Bible Translation: Barbarisms, Solecisms, and Aristotle

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

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

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

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

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

Yes, you're catching on.  So am I.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robert Crumb's Rhetoric, And How We Read It

All this is flashy rhetoric about loving you.
I never had a selfless thought since I was born.
I am mercenary and self-­seeking through and through:
I want God, you, all friends, merely to serve my turn.
--C. S. Lewis, "As the Ruin Falls"

When Robert Crumb tells us his intent (or when John Hobbins does), then that should settle it for us. The trick is to believe what he says as if he believes it himself, all the time, when he's awake. (Robert Hughes believes Crumb's a genius, an anti-modernist, a severe satirist, and so Hobbins believes that and says "I certainly am enjoying my copy" of his Genesis. Hobbins enjoys because it's intended to be satire and satire intends to offend. In my library's copy of The R. Crumb Coffee Table Art Book, there's nude pictures of Crumb's wives and his other expressions of intent: "It started as a kid when we [Crumb and his brother] would make our own home-made comics. We developed the habit of filling up notebooks with stuff.... I started looking at the old masters in books... Leonardo, everybody. I thought I wanted to draw like that, so I drew like a motherfucker! That was a breakthrough... When I look LSD... it was the road to Damascus for me!.... I was egoless, drifting along, totally passive. About the only thing I could do was just draw in my sketchbooks. It was while I was in this fuzzy state that I told my wife, Dana, I was leaving. I just walked out and left everything. I went to Chicago and stayed with Marty Pahls. I remember wandering around Chicago on the public bus aimlessly. My mind would drift into these crackly grotesque cartoon images accompanied by off-key tinny music. It was in my brain. I had no control. NO control ... which was good for art." [page 77])

A couple of days ago, I posted to bring attention to the fact that there is sexism, misogynistic rape portrayals, anti-Semitism, and other racism in Crumb's art and that few bibliobloggers reacting to his latest comic book of Genesis have noticed. Chris Brady kindly linked to that, confessed he knew little yet of Crumb while just reading his Genesis, and got us asking "the age old questions of authorial/artist intent and how much we should allow our (pre)conceptions of the author/artist influence our reading of their work."

So what does Crumb intend? What did Robert Alter intend by his English translation of Genesis? What did Moses intend when he wrote it in Hebrew (if you believe he wrote it)? What did God intend to write (if you believe he inspired or dictated what is read as Sefer Ma'aseh Be-Réshit)? And what did I intend by my post a couple of days ago (since a few of you commented to tell me, or so it seems)?

I think there are rhetorical answers to these questions. There are readerly answers to these questions. The answers go beyond anyone's ability to enjoy satire that intends to offend. To get to some of those answers, I'd like to look at a couple of things Julia O'Brien has posted recently and then at some things Karlyn Kohrs Campbell has written not too long ago and then a couple of things C.S. Lewis wrote. If there's time, maybe we'll look (again) at some of the things Alter and Crumb said and, presumably, intended.

Here's what I intend by this post: to say that authors and artists may intend one thing but always do more than they can say they intend. Readers make meanings of the rhetorics in ways the authors and artists may or may not approve of.

O'Brien posted a post she originally entitled "Rereading Trible's Rereading of Eve and Adam" and then later as (the link) "Phyllis Trible systematically shows how the tradition has misread the text." Notice what's going on here. First, there's the text of Genesis in which and out of which people have been "reading of Eve and Adam"; then there's Phyllis Trible's feminist re-reading of that traditional reading; then there's O'Brien's readers re-reading what Trible wrote; then there's O'Brien giving her own readers a more instructive title (i.e., that "the tradition has misread the text" early on according to Trible's systematic re-reading). After all of that, O'Brien brings in another Genesis reader, or re-reader, in her more recent post, "Phyllis Trible and Sojourner Truth on Eve." When you and I read that post, then we also "read" Alfre Woodard. We read Woodard's intonation and her inflection and her body language as she reads Sojourner Truth reading on Eve from Genesis. We are reading by viewing a youtube video that O'Brien has embedded in her post; we are, in fact, watching and listening to Woodard reading what turns out to be a re-reading of Sojourner Truth's speech.

We hear, starting in, Truth saying, “Well, chilern, whar dar is so much racket dar must be somethin’ out o’ kilter. I tink dat ‘twixt de niggers of de Souf and de womin at de Norf, all talkin’ ‘bout rights, de white men will be in a fix pretty soon. But what’s all dis here talkin’ ‘bout?” But this is Frances Dana Barker Gage's transcription of what Truth might have said. Karlyn Kohrs Campbell tells us that these words we hear Woodard reading are Truth’s “words” as they “appear in the argot of blackface minstrel shows” of Gage. Kohrs Campbell tells us that Gage got Truth's words from newspaper reports, which happen to be the “racist caricatures of writers such as Thomas Dixon and Thomas Nelson Page.” Kohrs Campbell was so outraged by the racist depictions that she, for her book, modified Truth's speech to what it might have really been; Kohrs Campbell explains: “When the text of Gage’s version of Truth’s speech was published in [my history text] Man Cannot Speak For Her, I removed the dialect that smothers the speech with racist stereotypes.” Now, Kohrs Campbell sees value in the racism, though in principle, as a feminist, she's opposed to such denigrations:

I now believe that it was wrong to do so [i.e., to remove the racist language of Dixon, Page, and Gage put in Truth's mouth by them], although it could not and should not have been published as originally written without the kind of analysis done here. But agency is perverse: the stereotypes that gave rise to penning the speech in this demeaning argot ironically give the text special force. Admittedly, as Truth herself illustrates, not all former slaves spoke in such language, but the women she most represented, the experiences and history she most embodied, are rendered more perfectly in language that expresses so painfully the terrible costs of slavery—the loss of literacy, the loss of education, the loss of access to public dialogue that, even when overcome, is constrained by being rendered in language that ridicules and demeans. (“Agency: Promiscuous and Protean,” Communication and Cultural/Critical Studies, 2 (March 2005): 1-18. NCA Golden Anniversary Monograph Award, 2006.)

There's rhetorical irony here. Dixon, Page, and perhaps Gage intend racism by "the argot of blackface minstrel." Kohrs Campbell would leave the racist caricature as does Woodard (and as does O'Brien) because it gives Sojourner Truth agency. Agency and rhetorical power is what the racist portrayals of her give her. What white authors intend as offending racism black rhetors may turn around and use rhetorically against racism. But never is denigrating racism made right.

So that brings us to C.S. Lewis. In the lines of his poem (my epigraph above), Lewis confesses the intention of "flashy rhetoric," which ironically hides and casts doubt upon his love for his lover, whom he addresses: "you." Each subsequent line begins with "I" - his confession that deconstructs his "flashy rhetoric" and becomes, then, a new rhetoric of humility, his now un-original rhetoric of real attention away from himself toward her, his love: "you." What is Lewis's original intent? His later intentions? His reader's (i.e., his addressed lover's) intentions as a result?  Your intentions as you analyze or enjoy Lewis's poetry?

Lewis knows that writers and rhetors don't always know what they're doing. Their intentions give way to "second meanings." And Lewis has two insightful chapters on second meanings (meanings beyond the authored and intended ones) in his book Reflections on the Psalms. Lewis's entire book is his literary critical view of Jewish Psalms from a non-Jewish (i.e., a post-atheist, anti-modern, and distinctly Christian) perspective. He talks of Plato describing Jesus Christ when intending to describe the ideal man (i.e., Socrates in his passion). Lewis also talks of Virgil's really prophesying the Virgin Birth (though the writer intends not to write about The Christian accounts that come later).

That brings us to another thing Lewis knows: readers don't always limit themselves to the meanings that authors intend. For example, in the heavily edited third edition (after the heavily edited second edition) of his allegorical autobiography that he had intended to be obscure, Lewis makes this complaint in the appendix (as if complaining aloud to his publisher for trying to make the book clearer so that it would sell better): "The map on the end leaves has puzzled some readers because, as they say, 'it marks all sorts of places not mentioned in the text'. But so do all maps in travel books. [The protagonist's] route is marked with a dotted line: those who are not interested in the places off that route need not bother with them." What Lewis is getting at is how his readers don't always follow his intention as author. But then the author was having a hard time following the intention of the publisher, who intended to follow the money of the readers.

One of my favorite Lewis quotations on author or artist intention, and the rhetorical listening of readers, is in his essay "Transposition." Lewis is talking about the Christian interpretations of "speaking in tongues," and "transposition" is the taking of one form and putting it into another. It's like taking the Beatles song "A Hard Day's Night" and putting it into the form of "lift music" or "elevator music" - not exactly what John Lennon intended when writing and performing the song with his band or when making an entire album around it or when transposing all of that into a film by the same title. It's like taking God's words presumably, writing them down (if you're Moses), translating them into English (if you're Robert Alter), converting that into satirical offensive comic book drawings (if you're Robert Crumb), and publishing that for mass production for between $12 and $25 a book gross (if you're marketers and part of the sales force for W.W. Norton & Co. and booksellers worldwide). Lewis says, "I have tried to stress throughout the inevitableness of the error made about every transposition by one who approaches it from the lower medium only. The strength of such a critic [perhaps of Robert Hughes appreciating Robert Crumb's art and of John Hobbins's enjoying it] lies in the words 'merely' or 'nothing but' [as in merely and nothing but severe offensive satire with misogyny rampant]. He [the critic, whether Hughes or somebody else] sees all the facts but not the meaning [especially not even the second meanings, the rhetorics]. Quite truly, therefore, he claims to have seen all the facts. There is nothing else there; except the meaning[s that the critic, from his position, may be ignoring]. He is therefore, as regards the matter in hand, in the position of an animal. You will have noticed that most dogs cannot understand pointing. You point to a bit of food on the floor; the dog, instead of looking at the floor, sniffs at your finger. A finger is a finger to him, and that is all. His world is all fact and not meaning[s]." (page 71 of The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses)

When Robert Alter discusses his intentions for allowing Robert Crumb to illustrate his translation, he nearly sighs on the page when Alter writes, establishing the facts, that "genitalia are never shown in the sex scenes."

So now I'm suggesting that if we listen rhetorically to what Crumb says, then we hear meanings and not just facts. Krista Ratcliffe advises that we may listen not just to the author's expressed intention but also for our intentions and with our own intentions. So listen:

His comix (which had never been particularly woman-friendly) became violently misogynistic, as he graphically poured what were essentially his masturbatory fantasies onto the printed page. Women were raped, dismembered, mutilated, and murdered, sometimes all at once.

"I do this stuff, and then I'm horrified and embarrassed when I see it on the paper, and I say, 'Oh, my God,' but somehow I can't stop doing it," Crumb says. "I have this hostility toward women," Crumb admits on camera.

Fact is, that's just offending satire. Enjoy it if you can. Never mind if you're a woman on bottom with breasts showing.

[update:  Ben Witherington III, biblioblogger, gives his opinion (as if not in the position of a woman or for women):

"What I think is that in an age of visual learners, some of this material in Crumb's book is user friendly for church and synagogue folk, though one has to pick and choose and be discerning. Lord knows our Sunday school and Bible study literature could use some updating of its images.  One grows weary of the Rococo Jesus, and Rubenesque cherubs."]

trans-apparent HIM

Below I'm demonstrating the much-taken "approach" - but just one approach taken - in order to translate gender.

Suzanne explains that this all-too-common "approach is to infer that grammatical gender reflects an underlying gender which is could be ontological, representative or metaphorical, but, which, in any case, ought to be translated." She illustrates how "using a gendered pronoun [in English translation] can alter the literal meaning of a [Greek] clause, as it appears to do in John 1:3 [where 'the word', the actual antecedent to the English pronoun, is not masculine in any way except by Greek grammatical gender].

'All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.'"

I've added the italics to make clear the correspondences. As we all know, to make "the word" masculine in English (as with the pronoun "him") is very strange. (For background, Suzanne's conveniently posted, The Intrusive Pronoun: An Index.)

But let's give most English Bible translators a break. They commonly require absolute "faithfulness" to the original text. (Never mind that they require a merely apparent faithfulness to the Greek. Never mind their faux faithfulness. Never mind their faithfulness to gender in grammar alone - masculine grammatical gender - that defies ontology, representation, and metaphor. Never mind that theirs is a faithfulness in translation that does not allow the writer, John, wordplay later in his text -- as in John 1 verse 14 here, in which the writer gives "the word" its "flesh," which is, of course, female flesh in John's Greek, grammar femaleness that is: σὰρξ, "the masculine word became feminine flesh; ὁ λόγος σὰρξ ἐγένετο." Never mind the wordplay.)

Below my illustration of this typical but absolutely "faithful" approach is a demonstration by the translation of Mark 4:13-20. This is one passage that Bible translators must get absolutely right. After all, it is the absolutely exact explanation of a wordplayful parable of the absolute Teacher. If our translation falls by the wayside, then we absolutely miss "him the word" indeed.

Please note that I'm also adding another absolute "faithfulness" in the common approach to translation of the Greek: transliteration of the words. Therefore: I give here not only (A) a very faithful "translation" of the masculine gender of the pronoun but I also provide (B) a very very faithful "translation" of the sounds of Greek using TRANSLITERATION OF GREEK SOUNDS IN CAPITAL ENGLISH LETTERS [with translator explanations in brackets]. The reader, then, gets (C) absolutely faithful "transparency" to the Greek language of Mark. The translation is a faithful (A) trans-lation of the Greek male pronoun; a fixed (B) trans-literation of the Greek male sounds; and the trans-apparent rigidly Greek language of JE-SUS.

(We'll just ignore the fact that Mark does not so faithfully "translate" or "transcribe" the grammatical gender of pronouns and the true sounds of the speaker's spoken Hebrew Aramaic. I boast here: "I am doing a better job in translation of Mark's Greek than Mark does in translation of the Jewish Joshua's Aramaic"! Please read the sarcasm here. Please know that I'm not disrespecting "THE WORD" but rather am poking fun at TECHNICAL BIBLE "TRANS-LATION" APPROACHES. Here goes.)

-------

¹³And HE [implied pronoun] said TO HIM AND TO HIM [figuratively, "to them"],

Do YOU MEN have no IDEA [from "eido"] what the meaning is of this PARA-BOWLED story [technically = "parable" with one and only one main meaning]?

And how then will YOU MEN GYKNOW [from "knowledge"=gnosko] all PARA-BLEs?

¹⁴ The SPERMER [lit. "sower of seed"] SPERMS the LOGOS [lit. "word"].

¹⁵And in the first place:

HE AND HE [fig. "they"] are the PARA-ODOS [in contrast to "Exodos"; lit. "those alongside the way"], where the LOGOS is SPERMED;

but when THESE MEN have ACOUSTICALLY RECEIVED [lit. "hear"; fig. "get it in the ear"],

then SATAN [note: "we all know who HE is"] comes EU-THEOS [rhymes in Greek with 'good god'; lit. "immediately"],

and HE ERECTS [lit. "lifts up"] the LOGOS that was SPERMED in the KARDIA [fig. "hearts"] of HIM AND HIM.

¹⁶And in the second place:

HE AND HE [fig. "they"] are the EPI-PETER [lit. "on the rock"] SPERMED; who, when HE and HE have ACOUSTICALLY RECEIVED the LOGOS, receive HIM EU-THEOS with CHARA [lit. "joy"];

¹⁷And HE AND HE [fig. "they"] are the possessed by a root in HIMSELF AND HIMSELF,

and HE AND HE [fig. "they"] so endures but for a PROS--> KAIROS [fig. "a time"]:

afterward, when affliction or persecution has that GENESIS of HIM AND HIM [fig. "them"] for the sake of the LOGOS,

then EU-THEOS immediately HE AND HE [fig. "they"] are SKANDALIZED.

¹⁸And in the third place:

HE AND HE [fig. "they"] are SPERMED among thorns; such ACOUSTICALLY RECEIVE the LOGOS,

¹⁹And the cares of this AGE [αἰῶνος], and the deceitfulness of riches, and the EPI-THUMOS [lit. "desires on" fig "lusts"] of other things together enter in, choke the LOGOS, and have unfruitful GENESIS.

²⁰And in the fourth place:

HE AND HE [fig. "they"] are SPERMED on good GYNESIS GYN GEN [fig. "ground" as in "geo" graphy and "geo" "LOGY"];

such as ACOUSTICALLY RECEIVE the LOGOS, and receive [implied Greek "HIM" grammatically - not "it"], and PARA-bring forth fruit, some thirtyfold, some sixty, and some an hundred.

------

Hmmm. Maybe Μάρκος and יְהוֹשֻׁעַ‎, (Mark and Joshua, aka Jesus) were taking an-Other approach to translating gendered pronouns and gendered sounds and interlated language transparencies.

Eye-Popping Post!

Two semesters before I started learning ancient Greek, I started learning modern Japanese. My roommate was from Japan, and got frustrated with me for using おめでと (or 御目出度) to mean literally "eye-popping." In Japan, of course, "omedeto" is the phrase for "congratulations," not for "eye popping" of any kind. But my other Japanese friend on campus named himself "Earl Farley" using American English sounds for "R" and "L" and "F" for which there are no equivalents in Japanese. We loved to play with each others' language, Earl Farley and eye-popping me.

Today, Wayne Leman has this great discussion going following his interesting post at BBB, "This post will open your eyes." The example he gives is from Matthew who is, I think, probably using a Greek-translated Hebrew idiom. But the conversation opens with John Hobbins' wonderful question about whether the BBB blog has mainly "promoted the dynamic translation philosophy." John confesses he's looked for some "positive information regarding the literal translation philosophy."  UPDATE:  ALTHOUGH JOHN HOBBINS DOES PROTEST DE TRANSLATION IN THIS POST, HE CLARIFIES HERE THAT IT'S ANOTHER JOHN WHO MAKES THESE COMMENTS THAT I'M REFERRING TO.

I told my story of wordplay with the Japanese (and Earl's with our English) because I'm making the point here that literal translation often offers the most word play. And the original native speaker doesn't always get to decide how others play with her language. Nor does the linguist or scholar always get to decide what plays best.

Since we're talking about the limits of "dynamic translation philosophy," here's a bit of helpful insight from translator Reynolds Price, from pages 20-22 of his Three Gospels:

Despite such a likably humane doctrine as what might be called the universality of the human heart in all times and places, it remains beyond doubt that human beings alive on the same day in the same city block—not to speak of different countries and centuries—will witness, reflect on, and respond to equal stimuli in ways as divergent as an infant’s and a leopard’s. Can any of us claim seriously to feel at all confident of sharing the feelings of a poor Roman Jew—or a Roman’s senator’s well-heeled wife—as they sat together in a threatened domus ecclesia (a house church) in the mid-sixties AD and listened as Mark or some literate friend read the agony scene in Mark’s gospel—Jesus terrified in the lonely hours before his arrest—while, a few yards away, Nero’s or Galba’s police combed the streets fro bodies to feed an imperial craving for scapegoats? Or try imagining the contrary pulls on a young Greek sailor as he paused near the harbor in Ephesus by the great temple of Artemis with its many-breasted statue of the goddess, and then chose to follow a gently importunate man from the Jesus sect up a blind alley into a dim room to hear the ancient Beloved Disciple recount Jesus’ fourth and last appearance after death. Now try to convey your imagined experience to others less resourceful than you.

Such exercises are both entirely legitimate and also laughable; they smack more of the ludicrous Hollywood fumblings in Quo Vadis or Ben Hur. In fact, we have no firm notion of how it felt to exist in Rome, Palestine, or Asia Minor some two thousand years ago—burdened with all the assumptions and hopes of our past lives. . . .

Archaeology has often made it possible for us to imagine clearly enough the look of ancient life. What is certain to be lost forever is the feel and the tone of specific moments in prior centuries—the million unexamined assumptions that underlie the thoughts and actions of a particular human being at a given moment. Especially irrecoverable are the thoughts and choices, the fears of and reliance on the realms of angels and demons, of that large majority of people who never read or wrote a word but were sure that they lived at the momentary mercy of overlord, goblins, not to speak of an unimagined world of microbes. Nonetheless, in an understandable effort to bridge the chasms between our minds and those of the gospel writers—as well as he minds of their subjects and their audiences—translators who convince themselves of possessing access to the psychic atmospheres of the first century have frequently lurched into slangy or loose-mouthed approximations that ring suspiciously wrong and pretend to strip from their subjects the immoveable screens of age and distance.

Attempts to find, for instance, what some leading students of modern translation have called a dynamic equivalence for first-century Greek are logically suspect in the extreme but have been pursued so often by individuals and groups that we now have in English several popular versions of the gospels that constitute what are well-intended but almost certainly major distortions of their originals.

(hypothetical) equivalence

[O]ne does not translate between equivalents; rather, one creates tropes of equivalence in the middle zone of translation between the host and guest languages. This middle zone of hypothetical equivalence, which is occupied by neologistic imagination, becomes the very ground for change. 

--Lydia H. Liu, Tokens of Exchange, page 137

If it is true that the translator . . . in the host language always initiates the linguistic transaction by inviting, selecting, combining, and reinventing words and texts from the guest language and, moreover, if the needs of the translator and his/her audience together determine and negotiate the meaning (i.e., usefulness) of the text taken from the guest language, then the terms traditional theorists [in the West] use to designate the languages involved in translation, such as “source” and “target/receptor,” are not only inappropriate but misleading. 

--Lydia H. Liu, Translingual Practice, page 27

My youngest child has taken up learning Mandarin.  She is twelve going on thirteen; but the language is exactly 684 years old.  We know that because this particular Chinese originated with 中原音韵, which she calls "Zhōngyuán Yīnyùn" but which the translation scholars have rendered into English as "The phonology of the Central Plains" by 周德清.  She's mastered the piano, the ukulele, won the science project at school, has scored a few goals for her soccer team, and reads and writes English fluently; so I don't think she'll have much problem getting Mandarin. Besides, many of her grandparents' friends use the language here in the US, and so do many of her dad's students at the university, and so does her own friend, Mei Fuh, who goes by May.  She also checked out "Speak in a Week: Chinese" from the local library, and is now on day 5.  She's surrounding herself with all the right teachers.

I'm being a little silly here (although everything I've written so tongue in cheek is absolutely true).  You were being most serious when you started reading those italicized epigraphs, above, by Lydia H. Liu.  

Why is my being silly and your being so serious such different things?  Did you know that Lydia Liu was once twelve going on thirteen?  

What I'd like us English speaking westerners to notice is how we play such "important" games with "equivalence" in "translation."  "Christians" reading the "Bible" are the worst at it.  But "poets" like Robert Frost give "them" (or is that "us"?) precedence.  Remember how Frost said things such as "Poetry is what gets lost in translation" and then he insisted that "Two roads!" meant "one" thing and not the other!?  He was not fooling around.  He didn't bother with Mandarin either.

I'm writing discursively again, narratively, in a blog post.  It's a "parable." 

But my bible-translating blogger friends are writing much more clearly.  "Scholarly," we presume (neither poetry nor parable).

I'm wondering if anyone will notice.  I mean, Peter Kirk posts at Better Bible Blogs mentioning, "Craig Blomberg’s interesting defence of the rendering 'brothers and sisters' [in translation] . . . [which] touches on the gender issues"; but Kirk insists that Blomberg "also goes beyond them [i.e., those specific ho-hum points on gender issues in translation] to make [rather different and even] more general important points about Bible translation."

Now, if he dares, Kirk will come over here to this blog to defend his own intentions. Or some of you other readers will defend his author's rights. And, I agree, we have to listen to what he means, and not put proverbial words in his mouth (or in this case in his hand). But I want to protest. Isn't Kirk getting away with something?

Look how one writer (i.e., Kirk) "initiates the linguistic transaction by inviting, selecting, combining, and reinventing words and texts from the" other writer (i.e., Blomberg) but how "the needs of the" first writer (i.e., Kirk; or is Kirk the second writer?) "and his . . . audience [i.e., that "audience" would be Kirk's readership with him] together determine and negotiate the meaning (i.e., usefulness) of the text" (i.e., the meaning of the original text of the first author).  Lest you missed it, I am quoting Lydia H. Liu, in English, from my epigraph above. Do you see what we've done? We claim to be so very faithful to the author and his (or her) intentions. But we always have our own intentions. And sexism doesn't need to be linked, always, to the more important points about Bible translation.

So let's keep going. Now biblioblogger Mike Sangrey is asking ("us"?) "Is it mean to not mean what you mean?" Sangrey is also quoting another author, Steve Runge, but decides what is most important that Runge says: "he talks about semantic meaning versus pragmatic effect. Translators need to get their minds around this. . . value of pragmatic effect." Sangrey ends up saying "the originally intended effect" is the most important place for translators to start because, in the end, "it’s vital to reproduce that effect." To get to all of that, Sangrey has been walking us through a text in which the author is interrupting his own narrative. (The author is also the translator of all the dialogue that Sangrey says he interrupts, but Sangrey doesn't bother to interrupt his own blog post text to get us to notice the translating. Rather, he gives us lessons on translating, which presumably starts and ends with the attempt to make equal in the target language some "intended" or "meant" original something of the "original" writer who is the only "author" to consider.) Sangrey means nothing like this: "This middle zone of hypothetical equivalence, which is occupied by neologistic imagination, becomes the very ground for change." And again, we're reading Liu in English but changing a bit what Sangrey means, as if he is not changing what Runge means, or what John means, who changed what Jesus means. (Oops, we're NOT to change what the man means, whoever he is, even if he does.)

So let me now do what Aesop and the Libyan (whom Aristotle disparged) had to do. It's what Jesus had to do too (or at least his translators had to do for him). Let me give the moral of the fable, of the parable, of that story always thrown beside our own story to effect an unequal change (in me, in us, YIKES).

The moral: "Equivalence" is always the creation of the translator. And, for the translator to pretend absolute faithfulness to the original author and the original text is one of the greatest (sexist, elitist) hypocrisies of the West.