Translating the Pen, Penning Translations

“Bob Cargill has penned. . . .” In that broader context, is “pen” a crucial element of the phrase that needs to be translated?

The above question is Joel Hoffman's, as he's "Thinking About Translation In Just One Language." Hoffman is asking, "[S]hould the translation be the equivalent of 'wrote with a pen' or just 'wrote'?"

The answer is that "pen" must be translated if it's important in English. And the word pen is important in English if it is important to these people:

the writer or speaker or the reader or listener in English,
or the translator or the reader or the listener in the language of translation.

That's a lot of people. But that is the answer. To make the answer dependent on some inherent nature of Language or of translation is to discount the people who use language. In this post, we'll review four language games that people play -- and we'll look at how we people play with "penned."

1

The fact is that the person who Hoffman quotes above is a person, namely Dr. Jim West, who uses "penned" plenty. In Hoffman's example, West is stopping to reflect on somebody else's language, namely Bob Cargill's language, about which West claims "I know, it’s an anachronism since he typed and didn’t pen at all." But, in fact, West usually never pauses to reflect on his own language. For instance, without knowing it was an anachronism, West typed this sentence: "I’ve penned a little response here." And in numerous other posts, West has used the verb penned to pen various clauses, such as "Others are a bit unhappy about it as well, and have penned"; and "a recent essay he’s penned"; and "books he penned"; and "he penned a letter"; and "Bishop Wrong has penned"; and Fouler blasphemy and vile nonsense has never been penned"; and "Jonathan Cook has penned"; and "he happily penned"; and "whether or not the same chap as penned Revelation"; and "I think it the finest, most precise definition of what it means to be a Christian ever penned." The game that West is playing, especially when he focuses on someone else's "anachronistic" use of "penned" is the game of "Get it right." This is the game of language as "proposition." Literary critic George Steiner would call it the "epiphenomenal" or "contingency" game. To get "penned" right, West will point out that the word is "old" or "anachronistic" just the way the dictionary entry might point that out. To get it right is contingent on what the dictionary says it means. And to get it right is to see that "penned" is an epiphenomena, or an old accident of language (i.e., in which a "pen" just happened, once upon a time, to be what people would use to write or to pen language).

2

So we move on to a second game played with the word penned. It's the game of "get it to work." This is the game I call "imposition" and that Steiner calls the "tactical" game. The NIV Bible translation team, for example, plays this game when they come to Matthew's Greek word κεραία /keraia/ or something like a "horn" or a "hook" mark in writing. Matthew, of course, is using the Greek word to translate what Jesus has said in Hebrew Aramaic, probably his spoken reference to an anachronistic, written Hebrew letter. Who knows what Jesus said, but Matthew forces it to look visually like a hook when Greek readers say his translation aloud, and the NIV Bible team force their English to go like this: "the least stroke of a pen." Hoffman himself quotes the English word pen in this context when posting about the Bible verse in the NIV--the verse is Matthew 5:18. Hoffman is answering the question of one of his readers about another Greek word in the verse. Thus, the NIV team and Matthew himself both "get it to work." Matthew gets κεραία to work, and the NIV team forces "the least stroke of a pen" to work. And neither Hoffman nor any of the rest of us notice right away.

3

But there's a third game, and this is the one that Hoffman plays. It's the "get to the essence" game. I've called this the "transposition" game, and Steiner uses the phrase "modal" for how this game is played. The word penned is strangely a verb in the English language, and Hoffman notes that some languages "can’t make nouns into verbs the way English does." The noun form "pen" is the default part of speech, or to use Chomskyan language, it's the deep structure or the abstract form that gets generated or transformed -- through performance from competence. What if the "target" language for translation does not have this essence, is the essence of what Hoffman's asking. Then should a translator insist on "pen" as part of the resulting translation? Hoffman asks these sorts of questions lots, because he can see differences in languages deeply. For instance, at his other blog (the one with his name on it), he mentions the proverb “The pen is mightier than the sword,” as close to some things in "Jewish thought" and in "Torah readings on Yom Kippur," essentially, deeply on the "power of words" in various modes. Hoffman might be very interested in this Japanese representation (by brush stroke) of a "pen" as being more powerful than a sword.  It's a visual rhetoric or a visual modality for words.  But pen equals brush.

4

The last game is the one that Louisa May Alcott plays. If you know her works, then you probably know Little Women. Alcott plays with language. She writes pseudonymously (by a "pen" name), and she writes using her own name. Maybe that will get us more interested in her and her word play. In one work, Hospital Sketches, she plays with words.  As the protagonist, she "sat listening to the busy scratch of his pen." As a nurse, as the protagonist, she watches men "Suffer agonies till a compassionate neighbour pokes them out of a crack with his pen-knife." In the very next sentence, she talks of how she "Put them in the inmost corner of my purse, that in the deepest recesses of my pocket, pile a collection of miscellaneous articles atop, and pin up the whole." She notes how "Every man's legs sprawl drowsily, every woman's head (but mine,) nods, till it finally settles on somebody's shoulder, a new proof of the truth of the everlasting oak and vine simile; children fret; lovers whisper; old folks snore, and somebody privately imbibes brandy, when the lamps go out. The penetrating perfume rouses the multitude, causing some to start up, like war horses at the smell of powder." She explains that "Once he asked me to write a letter, and as I settled pen and paper, I said, with an irrepressible glimmer of feminine curiosity, 'Shall it be addressed to wife, or mother, John?'" She talks of women (not men) "all affected much looseness of costume, dishevelment of hair, swords, arrows, lances, scales, and other ornaments quite passé with damsels of our day, whose effigies should go down to posterity armed with fans, crochet needles, riding whips, and parasols, with here and there one holding pen or pencil, rolling-pin or broom. The statue of Liberty I recognized at once." She goes on with such. And then in reflection, finally, on what she's written, she says:

"Since the appearance of these hasty Sketches, I have heard from several of my comrades at the Hospital; and their approval assures me that I have not let sympathy and fancy run away with me, as that lively team is apt to do when harnessed to a pen. As no two persons see the same thing with the same eyes, my view of hospital life must be taken through my glass, and held for what it is worth."

Now our eye and ear note what's going on. This is the "self-transformation," the positionless / side-by-side, a(p)position game. It's what Steiner calls "ontological." It's about the very being of a person using language. Alcott has what traditionally belongs in the world of men, the pen, the phallic pen, now a part of the world of women, when men are wounded now and women are there beside them, penning and punning. These things are not so obvious. And yet they really are penned. Subtly mightier than the rigid sword. How would one translate all the language play, the be-ing play, the feminism of Alcott?

half empty/ half full

People tell me, with quite enough frequency, that I'm the "absent minded professor type." So I just love, when I've "forgotten" to get my laptop from the car after arriving far from the parking lot to the office first thing in the morning, I just love to announce to my staff members: "I 'remembered' something." Then I can with a smile on my face do the about face and go get that thing I'd "forgotten" and "remembered."

That just happened. Good morning to you too.

"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.

Imitation Translation: a Challenge (or Two)

Here’s a challenge to any of you reading. Translate the following simple English language phrase into any other language. And/or translate the joke I’m about to tell you below. Then post your translation in the comments here, and help us out with reading the other language(s). (Now I’ll play the linguist who explicates beforehand various English meanings of the words, both in the phrase and in the joke).

I.A. First the phrase:

"imitation translation"

Dare you translate that phrase?

I.B. Now the linguistics (plays on the words) of the phrase:

1) There’s a sound play (i.e., phonological alliterations and rhyming). The spelled-out “-ation” gives away the rhyme. And, if you’re from Texas (or another Southern part of the USA), then you get more alliteration: the “m” in the first word and the “n” in the second make a nasally sound for both words. And the vowel sounds are pretty close together. Now if you’re British, then the first two vowel sounds in “imitation” are much higher and much more to the front of the mouth for you than they are for Americans saying the word; as a result, the two words don’t sound as much the same for you when you say them.

2) The first word, imitation, as an adjective in front of the noun translation, can mean “cheap,” or “pretended,” or “artificial,” and so forth. Not a great meaning.

3) Without much of a stretch, you can also imagine “imitation” to be the sort of act that Wayne Leman over at Better Bibles Blog writes about today. “Be readers of this post” is his playful title, which imitates what he’s arguing is a bad-sounding English (e.g., “be imitators of God”) for a Greek clause. Wayne’s bad-sounding title is an imitation clause; that is, his clause mimics or imitates the bad-sounding clause in English that seeks to imitate the “natural word order” or “syntax” of the Greek. He also helpfully provides a transliteration of the Greek (e.g., “ginesthe oun mimetai tou theou”) and has us look at other ways to translate (i.e., to imitate the Greek word meanings without being stuck to the Greek word “literal” grammar). It’s fun stuff, because Wayne offers real life natural English examples of using “imitate” (and not “be imitators of”) as an imperative, or a command. (He doesn’t say it, but one reason “be imitators of God” sounds so odd is because English speakers don’t usually tell anyone else to “be something” very often. I mean we might hear, “Be a man,” which is a command to another person to be more “man-like.” When we use “be” as a command, we’re usually wanting the other person to change their quality, to change what they’re like. We say,“Don’t worry, be happy,” and to rowdy children or domestic animals, “Be quiet” or “Be still” or “Be nice.” You should find helpful Charity's comment on “Be imitators” and “be readers.”)

4) You may add a #4 here as to what “imitation translation” means.

Now, how much of 1), 2), 3) or 4) can you bring across in your translation?

II.A. Here’ the joke in English:

How did the turtle cross the freeway?

[Let me just interject quickly here to warn: this joke is rated PG. One of my daughters brought it home from her private Christian school. Let me also warn that I’m spoiling the joke.]

[When the person you ask the above question to can’t answer, then offer this “help”]:

To figure out the answer, take the “F” out of “free” and the “F” out of “way.”

Okay, you’ve taken the “F” out of “free.” Now take the “F” out of “way.”

[If the person’s a native speaker of English, then he or she will eventually answer this way]:

There’s no F in way.

[When everyone around is laughing, the person will then start laughing after realizing the awful, unspeakable pun].

II.B. Now the here’s linguistics (plays on the words) of the joke:

1) There’s sound play (i.e., a pun): “no F in way” is the same set of sounds in “no f-in way” but the meanings are different.

2) “There’s no F in way” is the retort the one falling for the joke gives. But the same person has just uttered a clause with the abbreviated expletive “freaking.” This is funny for another reason: it’s an answer to the original question of sorts. How did the turtle cross the freeway? Well, the turtle didn’t cross the freeway; there’s no freakin’ way the turtle can make it across the freeway.

3) The other funny thing is the social shock of the joke. Everyone else is anticipating the answer; everyone else is laughing first; and then, when the one falling for the joke finally gets it, everyone laughs all over again together. Saying an F-word (and almost saying other F-words) is often funny. (But if English isn’t you’re first language, then you won’t fall for it so easily. You see, we English speakers to introduce a new idea will use what linguists name “the existential there.” That’s “There + BE.” We say, “There is a no business like show business.” Or, “There is no letter F in the word way.” But, of course, we contract the words in speech. Now, the reason you won’t fall for the joke if you are not a “native English speaker” is this: you haven’t internalized the “existential there” rule. So you’ll say what my wife’s coworker from El Salvador said: “Way has no F in it.”)

4) You may add a #4 here to explain how linguistically the joke is funny.

Now, how much of 1), 2), 3) or 4) can you bring across in your translation? Will your listeners laugh in the other language(s)?

III. Your Turn

Would attempt to imitate the phrase or the joke by translation into another of your languages? Would you share your translation (and explanation) in comments here?

Or would you just care to explain why translation doesn't work?

There will be prizes for the winners!

“Our First Woman President”

Toni Morrison was perhaps the first to say that “Bill Clinton is our first black president.” Now that she endorses the Senator from Illinois, I've been asking whether she may be able some day to say that “Barack Obama is our first woman president.”

Now Aristotelians seem to want to explain away such words. In fact, we’d all do well to hear what Morrison says, but let’s first listen to why an Aristotelian won’t.

AN ARISTOTELIAN EXPLANATION

The Aristotelian first classifies Morrison and her text. For example, the Aristotelian writer for an Oxford University Press encyclopedia concisely captures her this way: “Morrison, Toni (b. 1931), novelist, essayist, editor, short fiction writer, lecturer, educator, and Nobel Prize laureate.” Her text? “African American literature.” And sometimes, “literary criticism.” Hence, perhaps here, “political commentary” by a mere “novelist.”

What Morrison is not, and what her text is not, must also be very important, therefore. She’s not a political authority. Neither do her words constitute an authoritative text on presidents. Besides, Bill Clinton is not black, and Barack Obama is not a woman. The most extreme binary classification is this: Morrison is not a writer inspired with something like plenary inspiration. Her words are not God’s words.

(The extreme classifications may, for the Aristotelian, suggest a sort of Platonic ideal with a sliding scale. But don’t think the binary principle of non-contradiction is entirely lost. Aristotle didn’t completely abandon all he heard from Plato. Neither do contemporary Aristotelians. For instance, although Aristotle’s pure logic is not enough for Eleanor Rosch, prototype theory is just fine. And if Rosch won’t admit it, Aristotle did write some about “more or less” and did not just use pure “either or.” Likewise, George Lakoff would reject Aristotle’s pure method of objectivity, especially cold objectivity as Platonic Noam Chomsky uses it to view syntax abstractly; Lakoff nonetheless more-or-less-coldly observes metaphors we live by, a real specialty of Aristotle. In addition, Richard Rhodes gets a preacher to preach as if against Aristotle: “We must escape the slavery of words and give loyal adherence to meanings instead. Words should express ideas, not originate them.” But Rhodes and Aristotle together could care less about translation of words, because meaningful, prototypical, natural classes are the really important thing and are, for Rhodes at least, what makes prototypical translation possible, if you’ll pardon the circularity of the argument.)

So, a quick review of the Aristotelian’s method: first, the classification by binary features; second, the classification by hierarchy. What Morrison is (not), and what Morrison does (not) mean, maps her naturally, and in the extreme as below the man whose words mean what God’s words mean. (The Aristotelian rhetorician would say, then, that all of a sudden we’ve got an enthymeme: that what Morrison says is rhetorically not important, at least when compared to what God says. But let’s get back to words, to meanings, to logic.)

There are other things going on here for the Aristotelian logician, so let’s listen a bit more.

Because Morrison’s words are so like the man’s words that are God’s words, there has to be further distancing from her and her text. The Rhodesian Aristotelian does that this way:

>first classification as in “God’s meanings, naturally, are not Morrison’s” and “We’ve got a category mismatch here, a big issue in translation.”

>second hierarchy as in “In fact, it takes some significant training to get to recognize the differences between first order communication and second and third order communication. Literary critics, who should know better, are actually the worst. If they understood these distinctions even a little we never would have gotten into this post-modernism mess.”

>therefore if Morrison has written “Bill Clinton is the first black president” or writes someday “Barack Obama is the first woman president,” then we may just dismiss her and her meanings. Fair enough, the first order stuff, those words she uses, might be observed as “not for the faint in heart.” Okay, fine, it may appear she’s writing “in a stream of consciousness mode” and using “the kind of extreme terms Jesus did.” But come on, folks, “it’s the meanings that are important and that the words are only tools to get to the meanings.”

THE WORDS OF (THE FEMINIST THE AFRAFEMINIST THE WOMANIST THE NOVELIST THE LITERARY CRITIC) an old woman blind but wise

Jesus isn’t the only one who throws stories beside the stories of the one who has ears to hear (otherwise rendering deaf those who would claim to hear and making blind those who claim to see). C. S. Lewis isn’t the only one resisting Aristotelian modernism and saying (as an outsider reflecting on somebody else’s psalms): words have “second meanings,” which also means that what anyone’s words mean is always more than what he or she only intends them to mean. Kenneth L. Pike isn’t the only one who says (going beyond Rosch with the very first words of his Introduction to Linguistic Concepts): “When [a] man studies ‘things,’ he injects part of himself into their definition. What is a chair, if there is no [hu]man to sit on it? A flute, with no player? A concert, with no listeners? A saw, with no carpenter? The relevance or intended use of a thing is part of its nature as experienced by us—a component added to it by its designer or user or deduced by an observer. . . . [T]he observer universally affects the data and becomes part of the data. . . . The beginner’s ear [because she or he is an outsider] may play tricks on [her or] him and [may] refuse to listen at all, and ‘tell’ [her or] him that the words sound the same. . . Seeing or hearing or learning is facilitated when the observer has a stake in the outcome.”

Morrison has a stake in the outcome of her words. If they make you laugh, then you get them. They get you too. If you’re listening to her say that “Bill Clinton is the first black president” or hear her say “Barack Obama is the first woman president,” then you begin to affect her words and her words begin to become part of you. If you’re American and a voter, then there’s a stake in the outcome of Morrison’s words for you. If you’re black, then yes a stake. If you’re a woman, then yes a stake.

But even if you’re not any of those, you can listen from any of “several cultures” to “an old woman. Blind but wise. Or was it an old man? A guru, perhaps. Or a griot soothing restless children.” Or is it not Morrison? Or not God? And if you listen closely, to this parable, to someone else’s story thrown beside your own, then what? What’s “the end?” You may know who’s saying this to you: “I trust you now. I trust you with the [thing] that is not in your hands because you have truly caught it. Look. How lovely it is, this thing we have done - together.” You may get these words: “we are our brother's keeper; we are our sister's keeper; . . . we are all tied together in a single garment of destiny.”

Update: Girl with Pen

First Step: Translation in Recovery, Hyperbole, and Parab(o)le

We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—
that our lives had become unmanageable.

μακάριοι οἱ πτωχοὶ τῷ πνεύματι
ὅτι αὐτῶν ἐστιν ἡ βασιλεία τῶν οὐρανῶν

εἰς ἑαυτὸν δὲ ἐλθὼν
(ἔφη . . . ἀναστὰς πορεύσομαι . . . καὶ ἐρῶ :
ἥμαρτον εἰς τὸν οὐρανὸν καὶ ἐνώπιόν σου
οὐκέτι εἰμὶ ἄξιος
ποίησόν με ὡς ἕνα τῶν μισθίων σου
καὶ ἀναστὰς ἦλθεν)

μετανοεῖτε
ἤγγικεν γὰρ ἡ βασιλεία τῶν οὐρανῶν

ἡ δὲ εἶπεν ναί κύριε
καὶ γὰρ τὰ κυνάρια ἐσθίει ἀπὸ τῶν ψιχίων
τῶν πιπτόντων ἀπὸ τῆς τραπέζης τῶν κυρίων αὐτῶν

ἤρξατο λυπεῖσθαι καὶ ἀδημονεῖν
τότε λέγει αὐτοῖς
περίλυπός ἐστιν ἡ ψυχή μου ἕως θανάτου
μείνατε ὧδε καὶ γρηγορεῖτε μετ' ἐμοῦ
καὶ προελθὼν μικρὸν ἔπεσεν ἐπὶ πρόσωπον αὐτοῦ
προσευχόμενος καὶ λέγων

Aristotle is not an alcoholic. And he is not anonymous.

Aristotle is not a woman, not a barbarian, not a slave, not poor, not homeless, not uneducated, not afraid for his daughter who is dominated by a deity, not crying out in a “safe place” in profound pain to his closest friends and his dear father all about to abandon him.

Aristotle is neither in recovery nor in need of doing recovery work.

Aristotle may well manage to be our father of Western modern mathematics, of physics, of biology, zo-ology, medicine, psychology, sociology, anthropology, civics, politics, political science, the art of war, ethics, history, linguistics, literacy, literature, poetry, theater, philosophy, metaphysics, writing, and rhetoric. But where does that get him? And were does it get us?

Aristotle does not translate. And by his own Aristotelian philology he will not be translated well. He does not have a translation theory. He does not even take the first step.

A (good) translation theory starts with admission of ambiguity and humility. (And now I begin listening humbly to the ambiguous epigraphs above. I’m listening by writing out the next six paragraphs in some correspondence with the epi-graphs. This is not yet translation, although I do “translate” some of the Greek here. Please don’t even start think that these zany para-graphs are some sort of glimpse into what that kind of translation will look like. I don’t. The glimpses are at http://rhetoricofaristotle.wetpaint.com. In posting these crazy playful notes, I’m going to stop blogging for a while. I will be reading and might be commenting on your blogs. Those of you who’ve been commenting with me, and at me, and from me here or at other blogs may recognize yourselves, or me, in my silliness here. Apologies again. I really do want to step up my work on translating Aristotle’s Rhetoric, with a translation theory. Did I already say Aristotle lacks one? As you see from the other Greek here, I’m co-opting the practical, rhetorical, feministical translation theory of Jesus Christ. And I’m converting again in a different way this week: from PC desktop to Mac book pro. So I’m stepping forward, again, admitting a certain powerlessness and lack of manageability.)

A good translation theory insists first on the greatest teacher’s original lessons not being “in the original” if ever original at all. It initially gets off its high horse – as we say here in Texas – by leaving what has been in the mother tongue of a barbarian – as they called it there in Greece – and by leaving it finally in the collaborative hands of unskilled students of barbaric Greek. This does not begin to account for all the other barbarisms, the truly dirty languages, that the original stories get found in. (I’m talking now about Jesus Christ and his disciples, and what “they” did in rhetoric, in translation. They admitted powerlessness, and yielded manageability, and began recovery work for the underdogs, for the marginalized, for themselves. Okay. Yes, I know I’m punning “recovery” as something feminist historians of rhetoric and literature and philosophy and the Jewish and Christian scriptures also do in the academy.)

A good translation theory begins before Aristotle’s teachings on “Pneuma,” which is in 6 letters how we transliterate 1 word for His full and vital inspiration, His spiritual authority, which is what we today appropriate as the plenary inspiration of the text with certain necessarily-mysterious Divine-only locked-up-in-His-heaven categories of mistakes. A translation theory worth its salt starts at the point of utter poverty of breath. (I’m referring to the first “blessed” in the beatitudes. These inspired words must find their way back into un-recorded Hebrew Aramaic speech, and recovered into translated Greek that mirrors earlier collaborative translations of Hebrew into Greek by 70 some Jewish men commissioned by a polytheistic Egyptian king in a city established by a polytheistic Greek conqueror, the man who is none other than Aristotle’s very own student. Now, if that last sentence takes your breath away, then “it’s all good,” as my children would translate it. I might translate this whole paragraph on inspiration in translation theory with this whole English-Greek word: “hyperbole.”)

A translation theory that yields some light is one that speaks sometimes-shadowy “parables.” We could re-translate our Greek word parables ambiguously and humbly as this: as someone else’s stories thrown along side our own. But if I get on both sides, then I might come to the end of myself, moving in and out of the stories, until I move beyond that first step.

(I’m writing here about prodigals. One prodigal son, C. S. Lewis, writes the story of his own personal conversion out of atheism, in which God is the great chess-master who, late in the game, approaches checkmate by getting the literary critic, in his consciousness, to move out of simple “contemplation” [and shall we call such “contemplation” “Aristotelian,” with it’s cold detached singular arrogant objectivism?]. God moves Lewis into another side of consciousness: into robust and vibrant “enjoyment.” And Lewis begins to yield power and management to the translation, perhaps the interlation [as Mikhail Epstein theorizes it], between conscious contemplation and conscious enjoyment. So for more on that parable, find Lewis’s Surprised by Joy, but beware: it’s a life changer. Beware even more if you’re not a fan of literature or literary translation theory.)

A good translation theory starts back(wards) by re-thinking everything. (Here, you may recognize that I’ve translated μετανοεῖτε as [or by] “re-thinking everything.” We could have “translated” it “metanoia” by transliteration, the way Aristotelian rhetoricians and Christian preachers do with “hyperbole” and “parable.”)

A good translation theory with what Hélène Cixous also might advise from the get go is: avec l'écriture féminine. (Of course, pardon my French, or hers in my italics; but I do find it amazing that Jesus would speak to women, in their own goyim ethnic mother tongues – even in Greek on occasion, although most Jewish men and many ethnic Greeks under Aristotle wouldn’t bring themselves to think of letting these botched humans – especially the foreign females – speak. At first, Jesus himself appears to struggle with the powerlessness and unmanageably of their pleas, but, in interlation or translation or translingualization, their womanly rhetoric amazes and humbles him instantly, genuinely, and with great effect. The Greek deities in the daughters always over-hear and flee.)

A good translation theory seems not safe at first. But it starts to admit that none of us is safe especially by oneself or even from oneself. There are dangers from which we need safe retreat with the closest of others so as neither to be abused nor to abuse, so as to face pain and abandonment and death. Most of us have to start earlier, with our fears and resentments and needs and imperfections with interactive boundaries in place. (And if Aristotle’s safe place is being on top of the world without needing to translate into or out of the barbarian’s mother tongue, then for most of the rest of us, a safe place must be altogether different. Jesus models this difference. He invites interaction – translations and interlations and “monolingual demonstrations” between men and women of extreme difference and imperfection – but he attends to his very personal needs in safe places. That’s all until “pain” and “abandonment” yield to their sister, “death.” Then, the “seed falls into the ground – good ground is another translation – and dies”: how else would he translate and how else could we learn without such a first step?)

update, cross-ref link: Feminist Binary: Eleventh Step