim: "I undertook a new translation of the New Testament to give a chastely modern, literary version of a major world text." (I'm quoting here from the Oxford English Dictionary online and from Barnstone's page 14 of The Restored New Testament: A New Translation with Commentary, Including the Gnostic Gospels Thomas, Mary, and Judas.)

Notice how Wyclif's translaciouns, Coverdale's translacyon and translacion, and the 1611 versioners' and Barnstone's translation are transliterations. The English word (with various spellings) is a nearly-equivalent sounding transliteration of the Latin word translatio. Literally, however, the Roman's Latin word did not exactly mean for them what our English word has come to mean for us. The Latin word literally meant "to carry across" and is a variant of the Latin word transferre, which is closer in meaning to the English transliteration of this word: our English word transfer. To be sure, Romans such as Cicero and Quintilian would use translatio figurally to mean things like "reddo" and "verto" and "converto" (or what we in English mean by words such as render and change and convert, words we use also for "translation"). The Latin word translatio, then, gained a wider range of uses than we have, perhaps, for our English word, translation. In fact, we tend to limit the meaning range for "translation." Because it's a transliteration, we make "translation" very abstract. We make it scientific, in fact. We look to experts to tell us what it is and what it must not be.

Second, the most direct translation is transliteration in the very specific way we think of "translation."  For example, Barnstone surveys three [3] possibilities.  On the one hand, there are "two extremes that can be satisfied happily:  [1] a gloss for the reader who wants help with the source text [i.e., an interlinear], and [2] imitation for the ['translating'] writer who wants to collaborate with, adapt, or rewrite a precursor's [originally-authored] work." On the other hand, "[t]here is also [3] a middle ground between [1] gloss and [2] imitation, whose purpose is to hear the source author more clearly than the translator author" (page 1290).  Can we see how transliteration is a very direct gloss?  It gives help with the sounds of the source text, and in this post I'm talking about the Latin source word, translatio, and our English appropriation of that word, as a translation -- indeed, as the very word translation in English.

Bloggers (and especially bibliobloggers) who care about "translation" tend to argue over what translation is, and what it must not be.  And they argue along these lines.  For instance, Rich Rhodes comments as follows to a reader of his Better Bibles blog post, "Thinking About Scripture":

You believe that translation is the process of matching words part for part (morpheme for morpheme) between Greek and English. At least, this is what it appears to me you mean. If so, that’s where the problem lies. We believe that translation is what translators do between modern languages and therefore the principles of that kind of translation should be applied to Bible translation.

Notice how Rhodes believes that translation should not be this extreme glossing process of matching words and/ or morphemes.  Instead, he and his colleagues suggest that "translation" between languages that are living is the sort of principled "translation" that must occur with respect to the dead languages of the Bible.  And he clarifies, "Modern translation standards are that a translation should match the original, not just in reference, but also in tone and implication. If Paul or Luke used an ordinary word or expression, then the translation should use an ordinary word or expression." It sounds as if Rhodes is looking to Barnstone's middle way.

Likewise, Joel Hoffman engages with Doug Chaplins's post, on "The oddity of plenary verbal inspiration." Hoffman, in his post "What’s Plenary Verbal Inspiration Got To Do With Translation?," gets logical (and I truncate the argument slightly here):

"if every Hebrew and Greek word in the current version of the Bible is inspired"

then it "seems like a good idea if you believe that one point of the words was to convey a message in a particular way"

Notice how Hoffman is making the extreme position of "translation" as a "gloss" somewhat contingent on a person's belief about the God-inspired nature of the words.

Furthermore, Bill Mounce asks a similar question rhetorically: "The question is whether functional translations betray a lower view of Scripture since they don’t translate every Greek word." His post, "Words, and the Word of God—γαρ," is to draw this conclusion:

So what is my point? You don’t have to agree with the exegesis, but hopefully you can see how not translating every word does not necessarily indicate a person’s view of inspiration. Even the ESV and NET don’t translate every word; just skim the footnotes on the NET Bible to see all the occurrences of δε that went untranslated.

There is not an exact equivalence between the Greek and English words, and sometimes an explicit translation is too strong, and the sense of the Greek is carried over in context or by punctuation. But nowhere in this discussion is there a justified criticism on a person’s view of verbal plenary inspiration.

Mounce is, like Rhodes and Hoffman, rejecting the one "extreme" notion of gloss as proper "translation."  Interestingly, he seems also to want to avoid the other "extreme" Barnstone outlines.

Nonetheless, if you look closely as what these "extreme"-avoiding bloggers do, you notice how they have no problem with the most extreme sort of glossing there is:  "transliteration" as direct "translation."  They each gloss the Latin word translatio for their English translation.  Now, they will concede that the Latin did not exactly mean what their English does.  And yet, they conceive of "translation" as a very limited range of activities, as a science if you will.  Moreover, they limit that range even further by declaring out of bounds the very sort of "extreme" that they find themselves engaging in.  Translation, and not anything extreme, is very bounded and very protected.  This is not to say that the limited notion of translation does not have value.  Nor am I trying to claim that Barnstone's and the others' middle ground is hardly the best approach.  Moreover, will anyone mistake what I'm trying to say as "anything goes" in thinking about other ways of theorizing and of practicing "translation"?

If we have time for another post, then we will look at other metaphors for "translation" beyond the limited one appropriated from the sounds of a figural Latin metaphor.  We might even look at how Cicero and Quintilian followed Greeks such as Aristotle and Plato.  We might imagine that there are other ways of viewing what we in English call "translation."

America, the beautiful mix-breed, the ugliest of massacres

"Mỹ lai" is one of the first words I ever heard. It's the Vietnamese phrase for "AmerAsian," which is what many people called me when I was a baby and a child and an adolescent, growing up in Viet Nam during the war. The many people were well-meaning when they used the term. Perhaps they were well-meaning. The connotations and the meaningful possibilities can be very hateful.

The last time another person called me "mỹ lai" was well after the war, in America. I was a graduate student in linguistics at a university in Texas. In the weight room on campus one day, I overheard two Vietnamese American students doing what linguists call "code-mixing." One asked the other, "Bao nhiêu reps cho cứng?" And I wondered to myself whether a single sentence could be an instance of code-mixing as the sociolinguist prof and the textbook written by another sociolinguist had defined it, or whether this was just bad Vietnamese-English-Vietnamese. When one of those students left the room, the other just happened to come over to where I was to ask me in English how to use the weight machine I was on. I answered in Vietnamese, and without a reply, the young man did an about-face and walked away from me. I switched to English to explain how it was I spoke Vietnamese. He explained to me that he assumed I was American, but when he heard me speaking Vietnamese he thought I was "mỹ lai."  (He did not want to talk with a "mỹ lai.")

"Mỹ lai" is not a pretty word. If you translate it into English, then it's usually either "AmerAsian" or the name of a village in Vietnam where a massacre of innocents took place by American military action.

We explain the former translation of "mỹ lai" by remembering how American military men would impregnate Vietnamese women and then abandon them to the scorn of the general Vietnamese population. I know many Amerasians who were children in orphanages in Vietnam and some of whom were as misunderstood growing up with a mixed-up identity in America.

The latter translation of "Mỹ Lai" is a transliteration. As such, the phrase is a name, a "proper noun" now, an abstraction of the sounds of the two Vietnamese syllables in flat English tones that sound like this: "the Mee Lie massacre."  What does murder and rape and a gang rape sound like?  So we read about it now in history books, or we remember it as President Obama explains last night at West Point in America how the Afghanistan war will not become another "Vietnam."

What we don't think about much is that "Mỹ" means "beautiful" or "fine." And that "lai" means "mix-breed" or "half-breed" or "little ugly mongrel bastard."

This is a funny mix of syllables in a mono-syllabic language. But the syllables "A - Mer - Ic - A" are a funny combination too. John Everett-Heath explains them on page 18 of his Concise Dictionary of World Place-Names:

The name America was first applied to South America in 1507 by Martin Waldseemüller (c.1470–c.1521), a German geographer and cartographer at the court of the Duke of Lorraine, in honour of an Italian (Florentine) explorer, Amerigo Vespucci (1451–1512) (Latinized in Waldseemüller's Cosmographiae Introductio to Americus Vesputius). Vespucci made a landfall in modern Guyana in 1499 and then went south. This first voyage was with Spanish support, but his subsequent voyage in 1501–2 along the coast of Brazil had the backing of the Portuguese. Vespucci came to the conclusion that during the voyages he had undertaken in 1499–1502 a 'New World' had been discovered rather than the east coast of Asia.

Notice that "Latinized" is Everett-Heath's way of saying "transliterated."  In other words, a German takes the sounds of the name of an Italian and abstracts it as Germanized Italian.  Spanish and Portuguese borrow this method of naming and renaming their 'new world.'  Never mind the names of the people and places already in that world.

Another funny thing is that peoples not "discovered" by Amerigo Vespucci have another name for this 'new world' named after him.  That is, the peoples of "the east coast of Asia" tend to call America "beautiful."

That's right.  The Germans call it "Amerika"; the Spanish and Portuguese "América"; the French "Amérique"; the Italians and English "America"; the Israelis "אמריקה‬"; and the Palestinians and Saudi Arabians and Afghanis "أمريكا."

But the Japanese call it "米" - which means "rice" (that beautiful stuff grown on abundant fields in far-reaching open land)
And the Chinese call it "美"; and the Koreans call it "미"; and the Vietnamese call it "Mỹ."  Which means "beautiful."

Why let the ironic playfulness of these words get lost in translation or in transliteration?  Beauty can and does certainly imply things ironically not beautiful.  Words -- especially words like "Mỹ" and "lai" and "mỹ lai" -- can be mixed-breed bastards that make their users who long for purity look ugly.  The "translation" Amerasian doesn't get the half of it.  And the flat-tone English transliteration "My Lai" (as a nicer short-hand for the massacre) hardly conveys all the ugliness of one of the first words I ever heard.

Why Do Men Want to Be Gynecologists? Why Do Translators Transliterate?

One of my daughters asked the other at the dinner table last night, "Why do men want to be gynecologists?" They giggled, a little (being in mixed company and all). Neither has had to have the experience of being examined by a male gynecologist.

And I wondered how it is that men want to transliterate the Greek word as gyne. One of my Greek professors, a man, a miso-gynist and gyno-phobe perhaps, used to make fun of the very few women in class by using the vocative case on them, to call on them: "Hey, Goooy Nay - What do you say?!" The word is ambiguous, if not vague, and means many things such as "wife" and "woman" and "wombman." To transliterate is to make technical, to reduce a word to sounds, to keep the meanings from being so slippery. A gynecologist is clinical, a scientist, a practitioner of medicine, a person bound by an oath to respect the patient, the subject. He will not, ever, do anything inappropriate if he will also not do much sympathetic if he himself is not a gune. And he is not.

Joel Hoffman, this morning coincidentally, posts on transliteration of transliteration in translation. Makes me think of how Japanese when writing will use kanji (i.e., Chinese-derived characters) for most things (like novels and newspapers) while using hiragana (i.e., one syllabary) to spell out Japanese words, but they use katakana (i.e., a separate syllabary) to transliterate foreign words to keep them separate from pure Japanese words, to mark the sounds of other languages as other. "For example [in an example from wikipedia], America is written アメリカ Amerika (America also has its own kanji (ateji) Amerika (亜米利加) or for short, Beikoku (米国), which literally means 'Rice Country')." Some day, when I have some time, perhaps, I'll post on the implications of the transliterated titles of the books of the Bible. I might do that here at this blog. Maybe, if it gets into LXX stuff and bible sexism more, then I'll just post that over at my other blog. The long and short of the issue of transliteration, I think, is that it's generally a translator's short cut that gives him (or her) a way to sound "original" (or as if he, or she, were speaking the original language). It comes off rather snobbish, and reduces meanings substantially. But we'll have to take time, later, maybe, to talk more about that.

WWJD

Some want to engage Jesus in their own ideas. Others call that “dangerous” and want their present ideas of history to preserve him (as my mother preserves the figs falling from her tree in glass jars, I suppose).

For example, Wayne Leman asks the following of those wondering whether, in the Christian church and a Jewish synagogue, women may have positions equal to men. It's a quest to engage Jesus:

“WWJD? What would Jesus do? Would he encourage or prohibit women from having authority over men? In the work place? In universities? In Bible schools? In Christian colleges? In synogogues? In the church? In parachurch organizations, such as missionary groups? / Why or why not? / Remember, be nice to each other; it's the biblical thing to do.”

Similarly, Mark Van Dyke lets Dr. Sam Lamerson of Knox Theological Seminary in Florida ask about “Jesus’ Use of Comedy to Combat Religious Errors”:

“In his talk Dr. Lamerson will examine Jesus' use of comedy (in the Aristotelian/Aristophanic sense) as a tool for exposing the political or religious errors of his day. Dr. Lamerson will show that Jesus did indeed engage in the use of comedy. After defining comedy, Jesus’ use of this tool in parables, short sayings, and actions will be pointed out and examined for principles that might be transferable to the Christian combating errors in the public square today.”

So before we go on to those seeing this engagement as dangerous, do you see what these engagements of Jesus are doing? Do you notice the extra-Jesus appeals to “the biblical thing”? And can you imagine that I got quite excited to hear that some expert is claiming that a political religious Jesus applies the comedy that Aristotle uses in examinable principles that Christians today can use as weapons? (On the latter, I’ll have to ask the one on my dissertation committee who did his dissertation on humor in Aristotle’s rhetoric.)

Now, beyond the Jesus tangled up in our ideas is the Jesus preserved in our dangerous history jar.

For example, Loren Rossen relays this from William Arnal:

“If a Greco-Roman sage can be pressed into secular service, or used to validate liberal Christianity, a Jewish prophet serves more oblique agendas: insulating Christianity against anti-Semitism while, paradoxically, able to reinforce Christian supersessionism at the same time. In either case, says Arnal in The Symbolic Jesus, the figure of Jesus becomes a screen on which to project contemporary debates rather than a subject of genuine historical inquiry. The invective from both sides of the debate proves it. The Hellenized Jesus has even been denounced as an implicit (if unintentional) resurrection of the Aryan Jesus of Nazi Germany, while the Jewish Jesus gets panned, in turn, as a patronizing stereotype of modern Jews. Arnal's dangerous idea is that none of this matters. Even if Jesus turned out to be a Nazi's fantasy, a "pure Aryan", it would be irrelevant, because we don't need Jesus to serve as a precedent for us in today's world.”

And Rossen also agrees with this from Andrew Criddle:

“Jesus and Paul have more to offer women than many of the orthodox are comfortable with, but the idea has been way overblown. We know Jesus was publicly involved with women; that Paul got women active in the church (Phoebe was a deacon; Prisca helped with his Gentile mission). But none of this has anything to do with egalitarianism on Jesus' part. Ideas about social equality originated with the Enlightenment and were first put into practice with the American and French revolutions. Jesus maintained a hierarchy in which he stood at the top, twelve special men stood below him, and others below them in turn, some of whom, yes, included women. Oppressed women would have naturally found his apocalyptic message attractive, where there would soon be a reversal of fortunes. Jesus and Paul made more room for women than many in their age. But that's not saying too much by our standards.”

But then there’s Albert Molher turning to Darrell L. Bock and Daniel B. Wallace to preserve Jesus in the jar of history another way:

“The most hard-core forms of postmodern thought are generally limited to academic campuses, but the postmodern worldview is trickling down in various forms to the popular level. While postmodern literary theorists debate the meaning of ‘totalizing metanarratives,’ at the level of popular piety we see the widespread substitution of ‘spirituality’ for biblical Christianity. / In this sense, spirituality is a project centered in the self and constantly negotiable -- more about ‘meaning’ than truth. / Biblical Christianity teaches that Jesus Christ is both fully human and fully divine. Thus, Jesus does not need to be ‘humanized.’ / Christianity and Jesusanity tell two different stories and represent two very different faiths. As Bock and Wallace explain: Both of these stories afford Jesus a great deal of respect, but they are very different stories in regard to his importance. Jesusanity fits the postmodern mind and the postmodern mood, but it cannot save. We really do not know what Christianity is if we do not also understand what it is not.”

So, for Rossen, “we don't need Jesus to serve as a precedent for us in today's world,” not for race or for religion or for our post-Jesus Enlightenment standards. Likewise for Mohler, we don’t need Jesus for humanization or for the meaningful postmodern moodiness of Jesusanity. Yeah, I know Rossen and Mohler do stuff Jesus into history very very differently. But don’t you think they do a fine job, both of them, of engaging objectively Aristotle’s binary to keep the past Jesus pure in the present?

(My mom adds sugar to her fig preserves, but hey they do have a consistent taste I’ve grown to love, and they look beautiful, and last practically forever). (Un)fortunately, Jesus was no Aristotle (despite how biblical or humorous or racially motivated or gender-observing or “truth-telling” Aristotle was). No, Jesus comes to us through fragile humanized translation (albeit in Aristotle’s mother tongue) and then in what we’ve come to know as hyperbole and parable and miracle (more like my daughter’s spanish language translation of Harry Potter than like her physics textbook). So, I'm wondering if Woody Allen's Frederick in “Hannah and Her Sisters” wasn't smart to say: “If Jesus came back and saw what's going on in his name, he'd never stop throwing up.” So, can't we stop? Can't we start wondering whether we’re stuck today with our dichotomous (aka our Aristotelian) ways of translating (Ἰησοῦς)?

Of "Mice" and "Mystery" and Men who don't translate

Richard Rhodes, a UC Berkeley linguist, has posted about how Bible translators have not gotten the “secret” when they “for centuries have happily read Greek μυστήριον and translated mystery” in each instance in the New Testament. I am generally most grateful for his observations. But when I point out that LXX translators used the Greek word to translate the Hebrew word meaning “secret,” Dr. Rhodes ignores the point of how problematic a Greek alphabetic transliteration of the Hebrew would have been. Instead, he lists words borrowed into English; and he gives this reply on transliteration:

“That's not the problem. The problem is that once borrowed the word takes on a new life of its own in the new language. Like mystery did in English, because we already had a word for secret, and because our linguistic forebears were so hopelessly influenced by Greek philosophy that they bought into the whole mind/spirit is holy/clean, body is corrupt/dirty thing. So having a word for things that are beyond the comprehension of the human mind was an attractive way to think about the holiness of God.”

What Dr. Rhodes may not see is how influenced he himself is by Aristotle’s philosophy. Intellectuals and Bible scholars generally seem to be unwittingly and subtly persuaded by the thought and method of that most important Greek man. I’ll post again soon on how prone to elitism such Aristotelianism can be. The quick summary by the “either / or” method makes translation prone to transliteration (as it makes “rhetoric” prone to “logic” and the concept of woman prone to sexism).

Now, I want to show here how Aristotle uses μυστήρια in his treatise, the Rhetoric. And I want to show the problems with the Aristotelian method applied to translation of this phrase there. So I’m posting John H. Freese’s 1926 translation, then Huge Lawson-Tanred’s 1991 translation, and then George A. Kennedy’s translation. Next I show Aristotle’s Greek, and finally give a translation (mine) that refuses to transliterate.

But first, let me say that I’m not accusing Dr. Rhodes of sexism, or rhetoric, or elitism. I’m only saying his Aristotelianism doesn’t yet acknowledge the problem of transliteration by focusing on the commonality of loan words or their value. (There is much value to loan words, and much fun with them too: note the link to the Greek words borrowed into English at the bottom of this blog; and note this newest borrowing of English into Chinese.) And Dr. Rhodes’s conception of how “our linguistic forebears were so hopelessly influenced by Greek philosophy” overgeneralizes Aristotle if it doesn’t escape his method.

So now, here is μυστήρια by Aristotle (in English “translation”):

The second kind of fallacy of diction is homonymy. For instance, if one were to say that the mouse is an important animal, since from it is derived the most honoured of all religious festivals, namely, the mysteries.

Another form of false enthymeme is that by homonymy, such as saying that a mouse is a major animal, as from it comes the most respected of rites. For the mysteries are the most respected of all rites.

Another [verbal fallacy] is by use of homonyms, as saying that a mouse [mys] is a worthy creature from which comes the most honored of all festivals; for the [celebration of the Eleusian] Mysteries is the most honored of all.

Here’s how Aristotle writes it:

ἓν δὲ τὸ παρὰ τὴν ὁμωνυμίαν , τὸ φάναι σπουδαι̂ον εἰ̂ναι μυ̂ν, ἀφ' οὑ̂ γ' ἐστὶν ἡ τιμιωτάτη πασω̂ν τελετή : (15) τὰ γὰρ μυστήρια πασω̂ν τιμιωτάτη τελετή.

Here’s a translation into English (which refuses translation as mere transliteration but retains as much word play as the translator can pass along):

Besides that there are the alike names: Declaring that a “seeker rat” is important because it’s derived from the all-honored rite; when, in fact, “the Secret” is the all-honored rite.

What’s the Secret? Do you get it?

Uppity Denigration by “Translation”

Melvin B. Tolson teaches his students the dark meaning behind the word denigrate. Without the poet-professor’s lesson, of course, we would all know that the English translation of the Latin word denigratus is “To attack the character or reputation of.” Without the African American teacher’s lesson, we’d be stuck with this uppity highfalutin’ “translation.” But, rather eloquently, Tolson reminds his students so long ago (and us today thankfully) that in Latin niger is “black” and that de- + nigrare is “to blacken.”

(Tolson is wonderfully portrayed by Denzel Washington in “The Great Debaters,” a must-see film out in theaters. We went to watch the movie with one of our daughters this weekend here in Texas, where much of the tragic triumphant true story took place. It’s the story of white racism and sexism overcome by black educators and students in the 1930s. It's the story of the feminism of Henrietta Wells aka Samantha Booke, and of the civil rights for her and James L. Farmer, Jr., and of their debate-team classmates who make national headlines because of their ability to speak, which cannot be officially recognized because they are black. So back to Tolson’s lesson.)

Do you see what happens when a technicalized term goes untranslated? Do you notice that if an English word just “sounds like” a word in the original language, it’s an uppity term. This highfalutin’ phenomenon of just keeping the sound (i.e. “denigrate”) without fully translating the personally embodied meaning (i.e. “to make black”) is called transliteration.

Many Bible translators and many academic translators transliterate all the time. We might call them transliter bugs. When they transliterate, they sound good. They sound like they’re speaking Latin or Greek. What they’re actually doing is making a mess of the translation. They’re keeping us from really knowing what’s going on in that original language in the first place. This lets them assume they know what they’re talking about, unchallenged. But then they can trash each other over their ever-refined dogma and publications on their meanings.

Let’s look at some examples, one from the “Bible” and three from “rhetoric.” (I’ve put “Bible” and “rhetoric” in scare quotes here because you may know that these English words are really simply uppity transliterations and not personal or real translations. “Bible” could be translated from the Greek as “book” and “rhetoric” as “speakerism”; but then Bible scholars and rhetoricians couldn’t as easily debate the meaning of the “Bible” and “rhetoric.”) Actually, the theological word (and “theo – logic - al” is another uppity transliteration) I’d like us to look at is “baptize.” And the philosophical (yes, you guessed it “philo – sophic – al” is another uppity transliteration) terms from what they call “rhetoric” are “ethos,” “pathos,” and “logos.” When theologians and philosophers want to make these terms “sound” Greek, and debate the words in highfalutin’ ways, then they won’t translate βαπτίζω, ἦθος, πάθος, or λόγος.

So let’s do two things with “baptism” and “ethos, pathos, logos.” First, let’s look at a good translation of the Greek into English. Second, let’s look at how wildly varied and amazingly technical the uppity transliterated meanings of have become.

First, then, here’s Richmond Lattimore’s English translation of βαπτίζω, ἦθος, πάθος, or λόγος in passages from Homer’s Odyssey:

As when a man who works as a blacksmith plunges a screaming great ax blade or plane into cold water, treating it for temper, since this is the way steel is made strong, even so Cyclops’ eye sizzled about the beam of the olive. (9.391-394)

and they penned the sows for the night inside their accustomed places (14.411)

for her heart is urgent to find out from you about her husband, though she is suffering troubles. (17.554-555)

This is his daughter; she detains the grieving, unhappy man, and ever with soft and flattering words she works to charm him to forget Ithaka; (1.55-57)

Now most Greek texts, from Homer through the New Testament, in personal and embodied contexts, have fairly stable meanings for these four words. In other words, “plunges” is usually a very good translation of βαπτίζω; “accustomed” is a fine translation of ἦθος; “suffering” is not bad for πάθος; and “word” works quite well for λόγος.

But, second, we have to be aware of what academic technicians do otherwise. Some Bible translator blogger friends (Wayne Leman, Peter Kirk, Doug Chaplin, and Henry Neufeld) are reviewing some of the issues with “baptist” and “baptizer.” And more on that in a moment.

For students trying to get a grip on what Aristotle was making of ἦθος, πάθος, and λόγος, there is much confusion. (Scholars still struggle with his central terms in “The Rhetoric” as I’ve noted here). My favorite student web site on the confusion of “ethos, pathos, logos” due to transliteration is this one.

So now even more on the uppity combination of highfalutin’ “baptist, ethos, pathos, logos.” Here are three partial paragraphs published in Rhetoric & Public Affairs 7.4 (2004) 587-601. It’s past-pastor Present Professor Robert Stephen Reid’s article on “Being Baptist.” I’ve taken the liberty of highlighting the highfalutin’ words as you note the ways the words are used so precisely and technically and abstractly.

As one who has been a Baptist pastor and now works as an educator, I have long since made my public peace with “being Baptist.” This identity is somehow core to who I have become, not only as a person of faith, but as a rhetorician and an educator. I do not promise that I will always worship God with fellow Baptists—we can be such a contentious lot—but I could no more deny that who I am has been shaped by Baptist ways of thought than Terry Eagleton would wish to deny his Marxist intellectual commitment or Judith Fetterley would wish to deny being a feminist. I am pleased to join with colleagues in these pages to reflect on the influence of our various denominational rhetorics as a source of intellectual invention. In what follows I provide a personal sketch of becoming and being Baptist and explore the central communicative assumptions of a constitutive Baptist rhetoric in order to describe for non-Baptists the often inchoate impulses that shape what it may mean to think like a Baptist.(587-88)

Note how Dr. Reid makes contrasts between “Baptists” and “Marxist intellectual” and “feminist” and “non-Baptists.” Could Dr. Eagleton read any material influences on the author? Might Dr. Fetterley encourage us to do a resistant reading of his piece here? How do you “non-Baptists” read this otherwise? Reid continues:

Where many traditions are willing to grant a pastor the authority to preach based on such external ethos as recognition of professional preparation, appointed positions, or the symbolic auctoritas of clerical vestments, authority is granted to Baptist preachers based on a single standard of internal ethos—the congregation's perception that the preacher can handle the message of the Bible faithfully in preaching. (588-89)

Say what? Are we talking about ἦθος or something else we’ve become accustomed to, like, ethics or character or culture to prove an argument? Reid goes on:

If Baptist thought remains irrevocably fixed in a bygone era's strategies of persuasive invention, it is inevitable that pathos will be increased to supply the seeming deficit of a failed logos—the homiletic equivalent of the sermon manuscript with the scrawled marginal note "Weak point; pound pulpit." (597)

Don’t we doubt that Dr. Reid’s “fellow Baptists” are suffering if their words may fail them?

So we listen again to professor Tolson’s lesson on looking for the dark side of the uppity highfalutin’ transliteration. We return to our common need for personal, even embodied translation.