Barnstone on Better Bibles

The mutual self-isolation
of linguistic and philosophical studies on translation
and the theory and practice of literary translators
is absolute.

Were linguistics to be serious about literary translation . . .
it would be welcome.

A deeper infidelity in Bible translation goes undetected, however.
For although it is assumed that the felony of contemporary Bible translators
is literary insensitivity, mediocrity, or overliteralism,
few people realize that from earliest Bible translation to the present
there has only been the appearance of literalism. . .

The translations of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Scriptures,
consciously or not, are similar to
the controlled news information in authoritarian states.
In other words, license (register c) and extreme freedom
has been applied to Bible translations, yet passed off as literalism (register a).

There is nothing uncommon about a misalliance of theory and practice,
of intention and realization.
The gap between proclaimed intention and realization
in regard to Bible translation is extreme, however.

The epigraphs above are all from Willis Barnstone in his book, The Poetics of Translation: History, Theory, Practice. Just reading the “absolute” and “extreme” rhetoric in his sentences (yanked by me out of his context for mine), one might be tempted to blame Barnstone for (a) the isolation he notes between linguistic and literary translators and for (b) the lack of recognition of his work among Bible translators.

I want, then, to start this post on “Barnstone on better Bible translations” just by acknowledging the divide between translators of various sorts. And to note that (so far) Bible translators (at least the blogging ones, drinking Coke and discussing literary translation and debating Better Bibles) ignore Barnstone and his work.

The challenge that Barnstone provides invites less of a wedge between translators and more of a bridge. I would encourage anyone interested in translation, to read, to study, to critically review Barnstone’s work, especially his Poetics of Translation. As a fledgling rhetorician (and as a linguist much more mature), I find what he says incredibly important. We rhetoricians (in Communications, in Classics, in Composition, with Literature or opposing Philosophy) and we linguists (whether theoretical or field working) do isolate ourselves in our own work by our own approaches in our own small societies for our own goals. My blog here has been to show, in part, how dangerous that exclusivism can be. We from the West in various academic and missionic pursuits far too long have followed Aristotle in his dominant Aristotelianism (fostering intellectualism, ethnocentricism, classicism, kingdom-building imperialism, a self-referential politics, and misogynistic sexism.) And yet, translation and feminisms, in the directions Barnstone might lead us, are radically helpful alternatives. (I’ll just risk losing a few more readers by quoting Barnstone here by saying, “Eve is the mother of translation.” And that’s hardly all of what he says on this woman and translation.)

So, it’s been a breath of fresh air to be welcomed into conversation by Bible translators in the blogosphere. Check the blogroll here for sites and conversations of an incredibly intelligent and friendly lot. But, from time to time, we all retreat to the safe group of our own kind. Then we lob labels across and at: “feminist,” “postmodernist,” “egalitarian,” “complementarian,” “literary,” “literalist,” “Ph.D.,” “amateur,” “infamous,” “fabulous,” and so forth (often simply trying to understand the others’ perspectives). In a bad week, a (first order) comment may hurt another (unwittingly and, unfortunately sometimes, through acerbic wit.)

I think Barnstone has experienced some of that. And he’s not even blogging. His beef is with translation that purports to do one thing but that does another. Translation that pretends to build bridges, but sharply divides. Contemporary Bible translation has done that, he says. So what is a better Bible according to Barnstone?

Barnstone is quite conservative in naming English Bible translators he valorizes. But he doesn’t shy away from criticism of those whose translations would divide the linguistic and the literary:

As we have seen in the instance of the Bay Psalm Book, the claims of fidelity have, in older glorious translations, interfered neither with the magnificence of style nor with accuracy. Translators and exegetes alike have invented meanings and words with the full powers of their determined imaginations.

In our century, however, the Bible has suffered ignominiously “accurate” translations. Accurate has replaced literal as the word to justify bad translation.

(The Poetics of Translation, 63)

So one may count exemplary this translation by American Puritans, the Bay Psalm Book (aka The Whole Booke of Psalmes Faithfully Translated into English Metre [Cambridge, MA,1640]).

And Barnstone notes two others “who dedicated themselves to turning one great book of the Bible into a masterpiece, [namely] Sir Philip Sidney and Lady Herbert [Countess of Pembroke] from Elizabethan London” who gave “us a new rendition of the Psalms” (The New Covenant Commonly Called the New Testament, 16).

But, unfortunately, the Bible today has been

Abandoned by our best-known writer-translators and generations of readers. . . We have had no contemporary English or American equal to Poland’s Nobel laureate in literature, Czeslaw Milosz (who learned Hebrew specifically to translate the Songs of Songs into Polish), who might render distinguished books of the Bible in English. Perhaps it is an unfair burden to ask our leading contemporary religious scholars to become the Luthers and Dantes for our time an refresh the English language. In days of territorial specialization, literature and art are not their terrain. The consequences are clear. (The New Covenant Commonly Called the New Testament, 16).

Barnstone does find three or four exceptional exceptions. He notes [with my boldings here]:

In 1996 Reynolds Price published The Three Gospels . . . which includes Mark, Matthew, and John, a revision from an earlier version of the four canonical gospels. It is of the same literary quality throughout as the [Richmond] Lattimore [translation mentioned further below], less lofty and more modern, and very close to the Greek. It has extra words and is a literary breakthrough. Price uses “wrong” rather than “sin” as one way of reducing what he calls the “puritan” practice in translating from the koine. As pure observation and no reproach, I note that he comes closer than others, but makes no essential break with a strongly Christianizing bias in converting Greek into English and doesn’t move the text from a Hellenization of name, place, and spirit back to its Hebrew Bible base. He does mitigate, where he can without stylistic contortions, the domination of male gender words. (The New Covenant Commonly Called the New Testament, 17).

He adds:

A major change from the pedestrian Hebrew Bible translations that our century has sponsored has been the 1996 publication of Genesis in versions by Robert Alter and by Stephen Mitchell and the 1999 translation of Alter’s David. Alter and Mitchell are both literary, the Alter rhythmically rhetorical and austerely beautiful, with significant annotation; the Mitchell more contemporary, clean, and, like the Alter at once close to both the King James and to modern speech. Like the Everett Fox lineated translation of The Five Books of Moses, the first lines of Genesis in the Alter version have orchestral power and balance, although Alter does so in prose rather than in verse. (The New Covenant Commonly Called the New Testament, 17).

Barnstone dedicates his own translation of The New Covenant Commonly Called the New Testament to Alter, and calls Alter’s Genesis Barnstone’s “model.” Nonetheless, he praises another:

A masterly instance of close translation is Richmond Lattimore’s books from the New Testament. (The Poetics of Translation, 39)

And although his 1962 publication went largely unnoticed, it remains the finest version we have of the words of the Covenant scriptures in English. (The New Covenant Commonly Called the New Testament, 16).

But in his version of Scripture we hear the evangelists speak—as if we were hearing koine Greek. In his preface to The Four Gospels and the Revelation, Lattimore affirms the notion of letting Greek word order and rhetoric come through in English, as opposed to converting them to contemporary English idiom. He adopted this same method in brilliantly in his versions of Pindar and Aeschylus. . . The Bible in our time, sorely abused by unliterary handlers, finds in Richmond Lattimore its most effective translator. He re-creates Mark’s elegant plainness. The classical scholar writes in his preface, “I have held throughout to the principle of keeping as close to the Greek as possible, not for sense and for individual words, but in the belief that fidelity to the original word order and syntax may yield an English prose that to some extent reflects the style of the original” (vii). Just as Lattimore’s Pindar sounds like Pindar—not Pindar sounding like a modern, literate Lattimore—so, as Lattimore intended, Mark sounds in English like Mark. (The Poetics of Translation, 39)

Now, I’m excited to see that John F. Hobbins in “Faithful Bible Translation” (at Ancient Hebrew Poetry) seems to praise Lattimore in some of the ways Barnstone does. Even more thrilling is to hear Suzanne McCarthy (at Better Bibles Blog) follow Anne Carson and Robert Alter in her own literary translation of I Corinthians 13. As I look at the translations of Aristotle’s Rhetoric by classicists and rhetoricians, I find the kind of isolation Barnstone writes about and translates against. By working in collaboration, as does Barnstone, Carson, Lattimore, McCarthy, and others, I hope the result will be a translation of Aristotle that leads us more in the ways of his Sappho (and our Eve), a redeemed rhetoric not Aristotelian, not self-isolated (to men only, of any particular tribe).

UPDATE: LINK to Jobes on Better Bibles

pt 3, Dynamic unEquivalence: Nida v. Barnstone

This is part 3 of a series. In part 1, we considered how Eugene Nida’s reductive theory of dynamic equivalence opposed Eunice Pike’s much more robust theory and practice of translating. In part 2, we looked at how Nida’s simplistic focus on language as mere communication excludes culture and Jewishness in the Bible and how it takes people like Naomi Seidman and Lynell Zogbo to point out his ethnocentrism and to recover and to give us some recovery from it. In part 3, let’s review Nida’s binary and then let Willis Barnstone propose how to bust that up.

To be sure, Barnstone’s theory of language is as robust as Pike’s. Moreover, his work in translation is informed by his theory and is incredibly prolific. And, certainly, Barnstone’s knowledge of Bible translation is equal to Seidman’s and to Zogbo’s. He’s a well-researched scholar, a poet, a historian, a theoretician, and a practitioner of translation in general and of Bible translation in particular. I think he knows the anti-Semitic tendencies of much Christian Bible translation, and just a read of his essay, “How through False Translation into and from the Bible Jesus Ceased To Be a Jew,” gives evidence. All that to say, I don’t want us to pigeonhole Pike or Seidman or Zogbo or Barnstone as specialists with tunnel vision whose particular and individual and singular respective view only offers just one of several needed vantages from which to take down Nida’s dynamic equivalence theory.

Nor do I want to box in Nida. Nor do I desire for anyone to do that. I do want to notice the problems his reductive theory has caused. I do want you to see he’s caused issues for others and how they must deal with these. So here’s Barnstone.

Barnstone’s issues with Nida include two that I’d like to highlight here. The first is that Nida’s linguistics operates on the binary principle of a sort of reductive “linguistics v. literature,” and especially literature that is part and parcel of cultural patterns and the arts. The second issue is that Nida’s “form v. message” message is an unnecessarily simplistic binary.

First, Barnstone seems to be very generous to Nida. Here’s an excerpt from Barnstone’s book, The Poetics of Translation: History, Theory, Practice (page 224):

Returning to mainstream linguistics and literature, the joining of what might be considered science and art has not been “a happy alliance,” to use the words of Henry G. Schogt in his recent book Linguisitics, Literary Analysis, and Literary Translation. I do not wish to denigrate the work of older pioneers in translation theory: Quine’s indeterminacy of translation, Catford’s translation shifts and his application of Firth-Halliday linguistics to translation, Mounin’s linguistic techniques, which represent “un art fondé sur une science” (Problèmes théoriques 17), and the comparative discourse links expressed by the team of Jean-Paul Vinay and the late Jean Darbelnet (the latter my esteemed teacher) are all purely linguistic without reference to literature. Even Nida’s primary purpose has been to spread the Christian faith through denotative translations favoring “content over connotative and associative elements . . . content over form, and . . . decoder-oriented” (Schogt, Linguistics 104). Because their intentions and practice belong to linguistic theory, not literary analysis, they should not be reproached for what is neither their domain nor their intent.

Don’t reproach Nida, Barnstone suggests. But then he goes on to talk about the problems of Nida’s separation of his would-be communication-science linguistics from literature. Barnstone writes:

Disturbing, however, is the frequent expectation that linguistics provides a model for literary translation analysis and theory. We can easily identify the source of the temptation – translation, after all, ordinarily involves a linguistic activity between languages. So why not turn to linguistics for the theoretical frame of literary translation? Because to make linguistics the major instrument for the analysis or theory of literary translation is no more nor less reasonable than to make linguistics the major instrument for the analysis or theory of literature. Linguistics has essentially forsworn literary, and specifically literary translation, theory. That is its privilege and apparently for the moment its fate. Although linguistics and philosophy have largely ignored literary translation, their own work, forbidding to the nonlinguist, unnecessarily casts a shadow over the serious value of nonlinguistic approaches. Were linguistics to be serious about literary translation . . . it would be welcome.

Okay. That’s pretty heavy stuff for a blog post. I’d urge you to read Barnstone’s books, to see the various things he develops along these lines with respect to Nida and his reductive non-literary theory of translation. (For that matter, I would encourage you to read more of Nida for yourself. I’ll say more in comments if anybody is interested in what I’d recommend.)

Barnstone gets to another problem with Dynamic Equivalence, when he translates the New Testament and writes commentary on it. In his commentary, Barnstone identifies three different registers for translation. Notice three in contrast to simply an EITHER / OR two. Nida posits the simple binary:

"[T]here are fundamentally two different types of equivalence [in translation]: one which may be called formal and another which is primarily dynamic."

Nida writes of "Two [and only two] Basic Orientations in Translating," in his book, Toward a Science of Translating with Special Reference to Principles and Procedures involved in Bible Translating, on pages 120-21:

EITHER [1] translation has an orientation towards “formal equivalence . . . concerned with such correspondences as poetry to poetry, sentence to sentence, concept to concept," which “might be called 'a gloss translation,' in which the translator attempts to reproduce as literally and meaningfully as possible the form and content of the original.”

OR [2] there is, “[i]n contrast, a translation which attempts to produce a dynamic rather than a formal equivalence [which] is based upon 'the principle of equivalent effect' (Rieu and Phillips, 1954) . . . and aims at complete naturalness of expression, . . . tries to relate the receptor to modes of behavior relevant within the context of his own culture[, and] . . . does not insist that he understand the cultural patterns of the source-language context in order to comprehend the message.”

Barnstone rejects this binary. He says there may well be:

[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....

There is also [nevertheless] [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 of The Restored New Testament, Barnstone’s translation).

With respect to the Bible, an example Barnstone gives of [1] “a gloss” is “[t]he Jesus Seminar translation of the gospels... heavy in explanation and conceptualization of image and metaphor, [that] uses key words to clarify rather than to express.” This is Nida’s so-called “formal or literal equivalence.”

An illustration of [2] “imitation,” according to Barnstone, is “John Dominic Crossan's adroit transformations of Yeshua's sayings into minimalist poems.” For Nida, this would be closer to his ideal of “dynamic or functional equivalence.”

Finally, Barnstone’s alternative to these two is the more exemplary [3] “middle ground” translation approach, the approach that he says “is Tyndale's... autonomous restatement” and is also what Robert Alter is doing “in making the literal literary” with his translating of the Hebrew Bible.

As Barnstone himself attempts making the literal literary in translation of the New Testament, he says, “This is the difficult middle way.” He calls his work [3] “an autonomous text to be read in English as scripture. . . .” (pages 1289-91).

Barnstone gets his idea for [3] “the literal literary” not first from Bible translators such as Tyndale and Alter but from a translator of Homer's Odyssey: from Robert Fitzgerald. When Fitzgerald began to translate Homer, he first asked Ezra Pound, “How?” Pound replied, “Let Homer say everything he wanted to say.” This was the middle way between [1] glossing Homer's Greek and [2] imitating it.

There is not doubt that this advice was unusual for Pound. The translator was one who's “normal practice” was never [1] to gloss but was normally [2] to take “tremendous freedoms” as he “imitated, and intimately collaborated with or overcame the author in his best translations from Anglo-Saxon and Chinese.” Barnstone adds: “and they may be his own best poems” not necessarily giving any credit whatsoever to the original authors. Nonetheless, Pound advises Fitzgerald [3] to take the middle way between [1] literal glossing and [2] dynamic or functional equivalence license.

Barnstone explains this [3] “middle ground” approach as “both literal and literary.” We might use Nida’s terms and call it “both formal and functional” and “both literal and dynamic.” Barnstone says:

    The translator in service of the source author becomes more invisible as the art intensifies, permitting the reader [3] to see Homer or Dante or the Bible and, as Pound suggested, [3] to hear them have their say. By contrast, in the inevitable collaboration between author and translator, as we move from [1] re-creation to [2] imitation, the earlier author tends to disappear, overcome by the voice of the translating author. (page 1292).

Nida, to be clear, advocates [2] the dynamic or functional imitation of the text's effect on receptors. Thus, I'd like to end the post now with a contrastive illustration of Nida's approach and Barnstone's.

In his entry "Bible translation," for the first edition of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, Nida gives an example of a translation of his from the New Testament. He writes:

Since the relevance of a message is not in the formal features of a text but in its semantic content, some measure of freedom is required if the target audience is to understand the biblical text. The heavy weight of tradition, however, often stifles a translator's creativity and obstructs a reader's comprehension. For example, most English-speakers have no idea what Hallowed be thy name (the first petition of the Lord's Prayer, Matthew 6:9) really means. The Greek text can be translated literally [1] as 'Sanctified be thy name', in which 'name' is a Semitic way of avoiding a direct reference to God, and 'sanctified' must refer not to the character of God, but to the manner in which He is recognized by peole as being truly God. Accordingly, it is more relevantly rendered [2] as May all people realize that you are God or Help us to honour you as God or even as Help us to honour your name. (page 26)

Barnstone, in contrast, avoids either [1] literally translating or [2] telling readers what must really be meant by the Hebraic Hellene ultimately rendered "relevantly" in a non-Jewish but English "reader-comprehensible" sense.

By the way, the Jewish Matthew translates and writes the spoken Jewish words of the Jewish Jesus to his Jewish audience by this Jewish Greek:

ἁγιασθήτω τὸ ὄνομα σου·

Barnstone works, likewise, to Let Matthew let Jesus say everything that he wanted to say. They give voice to Yeshua ben Yosef. "Yet hear that voice and hear a poet." Barnstone lets Matthew, who is Mattityahu, say everything that he wanted to say. He gives voice to Mattityahu:

hallowed be your name.

A literary literal rendering of a Jewish prayer. So who's stifled whom and who's obstructed what?

A Bible Translator Uses Bad Words ("Ass, Fart, Whore, Piss, Shit")

Well, you're going to protest again maybe.  Here I go quoting a Bible translator's translation that makes you read bad words.  To be exact, ass, fart, whore, piss, and shit.

So would it make any difference to you if I told you that the published translation helped win this particular translator the "PEN American Center / Book of the Month Club Translation Award"?  Would you give the translator a break if one notable critic said that this is the translator's "most remarkable translation thus far" and that "it is, in fact, more an act of wizardry than of translation"?  What if you knew that the translator was also a poet, who was "[t]wice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in poetry"?

What else might matter to you?  That the translator is not a woman, but a man?  Does he need to be a theologian?  A linguist?  If he's translated the New Testament, does he need to be a Greek scholar?  A Christian?  Part of a team of men scholars of theology and of Greek language and of translation science?  Would those things then make it okay for him to use ass, fart, whore, piss, and shit in his translation?

What I'm trying to get at is what counts for you.

Yesterday, I started in on a post by quoting a feminist, a woman feminist saying "pissed off."  But I said that this was Jesus speaking.  Immediately, you began to protest.  "Gloria Steinem is no Jesus."  And some of you were thinking, "Cuss words are not the Word of God."

What I'm trying to get at is how the Bible can immediately make seemingly unequal things equal.

What I'm trying to get at is how translation, likewise, makes things that don't at first seem to count as the same really, nonetheless, the same.

What I'm trying to get at is how literature, even a poem, a sonnet for instance, makes seemingly unequal things equal. 

"Now, just wait a minute," some of you are saying.  "The Bible in the original language(s) is not translation.  And a translation is not the original by any stretch.  Don't you know much gets lost in translation?  And, since you're bringing up literature, and poetry, don't you even remember how Poet Robert Frost wisely noted that 'Poetry is what gets lost in translation'?"

What I'm trying to get at is how you can make things you think are unequal equal.  Men and women?  Yes, equal.  Jesus and a feminist?  Yes, equal again.  The original spoken word of Jesus and it's written translation by someone claiming to be his student named John?  Right, equal.  A bit of history and a possibly fictional, late-added episode of narrative complexity?  Of course.  Equals.

What I'm trying to get at is how the Western mode of thinking that is binary really is what scholars Andrea Lunsford and Lisa Ede rightly refer to as the "logic-chopping automaton."


But none of us has to be that much of a scholar to see this.  Let me just turn things around and come at it from another direction.  What if you yourself are not really making unequal things -- say, males and females -- equal?  What if they really are equal but it's just your use of Western, Aristotelian logic that makes them un-equal?  What if the Bible, translation, and literature in general really free you to reconsider difference?


Okay.  I suppose you're dying to know.  Who is this Bible translator mentioned at the beginning of the post?  It's Willis Barnstone.  "What?!" some of you are exclaiming.  "He's not a real translator of the Bible.  He's only translated the New Testament and not anything else.  Well, okay.  He's translated the New Testament, but not the one I grew up with.  He's not gotten to any of the Hebrew books, or any of what may be called the Old Testament.  And he's thrown in a whole bunch of Greek books that are not canonical.  The best and top-most-ranked Bible bloggers didn't know much about him until you started mentioning him here.  Yes, we know you mentioned him yesterday in a post.  Yes, we saw how you quoted from his translation.  But where did he use the bad words, the unbiblical English, that you quote in this post today?"


Please let me answer.  What I'm trying to get at is that Barnstone is the equal of any other Bible translator, dead or alive.  He's a poet, a historian, a theoretician, and a practitioner of translation.  Here's his complete, to date, bibliography.  If that's not impressive enough, then do know that he does have his critics.  Even literary types are good critics, somewhat severely critical critics, of his New Testament translation.  And those who know some of the original languages better than Barnstone does perhaps, even though these might still be students, can be good critics, somewhat severely critical critics.  


Now if you've stayed with me this far, anticipating Willis Barnstone's translation that uses those words I mentioned earlier, then do know you're going to get to read it (and them).  I'm not going to say a thing really about the passage that Barnstone has translated other than this:  it really is an award winning translation, but it really isn't from the Bible.  It really is a sonnet, perhaps equal to the Spanish sonnet Barnstone is rendering.  Thus, if you believe me that Barnstone is equal to a translator of the Bible, then here's a translation of something else by "a Bible translator who uses these "bad words":

from Six Masters of the Spanish Sonnet

Willis Barnstone on (Y)OUR Translation Approach

I have tried to chart--reductively, yet perhaps clearly--basic principles and problems of translation [on pages 25-29], suggesting a few variations in this connecting maze. Precisely because of the interconnections of these principles and problems, because, as in all literary theory, science and art merge, there will always be controversy renewing the art, confusion leaving it in darkened labyrinths, and illumination resolving its enigmas dogmatically. Absolutes may be proclaimed, but those absolutes will soon be translated into other absolutes. And although people will try to impose a single way, there can never be one conquering normative approach to translation.

In this study the translation paradigms will strongly depend on two early sources: translation of the Bible, with its frequent goal of literalism and absolute fidelity, asserted but rarely practiced; and classical translation, with its free-minded Roman poets and rhetoricians who chose to re-create, to paraphrase Greek letters into their Latin tongue. The Roman method was to dominate the practice, if not the pretensions, of secular translation from the Middle Ages, when antiquity strongly re-entered the West, until the early twentieth century.

The two paragraphs above are from page 29 of Willis Barnstone’s The Poetics of Translation: History, Theory, Practice. Clearly, he’s outlining approaches to translation and is noting two early and rather persistent approaches: “Bible translation” and “Roman translation of Greek poetry and rhetoric.”

Barnstone translates both the Bible and Greek poetry and rhetoric. But I suspect Bible translators are more reluctant to include him in their society of Bible translators although, I think, Barnstone fairly understands their concerns.

I’d like to see Bible translators and Greek classicists and Greek rhetoricians today talk more together about our approaches. Can we muse about whether we’re rather dogmatic, for instance? Might we be brave enough to confess our translation-approach lineage? Could we find ourselves on Willis’s chart? Here’s the abbreviated version from page 25:

1. Register, or translation level

a) literalism

b) middle ground

c) license

2. Structure, or degree of source text in translation

a) retaining structure of source text in target text

b) naturalizing structure of source text in target text

c) abandonment of original structure and creation of new one

3. Authorship, or dominant voice

a) retaining voice of source language author in target language

b) yielding voice of source language author to translator’s voice in target language

(And Barnstone sidesteps what most translators of most approaches sidestep: the absence of women in our histories of translation. But that's another discussion.)

Jobes on Better Bibles

Karen H. Jobes is a scientist turned translator. How she's translating and talking about translation of the Bible is no less radical than how Willis Barnstone has been translating the Bible and talking about it.

Jobes is a woman, and Barnstone is a Jew. (She's a physics-trained computer scientist who's come to Bible scholarship lately, doing work on the book of Esther as variant texts of the Septuagint. He's a classicist, a comparative literary scholar, a polyglot, and an English translator of texts authored in various languages both IndoEuropean and not.) So it will be interesting to see how these two are received by traditional mainstream Bible translators.

To date, the Better Bibles Blog contributors have not listed Barnstone's The New Covenant Commonly Called the New Testament as a notable English "Version." That's too bad, because Barnstone's recent Bible translation is well reviewed by many (including Robert Alter) and comes on the heels of his many other acclaimed translations, by the methods he articulates in his brilliant book The Poetics of Translation: History, Theory, Practice. Barnstone has contended that the history of the English translation of the Bible is replete with anti-Semitism that is borne out in and through the theory and practice of translations. He says much much more than that in his book. Nonetheless, for Christians, the most notable issue is the mistranslation of Yeshua as an anti Jew if not just a victim of the Jews.

Jobes is making a somewhat similar claim. But instead of accusing Christian translators of the Bible of producing work that hurts a particular race, ironically Jesus Christ's own race, Jobes says something else, perhaps more general. She does specifically argue that both "dynamic equivalence" and "formal equivalence" are inadequate theories which have polarized Bible translators in debate; and, she makes her more general claim. A better method "shows how Anglo-centric the evangelical debates have been." That's one of the most important statements (on page 9) of her essay "Bible Translation as Bilingual Quotation."

What may make such a statement more palatable to evangelicals (than Barnstone's claims) is the fact that Jobes herself is an evangelical Christian. What may make Bible translators take note of her "bilingual quotation" theory is that Jobes also has been included in the elite group of translators who have just completed the New English Translation of the Septuagint. (She's the only woman selected along with thirty men). (In contrast to Jobes, Barnstone is not a Christian--although he sees Jesus in very important, very fresh ways [see his statement on YESHUA BEN YOSEF]--and he has conferred with Alter but collaborated with no other person on his project. In comparison with Jobes, Barnstone does even more thoroughly take on the sucker's choice of either "dynamic equivalence" or "formal equivalence" in the theory section of his book.)

Paul J. Caminiti, Zondervan's Vice President and Publisher of Bibles, has posted a blog for your review, in which he allows Jobes to introduce her theory. This afternoon, Mike Pritchard, a manager in Zondervan's marketing office, kindly sent me an email notice, inviting us all to read the blog, and to comment as we would. Wayne Leman, a contributor at Better Bibles Blog, and a Bible translator and translator consultant, had gotten Pritchard's email earlier and had thoughtfully forwarded it to me. I mention all that to keep the conversation going. Although I've quoted from page 9, Caminiti gives quotations from pages 5 and 7, and a comparison chart of "verbosity" of Bible translations on page 15. Another main "point" of Jobes is then quoted from page 16. The blog and a link to the full essay can be found here.

Whether you read and comment there, or come back here to comment, I'd be curious. What do you think?

When Wayne forwarded the email to me, he said "speaking of 'feministic translation', consider Dr. Jobes' paper." So I am! Do know that Professor Jobes is not a self-identifying "feminist." Nor does she label "Bilingual Quotation" as womanly discourse of any kind. I would, nonetheless, like to know whether any of you think Jobes' translation theory is related to Pike's tagmemics or his monolingual demonstration (which I've said may contribute to translation theory and practice as much as Jacqueline Jones Royster's afrafeminist methods can).

UPDATE: These are bloggers who have either commented on or are inviting others to comment on Jobes' essay:

Wayne Leman at Better Bibles Blog
Wayne Leman at TNIV Truth
John F. Hobbins at Ancient Hebrew Poetry (twice)
Peter Kirk at Gentle Wisdom
James Getz at Kituvim

and in a more recent post, I wonder more about the gender inequities surrounding Jobes.

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."

Ann Nyland Translates the Psalms

Ann Nyland has just published The Psalms: Translation with Notes.  I'm especially excited about it because she's doing some things with translation that are fairly important and fairly rare.

Two remarkable things about Nyland's translation are these:

first, she keeps Jewish words Jewish (or rather "retains the divine names of the Hebrew");

second, she uses not just the newer Masoretic Text of Hebrew (MT) but also the older Septuagint (LXX) text of Greek (both reflections, of course, of even older Hebrew).

In addition, it's worth noting that Nyland is like Willis Barnstone and Richmond Lattimore in that she's a Greek scholar.  Her translation of the New Testament like theirs attends to Greek word meanings prior to the NT, including meanings in the Septuagint and early and ancient Greek classics.  And each of these classics translators has translated the NT alone, and not as part of committees.  (Here's a post that compares the way the three handle a Greek "hapax legomenon").

Nyland's Psalms are similar to Barnstone's New Testament books and letters in that they retain Hebrew (i.e., Jewish) names.  Moreover, Barnstone does not read the Christian translation tradition back into his Restored New Testament; likewise, Nyland "does not read the New Testament back into the text" of the Psalms.  (A comparison between how Barnstone and Nyland translate Matthew 16:15-19 is here; note that Nyland when translating the New Testament used the more Christianized transliterations for the names.).

Nyland, like Robert Alter, who also translates the Psalms, uses both the MT and the LXX to render the psalms into English.  The poetry of the original languages is some reflected in the English; Nyland puts it this way: "as this [the book of Psalms] is a poetic work, the translation does leave in some of the poetic style of the original at the expense of good English." Nyland also handles "several Hebrew words or sentences the meaning of which is uncertain or unknown" by "leav[ing them] ambiguous, with an endnote, instead of making a decision for the reader."  Alter, similarly, avoids what he calls the "heresy of explanation" in translation by using footnotes to mark textual issues that need clarification for the reader.

There are at least three fairly unique things to note about Nyland and Nyland's translation:

First, she, by her translation, "avoids the Biblish dialect, that is, the type of [English] language that follows the syntax of the original language."  For Nyland, such a dialect may cause a "translation error" in that it might "invent a tone that was not there in the original."  She gives several examples of biblish or "common [language] use with Christians" both in translations of the Bible and in social communication.

Second, Nyland's "translation does not attempt to translate the Psalms into poetry" as Alter's translation of the Psalms does and as Barnstone's translation of some of the gospel writings does.  Nyland does offer commentary on some of the poems in her endnotes; for example, she distinguishes Canaanite and Israelits poems and explains when the Septuagint but not the Hebrew Bible contains a poem.

Third, Nyland has had to work in ways that most men don't.  Neither Alter nor Barnstone nor Lattimore, of course, were ever disparaged for being a woman, for being a feminist, as Nyland has been so disparaged.  Her interview with Wayne Leman at Better Bibles Blog gets into some of that.  To be clear, Nyland has taken on the mostly male Bible translation establishment with essays such as in More Than Meets The Eye: THE CAMPAIGN TO CONTROL GENDER TRANSLATION BIBLES.  Nyland has a blog at which she says this rather explicitly about herself: "I breed, ride and train the old-fashioned type of Arabian horses; also Quarab horses, am a Bible translator." And elsewhere on the Internet, she converses about translation as the woman Bible translator, Ann Nyland.  Her Bible Translation blog is worth a careful read:  http://womenministers.blogspot.com/


For a sample of Nyland's work on the Psalms, I've included her translation of Psalm 8 in another post today.

Exploring Barnstone: Anti-Semitism, Slavery, and Sexism in the Bible

My blogger friend John Hobbins attacked me earlier this year for saying there is “sexism in the Bible.” John noticed how I'd been trying to restore some of that at my other blog by translating.   Back then, I wished John had explored in greater detail what translators like Ann Nyland and Willis Barnstone had been saying and doing.  Both Nyland and Barntone see sexism in the New Testament and consider the need to recover the New Testament, to restore the text, by translating, and translating creatively.

John's attack against me was an odd turn, I thought, because months earlier he'd thanked me "for introducing Barnstone to a wider audience." John also exclaimed:

You are absolutely right, J. K.: Barnstone rocks. Most scholars cringe before his creativity. May they enjoy the reward of their pedantic conservatism: the insurance men will praise them. As for me, I prefer skydiving with the likes of Barnstone.

And John added: "This Barnstone guy seems worth exploring in greater detail."

Very few in the biblebloggersphere have explored Willis Barnstone or his new robust translation of the New Testament and what he himself says about it .  (Many more, it seems, have been excited by Robert Crumb's graphically illustrated version of Robert Alter's Genesis -- though far fewer have dared to say anything about its sexism and anti-Semitism.)

So in this post, I'd like to begin to explore Barnstone a bit more.  Below are some quotations of him from Barnstone's new, restored New Testament translation. He discusses anti-Semitism, slavery, and sexism in the Bible.

Here's Barnstone on the anti-Semitism in the traditional Christian Bible translations:

The scriptures are anti-Semitic just because Jews are falsely slammed in "words" that, as [Karen] Armstrong notes, "for centuries inspired the pogroms that made anti-Semitism an incurable disease in Europe."

I address this dire and central question of disenfranchising Yeshua [aka Jesus] of his religious identity in two ways:  by restoring the probable Hebrew or Aramaic names to biblical figures and framing savage anti-Semitic passages in a historic context in the introduction and the textual annotation.

(page 19)

On the slavery in the Christian Bible translation tradition, Barnstone observes:

    Slavery was accepted by the church.  When the Roman Empire became Christian, under Constantine, slavery continued, flourishing in the Byzantine Empire as well as in the West.  It came to the New World in the sixteenth century under the Spaniards, a century before the English and French brought in slaves from Africa.  Bartolomé de Las Casas (1474-1566), a Spanish missionary and historian called "the Apostle of the Indies," heroically devoted his life to obtain, though without success, the complete abolition of slavery (the encomienda) among the native population in the New World.  In order to save the souls of the Indians for Christian conversion, he proposed to import black slaves from Cuba, who had no souls, he claimed, to work in the mines.  In Mexico, slavery was normal even in monasteries and convents.  When Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648/51-95), the major poet of the colonial period, entered the cloistered Hieronymite convent of Santa Paula in Mexico City, she brought with her to her luxurious apartment two slaves, one Indian, one black, onw of whome she later sold to her sister Josefa for 250 gold pesos. Although Sor Juana's biography, Response to Sister Filotea< (1691), was the first and truly most significant literary book concerning a woman's right to intellectual and artistic freedom prior to the publication of Virginia Woolf's emancipatory Room of One's Own, Sor Juana was unconcerned with the slavery that prevailed in working class Mexico during her lifetime.

Anciently, slavery was present in Israel and Christianity, in the Hebrew Bible and the Greek scriptures. There were rules concerning slavery in both the authentic and disputed letters of Paul. He asked for kindness to slaves and commanded that in the spiritual realm they be treated as brothers [siblings?] in Christ. With respect to the slave's obligations in the material world, in the letters in which he discusses slavery, he commands that a slave under threat of punishment, obey his master and not escape.

(pages 856-57)

The above comment is in introduction to Paul's letter to Philemon.  But Barnstone notes the pro-slavery arguments elsewhere:

The demanded behavior of slaves in I Peter, while stupefying, is not as offensive to contemporary understanding as its fuller articulation in the Pastoral Letters and in Paul's letter to Philemon.  However, here [in Peter's letter] as there [in Paul's], there is no hint of moral dilemma with respect to the institution [of slavery].  Indeed, the author of the sermon, as in the Pastorals, associates God's grace with obedience of slaves to masters.

(page 1002, footnote 31, a fn on I Peter 2:18)

Observing sexism in the Bible, Barnstone translates Paul's (or a pseudo-Paul's) first letter to Timo-theos this way, with some commentary:

11 Let a woman learn in silence and in full submission.
12 I do not allow women to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man.*
She must be in silence.
13 Adam was formed first. Then Eve.
14 Adam was not decieved, but the woman was deceived an became a transgressor.
15 She will be saved through childbearing, if she remains in faith and love and holiness and good behavior.**

*The word "man" in Greek can also secondarily mean "husband." However, by not choosing a specific word for husband, the Greek leaves the command open to all states of womanhood with respect to men.

**The extreme degradation of women in these famous verses, while often explained away, remains a fierce source of contemporary debate and protest. The kindest thing one can say in Paul's defense is that they were in all likelihood composed by church authorities between two and five decades after his death. However, the forgers using Paul's name were attempting to reproduce Paul's presumed thing.

(pages 935-36)

Likewise, in his footnotes on verses of Paul's first letter to Corinthians, Barnstone says this in viewing sexism in the text:

[Paul, whose authorship is not in dispute here] is contrasting the woman whose head must be covered, with the man whose head must not be covered (11.4). The more general meaning of the head covering is to give freedom to the man and to confine the woman to modest subservience. It is said that a woman exposing her hair in public reveals loose general morals and promiscuity.

In the next lines Paul develops the intense differences in station between man and woman, husband and wife, by the exposure or revelation of hair. He tells us that a man needs no cover since he is "the semblance . . . of God," but a woman need cover because she is the semblance of man. Paul pushes the parallel metaphor too far, since if the woman is indeed the semblance of man (even as a small relection), she is a semblance of an uncovered man and so she too should necessarily be uncovered.

The basis for Paul's assertion is that man was created before woman in both creation stories, in Genesis 1.27 and 2.7. The notion that woman was created "for the sake of man" has been a sore point emphasizing Paul's less-than-amenable position concerning the position of women, which is always subservient to men....

Paul now [in 11.15] acknowledges that women have a natural covering [i.e., their relatively long hair], which should imply they need no head covering. Then, catching the trap into which his metaphors have led him, he state succinctly states that if anyone wishes to take up a "contentious" line of reasoning, neither he and his group nor the synagogues of God have the custome of permitting women to go bare-headed.

(pages 738-39, fns 97, 98, and 102)

In his introduction ("Why a New Translation"), Barnstone gets at what he means by "restore" with respect to translating.  "And third," he enumerates, "I wish to translate as verse what is verse in the New Testament, as in Yeshua's speech..., following a practice that... has prevailed in rendering Hebrew verse as in the Song of Songs, the Psalms, and Job."  Barnstone sees as central to restoring (that is, as central to his project) that restoration of a Jewish, abolitionist, and feminist voice in the New Testament, namely Barnstone's translating of Yeshua (aka Jesus).  Barnstone adds:

    On all questions of faith versus fact, I take a neutral stance and address them in annotations.  As far as possible, I limit these matters to indicating a historical context of biblical happenings, always with the awareness that more is unknown than known.  In her brilliant Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews, Paul Fredriksen presents her first fact, from which all historical speculation must radiate:  "The single most solid fact about Jesus' life is his death: he was executed by the Roman prefect Pilate, on or around Passover, in the manner Rome reserved particularly for political insurrectionists, namely, crucifixion.  Constructions of Jesus primarily as a Jewish religious figure, one who challenged the authority of Jerusalem's priests, thus sit uncomfortably on his very political, Imperial death:  Pilate would have known little and cared less about Jewish religious beliefs and intra-Jewish religious controversy.

    As to denominations--Jewish, Christian, Muslim, the world--while respecting all views, I have not pitch for any camp.  There is no more polemic or preselytizing here than were this book a new version of the Odyssey or of Sappho's fragments, yet I hope that my love for these extraordinary world scriptures will show through.

(pages 14-15)

I do hope that John Hobbins and other bible bloggers too will explore more what Barnstone's done and is doing with greater detail.  To say that there's sexism in the Bible (and anti-Semitism and slavery) does not mean, as John has claimed it it does, that the Bible cannot be light to the outsider, the reader, so saying. "Good open-minded reader," Barnstone addresses those of us who will listen, "here is one translator's way to find the past of a book that may bring you light" (page 8). I think fellow blogger Michael Carden (at his blog Jottings: Michael Carden's Biblio-Blog: Reflections on Bible, Religion, Society, Sexuality, Politics) is listening. Michael takes note of "Ideology and translation of biblical texts" and of the difference translation can make.  A translator of the Bible does well, he says, when she or he "plays with and releases the text from such straitjackets and allows it to be revelation no matter how uncomfortable that might be." I myself am grateful to Barnstone for giving us the insight, courage, and willingness just to try to follow his lead. There are indeed various wayS of approaching the Bible, its sexism, and its translation.

Alternative Approaches to Translation (of Luke 2:14)

This post follows another that considered the labels "sexist" (or not) and "exclusivist" (or not) for Bible translations.  Here I'm wanting to focus a bit on how (i.e., by which approach) some translations end up deserving the labels.

Willis Barnstone's concept of register for approaches to translation is a useful lens by which to view and evaluate Bible translation theory and practice -- even when it comes to Luke 2:14.  I'd like to review and then go a bit beyond Barnstone's registers.

To review, Barnstone identifies three registers for translation.  The 3 are:

[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....  There 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 of The Restored New Testament).

With respect to the Bible, an example Barnstone gives of [1] "a gloss" is "[t]he Jesus Seminar translation of the gospels... heavy in explanation and conceptualization of image and metaphor, [that] uses key words to clarify rather than to express." An illustration of [2] "imitation," according to Barnstone, is "John Dominic Crossan's adroit transformations of Yeshua's sayings into minimalist poems."  Finally, the exemplary [3] "middle ground" translation approach "is Tyndale's... autonomous restatement" and it is also what Robert Alter has done "in making the literal literary."  As he himself attempts it in translation of the New Testament, Barnstone says, "This is the difficult middle way."  He calls the final product of [3] "an autonomous text to be read in English as scripture...." " (pages 1289-91).

Barnstone gets his idea for [3] "the literal literary" not first from Bible translators such as Tyndale and Alter but from a translator of Homer's Odyssey:  Robert Fitzgerald.  When Fitzgerald began to translate Homer, he first asked Ezra Pound, "How?"  Pound replied, "Let Homer say everything he wanted to say."  This was the middle way between [1] glossing Homer's Greek and [2] imitating it.  (To be sure, this advice was unusual for Pound.  The translator was one who's "normal practice" was never [1] to gloss but was normally [2] to take "tremendous freedoms" as he "imitated, and intimately collaborated with or overcame the author in his best translations from Anglo-Saxon and Chinese."  Barnstone adds:  "and they may be his own best poems" not necessarily giving any credit whatsoever to the original authors.  Nonetheless, Pound advises Fitzgerald [3] to take the middle way between [1] literal glossing and [2] literary license.   To repeat, he advised: "Let Homer say everything he wanted to say."  Funny thing is, when I read Fitzgerald's translation of Homer, I find the translator all over the place, from [1] to [2] to [3].  Ask me in comments if you want examples.  We hope Barnstone himself is truer to his principles.)

Barnstone explains this [3] "middle ground" approach as "both literal and literary."  He says:

    The translator in service of the source author becomes more invisible as the art intensifies, permitting the reader [3] to see Homer or Dante or the Bible and, as Pound suggested, [3] to hear them have their say.  By contrast, in the inevitable collaboration between author and translator, as we move from [2] re-creation to [1] imitation, the earlier author tends to disappear, overcome by the voice of the translating author.  (page 1292).

So how does Barnstone himself let us see Luke?  Barnstone certainly does not intend simply [1] to gloss or to explain the Greek with his own English; nor does he want just [2] to flaunt his own English in imitation of Luke's text.  Rather, Barnstone is after a "literal litarary" [3] "middle ground" that let's Luke "say everything he wanted to say."

Here's Luke (2:14) the way Barnstone might take up Dr. Jim West's translation challenge:

Glory to God in the highest sky
And on earth peace among people of good will.

So West's question is for us, Does Barnstone get the Greek right? In other words, does he "render it so as to make it sensible and yet retain its meaning?" This sounds a little like the middle way, the literary literal. And West's translation is pretty close to Barnstone's; West translates: "Glory to the highest God; and on earth, peace to men of good will." Barnstone clearly, however, [3] lets Luke locate God (i.e., "in the highest sky") and [3] sees that Luke does not see gender here (i.e., not even the unmarked gender "men").

Barnstone does feel the need to explain some of the Greek and his English for it. And he does so with a footnote:

From the Greek εὐδοκία (eudokia), "of goodwill" or "good pleasure," or variously translated as "whom he favors."

From how Barnstone has explained his approach, he needs the footnote so as not to use his translation for a [1] gloss.  Likewise, he needs the footnote so that he can leave open other literary possibilities that might be [2] imitations of Luke's Greek.

What I like about his footnote is how Barnstone leaves open the possibility that Luke intends more possibly than "goodwill."  Nonetheless, I want to suggest that Barnstone does not afford himself another approach in translating.

The other approach is very close to the difficult [3] middle ground between [1] mere gloss and [2] mostly literary license.  The fourth [4] approach actually does let Luke have his say as much as possible.

Nonetheless, the fourth [4] approach also goes after what C.S. Lewis calls "second meanings."  These are meanings that the author may have intended unconsciously.  Language is so rich, and is so dimensioned, and the psyche is so powerful that an author might say something intentionally and not even realize it.  Or a speaker or a writer may say something, and others hear or read it, and it's taken differently in a way so that the original author protests -- but the listeners and readers intend and realize the meaning anyway.  Lewis says, for example, that Plato prophesies the "passion of Christ" in writing about the death of the ideally "righteous person."  (Of course, Plato is talking about Socrates, but he would definitely agree with Christians much later on - if they could talk about it later - they would all agree that Plato is also ideally talking about Jesus.)  Lewis, similarly, says that Virgil prophesies the Virgin birth of Jesus.  (Virgil would say he didn't intend this at all; but some Christians since the writer wrote what he have taken it to be such a foretelling).  Lewis writes about Second Meanings in a couple of chapters in his book Reflections on the Psalms.  It's a book on how an inexpert (i.e., non-Hebraist) literary scholar who's an atheist turned Christian reflects (as an outsider) on the many (also Christian and also literary) meanings of the Jewish psalms.

I don't have time to consider the rhetorical listening of Krista Ratcliffe or the N-dimensionality of language for Kenneth Pike or why Phyllis Bird says, with some ironic certainty, "I am not certain, that the translator is even obliged to make the modern reader understand what is overheard."  We don't have time to talk about why this is not absolute relativism, not "anything goes."

What I do want to take time to say is that when we let Luke have his say, then we need to recognize something else.  Luke himself is translating.  He's letting angels have their say (to Mary in 2:10 and to God and all mortals in 2:!4).  There are lots of intentions and many different voices.  And Luke - the translator - is not entirely invisible.  No, he's a human like Mary listening.  Yes, he's a mortal like you and me.  And if you translate his Greek translating angel language, well then:  you also are listening rhetorically, attending to second meanings, some blatantly intended and others that take some more careful listening.

So to close:  Barnstone advocates three approaches.  And I'm saying there's another as well.  Here they are:

1) "the right way"; ("to inform") [the gloss]

or 2) "any which way";  ("to perform") [the imitation license]

or 3) "why that way?";  ("to reform") [why?  because what the author intends is so very important]

or 4) the "significant way." ("to transform") [so that meaning is made when the author intends one thing and also has other meanings that the readers and listeners discern]

I think I've tried to say things like this before.  If it's too complicated at the moment, then I'm going to take a break for now.

If you've stayed with the post this far and still have any mental energy left, I'd love to hear which "register" or "approach" you think you've taken in translating Luke 2:14.  Or what do you think about others' translations with respect to Barnstone's 3 and this 4th approach mentioned?

Part 4, Dynamic UnEquivalence: Nida v. Jin (and Gayle)

Somebody at the Better Bibles Blog called Eugene Nida a “translation statesman.” It was Wayne Leman.

(And I thought to myself, “Cicero, the statesman of translation.”)

Wayne later just as publicly accused me of caricaturing Nida. Wayne made what he claimed was a “safe” assumption that I had not read Nida or Nida disciples very widely or deeply. His evidence for his rather flimsy claim was the fact that I had quoted early Nida (because nobody else had quoted Nida in his very own words); I used direct quotations and had applied these statements by this "statesman" to actual examples of Bible translation that others in the comment thread were bringing in. And Wayne went even further, to say, to me, not to you, rather pointedly, directly, and even repeatedly: “I would, again, refer you to the actual writings of the Bible societies people, people trained by Nida, to find out that they are concerned with the very things you are concerned about, but which you claim DE people are not.” And so Wayne directed me, not you, to some books, as if this would help me get them and read them faster, presuming, by his claim, that I have not already read very deeply or widely the disciples of Nida who have moved on from their teacher; Wayne linked to the first-published jointly-authored book by Lynell Zogbo and Ernst Wendland and two other books by Wendland.

(And I thought to myself, “I wonder why didn’t Wayne mention and link to Zogbo’s and Wendland’s more recent book, Prophetic Rhetoric: Case Studies in Text Analysis and Translation.”)

[Please do note, dear reader, the comments below here, the on-going exchange between Wayne Leman and me.  He's wanting you not to see my comments here about him, in this post here above the comments, to be the first ones you read.  And, agreeing with him, I'd actually advise you to go back to the BBB comment thread to read it for yourself if you are interested in how different it might be from how I've framed here in my post what he wrote at the BBB.  In fairness to Wayne, he's continued to appeal to me, saying, "Again, I would encourage you to revise your first comments about me in your post, especially since they are the first things people read in your post. And you know how important the first and last things are for readers in terms of memory retention of the contexts of something they have read."  This is Wayne's caution to you, my dear reader.  Please read as you will, critically if you can.]

The conversation at BBB is winding down. Wendland has contributed frequently, constantly pressing everybody to move on beyond Nida. More than that, Wenland has made two recent comments in which he even “steers” BBB readers away from his “own stuff” – his publications, even the two with Zogbo, that move on from Nida – and Wendland goes on to “recommend just five older, (I would say) classic works, for starters.” He recommends three books by Robert Alter, including his Literary Guide to the Bible with Frank Kermode, and two books by Leland Ryken, including his Complete Literary Guide to the Bible with Tremper Longman III. Then Wenland agrees with Wayne on one final point, finally saying the following: “[M]uch more interdisciplinary work is necessary in the field of Bible translation. Intra-disciplinary as well, I would say—that is, interacting with the field of secular translation studies.” He urges BBB readers to go to the SIL center in Dallas next month for “Bible Translation 2011” after he’s made this final, parting comment: “Secular translators need to keep up with what’s going on in the theory and practice of Bible translation—and not remain with their eyes fixed, for good or ill, on Nida and his works.”

(And I thought to myself, “Eugene Nida only died 10 days ago.”)

This is now my fourth post in a series of four on Nida. Wendland’s final comment, dividing “secular” translators from “Bible” translators got me wondering how he’d classify Eunice Pike and Naomi Seidman and Lynell Zogbo and Willis Barnstone.

(And I thought to myself, the following:

I wonder how Jin Di would find himself classified by Ernst Wendland. Have the two ever met? What they have in common – regardless of some strict middle-exclusionary divisive “secular” v. “Bible” translation categorization made by Wendland in a parting comment at BBB – is that both Jin and Wendland have met Nida and want to move on. Wenland wants to move on with Bible translation, now with a more literary focus.  Jin wants to move on with secular translation and with Bible translation but with a notable difference from Nida.

Jin, of course, is perhaps best known in the USA for his translation of James Joyce’s Ulysses into Chinese. But I think he wants me, and you too, to know that he’s moved on from Nida.

In 1984, Jin and Nida co-wrote the book, On Translation: with Special Reference to Chinese and English. And then in 2006, Jin annotated and republished their entire book as Part 1. In the same 2006 volume, he added his own Part 2, several of his own essays, to explain just how far from Nida he then was.

Jin describes the difficult parting between himself and Nida. He’d disagreed with Nida over his famous and repeated appraisal of the J.B. Phillips’s translation as exemplary DE translation, a sort of watershed in the progress of Bible translation, as evidenced by Nida’s most-oft quoted example, the line: “give one another a hearty handshake all around” as opposed to the more literal “greet one another with a holy kiss.” Jin began to appeal to what works better for “a literary piece as a work of art” and began to question Nida’s linguistics as serving purposes for merely “religious translation” [see page 211 of the 2006 edition.]

In the Appendix for On Translation: An Expanded Edition, Jin publishes and comments on an interview he’d granted to John Kearnes. One section of the interview transcript is entitled, “Translation Theory and Eugene Nida.” There, Kearnes asks Jin if he would comment particularly on his work with Nida, particularly on their book, On Translation: with Special Reference to Chinese and English. Jin replies:

Sure, that was a really important link in my work on translation theory. You must have noticed that my relationship with Dr. Nida, mainly in regard to my theoretical approach to translation, was a main theme for the talk, “Literature and Exoticism” that I gave at the ceremony two days ago. . . Because of my three decades of experience in translating, I had been asked to serve at my university as a translation consultant for a group translation project and to work as a translation teacher at its new graduate school. . . . and toward the end of those 1970s I was writing first drafts of what eventually evolved into On Translation. I was giving lectures based on those drafts, and an American professor by the name of Tom Scovel found, when he attended one of my lectures, that my views were very close to Dr. Nida’s. Professor Scovel was not translator or translation theorist and did not know Dr. Nida personally but, being a warm-hearted Christian, he got in touch with Nida’s American Bible Society and helped make arrangements which enabled me to meet Dr. Nida in the U.S. in 1982. . . [D]uring the year, and for each chapter of the book I traveled to Greenwich, Connecticut where, in Dr. and Mrs. Nida’s very hospitable house, he and I discussed my draft and brought it into shape.

The discussions were very thoroughgoing. . . . I was and am still extremely grateful to him for the time and energy he generously put into this close collaboration, and in particular for the theoretical orientation based on the concept of equivalent effect that he had treated in his books . . . .

I believe On Translation, published in 1984, was and remains a sound exposition of the principles of translation and has been particularly useful for translation practitioners and students with the examples it provides. In the mid-1908s I began to deviate from Nida’s teachings in one particular aspect of the concept of dynamic equivalence, as I explained in my talk “Literature and Exoticism.” I don’t think we have time to go into that in this interview, but . . . in 1987 I sent Dr. Nida a copy of my typescript of the very first article I wrote which indicated that deviation. Obviously he did not like it, for he never replied to my letter . . . . [pages 304 – 305].

That Nida never replied to Jin was most difficult. Neither man was trying to reconcile the difference in their [Bible] translation theory. Jin’s theory departed from Nida’s. But, more importantly, Nida left Jin in silence.)

Nida has left all of us and is now silent. Like Cicero, the translation statesman, he’s left us with a theory perhaps dynamically equivalent to that of the Roman rhetorician. As we all know, Nida loved to quote, and even at times misquoted, Cicero. We have their words.

(And I thought to myself, I’m not so sure we all need to rush to leave Nida behind. I’m not talking about embracing his theory now that he’sgone.

But I’m not talking about going with his project full force either. It’s the missionary ethnocentricism that is embedded in Western logic, yes even Aristotle’s and Cicero’s who were not Christians but were missionaries for their own causes, that those who would abandon Nida now still embrace. What I’m talking about is the arrogance of presuming one’s own cultural and tradition is normative for everybody else.

Let me just say again what I’m finding about translation. I’m saying this again as an evangelical Christian missionary’s kid still growing up as a third-cultural kid. I’m saying this as somebody who continues to talk with SIL/ Wycliffe Bible translators after having done lots of reading and having completed a Master’s oF arts degree in Linguistics, which involved many lectures and articles and books by Bible translators, some secular translators too, including Nida. I’m saying this as someone who will try to make it over to Dallas to SIL for their Bible translation conference next month, because a BBB contributor, David Frank, is giving a paper there and as invited me to hear his talk. I’m saying this as somebody who applies his linguistics training to higher education work every single work day of the year. I’m saying this as someone who has a ph.d. in language, in rhetorics and in Aristotle’s Rhetoric of Athens and now of the West and in its reception and its translation.

What I’m finding is that Nida’s dynamic translation theory is too reductive. It’s complicit in what Nancy Mairs sees as the “fundamental structure of the patriarchy”: the binary. Good translations do many different things. They engage, alternatively, in what Robert E. Quinn has called, in a far different academic context, the “telling strategy,” the “forcing strategy,” the “negotiating strategy,” and the “self transforming strategy.” Statesman Nida, I believe, engaged in the “forcing strategy.” That is, he forces receptors of Bible translations to stay in their own cultures and prevents them from engaging in the Other. This post is already going way too long to explicate this any further. [Elsewhere, there's another 4-part series on something like this that went on something like that:  part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4.]

I do want to acknowledge, nonetheless, that although Wayne has accused me of being ignorant of Nida and of his later disciples and of failing to read, he’s also apologized at BBB to me in a sense. I have no hard feelings. And I do want you to know that I believe that Wayne, despite his entrenched views on missionary Bible translation, is one who engages nonetheless in “self transformative strategies.”  And that is, in fact, a very very good thing.

Wayne, in comments at another BBB post, made these precious statements. In email, he has given me permission to repost them here:

"Similarly, I believe that Jesus set new patterns for treatment of women. He treated them with greater respect and honor than they were typically accorded in his day. We did not see abolition of slavery within Bible times nor specific calls from any biblical authors for slaves to be emancipated. Yet I believe that God has been pleased whenever emancipation has occurred, especially if it was done in a way that accorded dignity to freed slaves and helped them become financially independent.

Similarly, I don’t believe that God has been pleased when men have owned their wives. But God has tolerated inferior social systems rather than calling for changing everything within them all at once. I personally believe that a marriage model that focuses more on a woman’s submission to her husband than a husband’s duty to sacrificially love his wife is inferior and, yes, even unbiblical. I grew up in such a household. My mother had to submit to my father or else he would beat her. He beat her anyway when she did something that displeased him such as accidentally scorching potatoes when she was cooking them."

The only exception I take to Wayne's precious statement above is that I do not think that "Jesus set new patterns for treatment of women."  I strongly believe that Jewish women and men long before Jesus, who was a Jew and was not a Christian, were the ones who actually set the patterns for good treatment of women by men and by women.  Jesus, in fact, did recover them.  And that also is, in fact, a very very good thing.  Eugene Nida's DE theory and practice, I'm afraid, may have contributed to burying the good and the Jewish cultural patterns of good treatment of women.

Wayne did want me to let you know who he is by name. He said to quote him by name when I reproduced the quotations. And he added this:

“BTW, Kurk, since my father has died I now feel free to have my Al Johnson poems under my own name.
Wayne”

I’d told him I wanted to link to an older post where, also with Wayne’s permission, I reproduced one of his poems. Here it is:

http://speakeristic.blogspot.com/2010/04/until-its-safe-for-you.html.

I’m telling you all of this because I have a missionary evangelical Christian patriarch, my own father, who is in the final stages of what his doctors have told him is inoperable and incurable cancer.  He was, in some unfortunate respects, like Wayne's father.  In some fortunate turns for my father and for my mother and for all of us in my family, my father has rethought things and has made amends and has given much and has received much requested forgiveness.  There is restoration and reconcilation.  The translations are coming. The transformations and self transformations are already happening.)

I hope I’ll remember Eugene Nida and his dynamic equivalence theory for the rest of my life. Not because I believe in his missionary project. I do not. But because he’s contributed to our thinking and practices of translation, secular and Bible, theory and work that we who are still alive may and do need to continue to study. When we stop changing, when we quit remembering, when we cease from learning, we die.