AN APOLOGY
As April DeConick might describe it, this may be another "post on subjects that are considered marginal (even heretical, especially if there is any feminist bent) to bible studies by the men who are blogging about the bible." I am a man. I'm tired of blogging. I'd like to talk about good feminisms more and not necessarily go on blogging about the bible.
Sigh. Well, that's not true exactly. I'd like to feel that I'm not always offending other feminist bloggers and other bible bloggers by joining the two together in nice and undivided conversations. This current post, likely, won't make me feel that way. I'm writing about something likely more threatening to both my feminist friends and my biblioblogger friends than just how Homer and how the LXX have significantly impacted how I read the Bible.
Today I'm blogging about the late Kenneth Lee Pike. And I'm using his theory to talk about his theory in what might be seen as unpure, even heretical ways.
PIKE'S THEORY
Ken Pike was one of my teachers. He's largely forgotten now though he passed just a few days ago (the last day of the 20th century). Although some of you remember Pike as a personal friend and an enthusiastic colleague, many of you mostly remember Pike as a Christian missionary, or as the linguist who invented a theory called Tagmemics, or as the one who inspired Larry Wall to invent the computer language PERL, or as a "composition studies" or a "new rhetoric" scholar, or as a college professor and department chair, or as director of one of the most famous English language institutes, or as the anthropologist who coined the terms emic and etic, or as the first person on the planet to conduct a monolingual demonstration with another human being, or as a translator of the Bible who served for nearly forty years as the President of the largest organization of Bible translators in the world.
I myself don't remember Pike ever speaking about the Bible. And, in the graduate seminar on tagmemics that a few of us took with him, and in his home when he invited us there, and in all of the many things I've read that he wrote, he never discussed or even mentioned feminism either.
So how can I say "Kenneth Pike's theory is feminist" or that his influence on how I read the Bible is?
(Wouldn't it be much easier to say, as Keith D. Miller does, that the scholarship of Jim W. Corder is "radical, feminist rhetoric"? Or, as Nancy Mairs does, that the project of Michel de Montaigne rightly "begins to sound like a feminist project"? Perhaps. But believe me when I say these are no easy things to say. I know. I've been in Corder's home and have chatted with him there before his second wife, the one he left for his first, became his widow. And I've heard from Mairs that Montaigne was "thoroughly masculine" as he maintained that "constant reliance on prior patriarchal authority" and made many statements that are sexist [i.e., “'You are too noble-spirited,' he was able to write to the Comtesse de Gurson when she was expecting her first child, 'to begin otherwise than with a male'”].)
What is remarkable about Pike was his willingness to listen to how we talk about reality. This willingness is part and parcel of his theory. And he enthusiastically embraced the choices, for example, of the astrophysicist who could choose, perhaps unconsciously, to talk about "light" alternatively in terms of "particles" and / or in terms of "waves" and / or in terms of "fields." That is, light can be and is talked about in light of its measurable properties. Light is talked about in with respect to its ephemeral margins and its wavelengths. Moreover, light can be discussed in relation to other things talked about, such as time and space and matter, as if the ground in the gestalt psychologist's field. Person, Pike would often say, is above logic. And by that he meant this: neither Aristotle's nature described by Aristotle's logic nor Plato's formalized ideal of nature must force us persons to talk mechanistically. Pike says we persons are "able to use all three approaches as alternative ways to view every situation as static, dynamic, or relational according to the current needs and interests of the observer."
(Wow. That sounds so jargony. So complex. So boringly theoretical.)
The exciting thing about Pike's theory is that it is personal. It takes into account a person's talk about reality, whether that reality is Light or the bible or anything else. How a person talks about reality is largely a matter of her choice.
She might talk about The Bible as a particle with well defined boundaries, as a precise canonized collection of certain specific books and not others. She might talk about the bible as also The Forbidden Gospels or as also something translated and continually being translated or as fragments of texts some day to be discovered in an archaeological dig in 2017 AD -- descriptions like waves that form and crest and crash. She might talk about the Bible in relation to other books or in relation to her synagogue or in relation to somebody's church or in relation to the patriarchy or in relation to any scholarly field.
Pike's theory and practice also takes into account whether the observer's language is insider language or outsider language. If she's observing and listening in to another, then she's on the outside (using etic talk); and when she's on the insider she uses different talk (emic forms, which may go unnoticed like water to the fish and air to the bird). Emic and etic languages are very different. The Bible, to its observer, may be written in language that marginalizes her, that puts her on the outside. She might be Phyllis A. Bird talking about the Bible, saying that her outsider perspective is "to overhear an ancient conversation, rather than to hear [one]self addressed directly." And as a Bible translator from the margins, she could add, as Bird does: "I am not certain, that the translator is even obliged to make the modern reader understand what is overheard." She, the observer, might be Adele Berlin who narrates about narrative; she talks about the bible saying: "...narrative is a form of representation. Abraham in Genesis is not a real person any more than the painting of an apple is real fruit." The point of such talk is to appreciate the bible from her outsider perspective but it is not to presume she's an insider.
An even more fascinating aspect of Pike's theory is his humble acknowledgment that observations change both the observer, in the observing, and the observed. Pike put it this way: "the observer universally affects the data and becomes part of the data." If you know afrafeminist Jacqueline Jones Royster, then you know how much Pike sounds like her and she like him, and how much more she just-as-personally develops this understanding of the observer in the data.
(Maybe I'll post next on Royster and how she's influenced my bible reading. For now, I should say I read the bible as an outsider, as one changed by and changing it too as I read. Haven't had much time here in the post. Have left out the references the citations for the quotations above. Will supply them eventually perhaps and most definitely if you ask for them. Time's up.)
Showing posts with label kenneth lee pike. Show all posts
Showing posts with label kenneth lee pike. Show all posts
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Saturday, May 30, 2009
You Are A Radical Relativist!
In this post, I'd like to expose you: You are a radical relativist! Before you deconstruct me, take a look at yourself. Listen to your own language. Okay, I'll help you out: listen to mine. These are "true" statements, of mine:
We construct and we deconstruct our realities by language. Benjamin Whorf began talking about that. Brent Berlin and Paul Kay chatted about everyone else chatting about colors. Ed Sapir took it all further. Kenneth Pike even further. These guys are feminists. Now, I hear you all saying to me: No way. So I'm asking you, No way What? And most of you say, No way these fellows were women activists. They are linguists. And some of you linguists say, Yeah, and they are structuralists. And I ask, Did I say that?
You see what we're doing, don't you? We're not listening to each other! We're talking past one another. We're assuming linguistic categories differently. "Women, fire, and dangerous things," are not all the same thing in English we all agree until we start reading that huge book of George Lakoff. He is not a feminist but a feminist taunter, I say. And while you're choosing words with which to protest, I add: "And Ernst-August Gutt, whom bible translators are looking to today to appropriate so-called 'Relevance' Theory for their work, is not a feminist either." What? most of you reply while still thinking of how women like Claudia Camp and Frances Young can so easily not be the feminists that Phyllis Trible is.
You are thinking their positions, and your very own, are not radically relative. Right? You love your own language and how it chunks your own reality for you. You love to see how awfully my language chunks your own reality. Which is Reality. And so you say so really in the space of a blog comment box.
But, my friend, think again please. You are a radical relativist!
Take your letter A, and it's shape. Write it by hand. Type it by finger. Did you write it the same way each time? Now teach it to a NON-native speaker of English, your English. Teach the fundamental absolute shape of the letter A in your alphabet to a native speaker and writer of Chinese. What is it? Do you see how many many different shapes you allow? Just for lower case? What if you chose the other shape of upper case? What if you've worn out the letter A on your keyboard. Wh^t if you h^d to use a different ch^r^cter for the letter ^? Do you see how toler^nt you h^ve been? How rel^tive! You r^dic^l! You w^nt your Chinese friend to underst^nd, don't you? Who t^ught you? Your mother? Your schoolte^cher? Remember how forgiving she was of you? Remember how forgiving you were of yourself?
---
My linguistics prof, Kenneth L. Pike, never called himself a feminist. Then again, he didn't call "emics" and "etics" what anthropologist Marvin Harris called these Pikean terms for "insider" and "outsider" perspectives. Pike was fascinated that scientists (the most rigid observers of all) could use variable language for "light." It's a "particle," it's a "wave," it's a "field." It depends on what's most useful. But Pike went beyond pragmatics. He'd always say, "person above logic." "Logic is formalism." "Persons and persons choosing radically relative perspectives are always above and prior to the formal rules they choose." "Okay, language may have some of the formal properties Noam Chomsky perceives it has, but language is also N-dimensional. N is infinite. We people are infinite in our choosings." Pike also told us his students of a moment when he was a student: One of his teachers one day was trying to overcome Plato's problem when he declared to the class, "What we really need in language is for one word to have one and only one meaning." (The teacher, I think, had been reading too much of Aristotle - but that is my aside to this little story.) Pike tells us his students how he responded to this teacher of his: "But sir," he protested, "how then would we learn language." Do you see how radical a question (how rhetorical!) it is?! Pike knows that learning language depends on it's N-dimensionality. If language for everyone is always and only chunked exactly the same way, then how will our mothers teach us? We need adjectives to modify our nouns. We need metaphors to give nuance to construct differently our worlds. Pike loved to quote Nelson Goodman saying, What we need is "radical relativism within rigid restraints." What most of us want to imagine most of the time (and it is absolutely pure imagination) is that there must only be rigid restraints. Thank God you are a radical relativist!
- I am a linguist.
- I am a native speaker of Vietnamese.
- I am a native speaker of English.
- My Vietnamese is Southern Vietnamese; my southern Vietnamese is Saigonese; my saigonese is 5-toned only.
- My English is Southern American English; my southern american english is Texan probably only less drawled than my maternal grandfather's.
- Blue is not green.
- Xanh is the Vietnamese word for blue and for green.
- Xanh is xanh; xanh is not not xanh.
- I am a fan of Bob Dylan's "Tangled Up in Blue."
- I am someone who almost entitled this post "Tangled Up in Green."
- Noam Chomsky is more clever than he thinks he is by creating his novel utterance: "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously."
- "Colorless green" is still a color.
- "Colorless green" is an illustration of much much more than just abstract grammar categories or than unbounded nonsensicalness otherwise.
- The river I step into is still the same river.
- A pile of grain is a heap.
- You and I are much much more forgiving and forgiven than we can even imagine.
- Abortion is murder.
- Abortion is a woman's legal choice in the United States of America.
- I am a feminist.
- You are a radical relativist!
We construct and we deconstruct our realities by language. Benjamin Whorf began talking about that. Brent Berlin and Paul Kay chatted about everyone else chatting about colors. Ed Sapir took it all further. Kenneth Pike even further. These guys are feminists. Now, I hear you all saying to me: No way. So I'm asking you, No way What? And most of you say, No way these fellows were women activists. They are linguists. And some of you linguists say, Yeah, and they are structuralists. And I ask, Did I say that?
You see what we're doing, don't you? We're not listening to each other! We're talking past one another. We're assuming linguistic categories differently. "Women, fire, and dangerous things," are not all the same thing in English we all agree until we start reading that huge book of George Lakoff. He is not a feminist but a feminist taunter, I say. And while you're choosing words with which to protest, I add: "And Ernst-August Gutt, whom bible translators are looking to today to appropriate so-called 'Relevance' Theory for their work, is not a feminist either." What? most of you reply while still thinking of how women like Claudia Camp and Frances Young can so easily not be the feminists that Phyllis Trible is.
You are thinking their positions, and your very own, are not radically relative. Right? You love your own language and how it chunks your own reality for you. You love to see how awfully my language chunks your own reality. Which is Reality. And so you say so really in the space of a blog comment box.
But, my friend, think again please. You are a radical relativist!
Take your letter A, and it's shape. Write it by hand. Type it by finger. Did you write it the same way each time? Now teach it to a NON-native speaker of English, your English. Teach the fundamental absolute shape of the letter A in your alphabet to a native speaker and writer of Chinese. What is it? Do you see how many many different shapes you allow? Just for lower case? What if you chose the other shape of upper case? What if you've worn out the letter A on your keyboard. Wh^t if you h^d to use a different ch^r^cter for the letter ^? Do you see how toler^nt you h^ve been? How rel^tive! You r^dic^l! You w^nt your Chinese friend to underst^nd, don't you? Who t^ught you? Your mother? Your schoolte^cher? Remember how forgiving she was of you? Remember how forgiving you were of yourself?
---
My linguistics prof, Kenneth L. Pike, never called himself a feminist. Then again, he didn't call "emics" and "etics" what anthropologist Marvin Harris called these Pikean terms for "insider" and "outsider" perspectives. Pike was fascinated that scientists (the most rigid observers of all) could use variable language for "light." It's a "particle," it's a "wave," it's a "field." It depends on what's most useful. But Pike went beyond pragmatics. He'd always say, "person above logic." "Logic is formalism." "Persons and persons choosing radically relative perspectives are always above and prior to the formal rules they choose." "Okay, language may have some of the formal properties Noam Chomsky perceives it has, but language is also N-dimensional. N is infinite. We people are infinite in our choosings." Pike also told us his students of a moment when he was a student: One of his teachers one day was trying to overcome Plato's problem when he declared to the class, "What we really need in language is for one word to have one and only one meaning." (The teacher, I think, had been reading too much of Aristotle - but that is my aside to this little story.) Pike tells us his students how he responded to this teacher of his: "But sir," he protested, "how then would we learn language." Do you see how radical a question (how rhetorical!) it is?! Pike knows that learning language depends on it's N-dimensionality. If language for everyone is always and only chunked exactly the same way, then how will our mothers teach us? We need adjectives to modify our nouns. We need metaphors to give nuance to construct differently our worlds. Pike loved to quote Nelson Goodman saying, What we need is "radical relativism within rigid restraints." What most of us want to imagine most of the time (and it is absolutely pure imagination) is that there must only be rigid restraints. Thank God you are a radical relativist!
Sunday, November 2, 2008
Where the Wild Things Are
Maurice Sendak's book, Where the Wild Things Are, was banned by my son's Christian preschool in Virginia, once upon a time. (I guess it is just too wild. The language play certainly is.) It is absolutely one of our favorite books.
Now, one of my favorite bloggers, John F. Hobbins, speaks of "the metalepsis of Maurice Sendak's book." Hobbins is pointing to the children's book rightly to defend and explain his very own brilliant translation of Genesis 3:1 (in his post, "On the Importance of Taking the Bible Literally"):
The serpent was the shrewdest / most nakedly cunning / smoothest operator of all the wild things the Lord God made.If you've read the Hebrew, then you can see just how wonderful the translating by Hobbins is. As he correctly notes, "A verse like this has to be taken literally in severally different interlocking ways before it can be grasped non-literally, which is, after all, its ultimate literal (genre-accurate) meaning." His is a "a translation that preserves metaphors and more generally, the vehicles of complex genres (genres to be read at more [than] one level, literal and so-called non-levels)." Hobbins is saying that language works on multiple levels.
Which reminds me of something linguist Kenneth L. Pike used to tell some of us. Pike used to say language is personal, that persons make meanings by language. Persons are above logic, always prior to its formalism for language and for translation. He used to call language "n-dimensional," which meant, for him and then for us, that "n" is "infinite," because our sloppy languages really are without (many) limits. (He'd struggle with that infinity thing, and would paraphrase Nelson Goodman in Ways of Worldmaking, saying "What we need is radical relativism within rigid restraints." He used to get upset with deconstructionists who would try to take authority away from authors, so he thought, and postmodern anthropologists who would question the work of missionary anthropologists. He was initially unhappy with the "materialist" anthropologist Marvin Harris, who coopted Pike's neologisms "emic" and "etic" and began using them in radically different, "wild" ways.) But, Pike was always a learner, teaching us to learn. And he told this wild story, a true one, of one of his own teachers. That teacher would, professorially, stand up in front of his pupils and declare: "What we need, really, is for each word of any given language to have one and only one meaning." Young Kenneth replied with a rather wild answer, a question: "How then, sir, would we ever learn language?" Now, in my dissertation, I'm calling the methods of my teacher Pike something that he himself never called his methods, something wild: "feminist rhetorical translating." (The astute observational method of Pike is itself a metalepsis! It's right where the wild things are! And my apologies for this paragraph being so jargony. Please keep going, and you'll get Sendak again, and Max, his wild things, and mamá, his mother too.)
If you don't as easily grasp Hebrew, like Hobbins does, and if you more readily understand English and Spanish and French and German and Finnish and Swedish and American Sign Language (ASL), then try something else. Get your copies of Sendak's book in these languages. And compare them.
A reader-reviewer at amazon.com has done just that (i.e., read Where the Wild Things Are in English and in Spanish and French translations). Notice the difference the astute reviewer notices:
I like this in English, LOVE it in Spanish and deplore the French translation.Notice that some translations can, on the one hand, be "bad" and "awful."
The spanish moves along smoothly, neatly matching the english yet retaining enough of its own flavor so that it's not a painful literal translation of the original (see: Cat in the Hat for awful translation).
The french translation is so bad I couldn't get more than a few pages in before I lost it in crankiness. Results in a very different feel/flow.
Researcher Riitta Oittinen looks at Sendak's book in translation "as rereading and rewriting: every time a book is translated, it takes on a new language, a new culture, and new target-language readers."
I've linked to Oittinen's fascinating, wild article, below. She examines the Finnish, Swedish, German, and English versions of Where the Wild Things Are. She confesses something subjective, something very personal (in contrast to Aristotle's impersonal logic): "The reasons why I take such a special interest in translating picture books are twofold: cultural and national as well as individual. In Finland, we translate a lot: 70-80% of all the books published for children annually are translations."
And, for my daughter who signs, there are Charles Katz's wonderfully textured versions, wild ones too, in ASL. And soon for all of us, there's a new film adaptation of the book.
Look, listen, enjoy on many levels (and then send those wild things off where they belong in the proper ways):
four different ASL translations by Charles Katz
"Where the Wild Things Are: Translating Picture Books" by Riitta Oittinen
the book transposed to film
su mamá le dijo: "¡ERES UN MONSTRUO!"
y Max le contestó: "¡TE VOY A COMER!"
y lo mandaron a la cama
his mother called him "WILD THING!"
and Max said "I'LL EAT YOU UP!"
so he was sent to bed without eating anything.
---
"¡Basta ya!" gritó Max y ordenó a los monstruos que se fueran a la cama sin cenar.
"Now stop!" Max said and sent the wild things off to bed without their supper.
Monday, March 24, 2008
feminist Bible translation: not "anything goes" but a lot more personal
Suzanne McCarthy has announced a series of posts on the translation of a Hebrew Psalm. She’s looking at a variety of issues, some of which I’ve found include the question of ambiguity. Ambiguity is something modernists and masculinists tend not to favor in language, especially when it comes to Bible translation. But, in this post, I am going to make a big deal out of ambiguity for better (Bible) translation. For a feminist translation, ambiguity is huge. Ambiguity actually and ironically helps the best translators disambiguate to make meanings clear, to make the text more “wholly” and personally meaningful. And, below, I want to explain that and then illustrate it with a feminist translation of a Greek language passage my pastor had us read for the Easter Sunday sermon. It’s just a snippet of a narrative: Luke 24:8-12.
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Let’s make six things clear initially. First, McCarthy is not necessarily making the arguments I am. In fact, she states very cogently in a comment on her first post in her series that she “cannot perceive what relevance gender might have to this post”; I’d raised the issue that a particular Hebrew word is ambiguous in multiple ways, even with respect to grammatical gender. (In an update here, I note that McCarthy suggests ambiguity needs to be "resolved" in or by translation, especially of the Christian scriptures.)
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Second, I’m not trying to invent ambiguity where it does not exist, but I will agree with Richard Rhodes that I find much more ambiguity in language than he feels is necessary or is necessarily there. Ambiguity, I must say, has its limits; even though we users of language enjoy what Nelson Goodman calls “radical relativism,” there are what Nelson Goodman says are “rigid restraints”
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Third, then, the radical relativism of language, including ambiguity, is related to several things Kenneth L. Pike observes about language. [Pike’s a teacher of mine who’s profoundly influenced my thinking about these things. Pike is as much interested in the nature of language as he is how we human beings look at—i.e., theorize—and talk about—i.e., know—language. The first SIL staff member and Wycliffe Bible Translator to earn a Ph.D., Pike began with some very radical ideas; his acclaimed dissertation “A Reconstruction of Phonetic Theory,” completed in 1942, foreshadowed postmodern methods as it emphasized the need for reworking rigid, traditional and modern ways of viewing language. With one of his favorite books—Language in Relation to a Unified Theory of Human Behavior—Pike commenced emphasizing “a wholistic view.” In a later introductory book—the book Linguistic Concepts, which he had some of us his students read for a seminar on this “wholistic view” —Pike starts with the following one-sentence paragraph: “In this volume person (and relation between persons) is given theoretical priority above formalism, above pure mathematics, above idealized abstractions” (page xi).] Language, Pike says, is N-Dimensional with respect (a) to hierarchy of features; (b) to salient context and unity of features; and (c) to “fusion, merging, gradients, change, growth, education, and indeterminancies” (xi). Persons may and do determine whether to view language as (a) field, (b) particle, or (c) wave. Persons are above logic. One person can learn another person’s language, not in spite of ambiguity and not just by formal logic, but because of such ambiguity and because we all are above such logic. Persons make language ambiguous, and radically so.
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Fourth, I think confusing (1) ambiguity with (2) postmodernism or with (3) feminism or with (4) gender difference is not helpful. Aristotle can be of help to us here; for he does not want confusion of categories (and absolutely, in language, he does not want ambiguity; and he does name ambiguity as a category of language to avoid). And yet, I can’t agree more with Cheryl Glenn who puzzles over the male-only histories of western rhetoric; Glenn, who reads the masculinist and modernist accounts of rhetoric’s history says that, helpfully, “[p]ostmodernism influences our resistant readings of the paternal narrative, particularly since it demands our awareness of situatedness, our angle (in my case [i.e., in Glenn’s case], reading as a feminist, as a woman)” (page 5 of Rhetoric Retold). Glenn, “as a feminist, as a woman,” and as a postmodernist, employs “three methodologies” which she calls “three angles”: “historiography (which informs the entire enterprise of feminist remappings); feminism (which specifically works to situate female rhetorical figures); and gender studies (which refigure gender as a category for historiographical analysis)” (page 4). Here we begin to see some methodology overlap. We might call it methodological ambiguity. For Glenn, ambiguity, postmodernism, feminism, and gender studies all “do” different things; and nonetheless they still all do similar sorts of things. For me, Glenn and Pike do similar things, even though Pike resists some rather non-Pikean forms of “postmodernism” and even though he never called himself a “feminist.” For that matter, Glenn and Carolyn Custis James do similar things. The former situates the predominately male history of classical rhetoric from the perspective of women; the latter rewrites the predominately male history in the Bible from the perspective of women. Nonetheless, Custis James is not an academician using postmodernism, feminism, or gender studies per se. What is common for Pike, Glenn, and Custis James is this: language is ambiguous because of persons. Feminism as methodology set is also ambiguous because it speaks to feminism also as the aim or goal to be achieved by the method. Hence, Glenn can situate herself postmodernly “as a feminist, as a woman”; likewise, I can situate myself personally “as a feminist, as a man.” McCarthy, Pike, and Custis James might rather situate themselves as linguists and Christians and historians (who may or may not admit to doing the kinds of things I want to follow Glenn in doing, as a feminist). The personal, and the ambiguities created by persons, allow us to tease out and to embrace the differences as long as, feministically, our epistemology works out the self evident truths that all men and women are created equal. (Aristotle insists on formal logic that would dictate to us no ambiguity; his end is to confirm by objective observation what is nature—including the nature of males over females and of logic over subjective rhetoric and of an original Greek text over any translation into a barbarian mother tongue.)
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Fifth, when I call what I’m doing “feminist translating,” I am emphasizing as much the methodologies as I am what the methodologies produce. I am not, for example, wanting to go “Beyond the Personal,” not wanting to go beyond the methods of feminisms, which is what Joy S. Ritchie and Gesa E. Kirsch want to do when one of their students turns to Christianity and when they conclude, therefore, that her move is now necessarily opposed to feminism, which their ultimate goal (but no longer their method) in “Theorizing a Politics of Location in Composition Research.” In addition, I am not wanting to use a methodology that is not also part and parcel of the aim of the method. This, for instance, is what Ann Nyland is wanting to do by using ambiguity in language combined with the applied “Relevance Theory” of Bible translator Ernst-August Gutt for her goal: a Study New Testament for Lesbians, Gays, Bi, and Transgender. Nyland may rightly challenge whether the “word arsenokoites in 1 Cor. 6:9 and 1 Tim. 1:10” in English should be “homosexual”; nonetheless, she turns to Gutt and even to E. D. Hirsch for methodology to say that “[t]he reader’s context determines how a certain passage will be understood.” What Gutt does (and Hirsch and Nyland with him) is to resort to a reader’s-context method of masculinist logic. Such logic (i.e., “this context but NOT that one”) may find ambiguity determined. Such logic is not—and I will emphasize this emphatically here—such logic is not a methodology that is lesbian, gay, bi, or transgender. (Generally, the Nyland translation gets favorable reviews by bloggers at BBB; it seems “accurate” in the places spot checked.) Nyland uses Gutt’s “relevance theory” for her method (to achieve her lesbian, gay, bi, and transgender translation) which is a method that is not Pike’s tagmemics nor is any of Glenn’s three angles either. Feminist translating uses both a personal methodology and also (by those angles) works the personal aim of valuing females as equally as males are valued; a feminist translation valorizes the personal connections that a person using language makes, regardless of and with regard to gender especially.
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Sixth, when I call what I’m doing “feminist translating,” I am calling attention to what male-dominant logic in translation neglects methodologically and teleologically.
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In Luke 24:8-12, there is attention given to women that does come across in the history. But in the Greek language that Luke uses there is more ambiguity than traditional English translators attend to because they tend to use masculinist logic. Masculinist logic wants to abstract the meaning to the text; masculinist logic wants to pretend objectivity (i.e., to say there’s no theological agenda even if there’s an attempt to say the a priori commitment to “plenary inspiration” theory of Christian scriptures is not a theological agenda); masculinist logic wants to be over subjective person; and masculinist logic wants to eliminate ambiguity when it drives some inclusive goal, such as Nyland’s NT fo LGBTs. As a consequence, traditional English translations can ignore the importance of women and their rhetoric. Sometimes, this is an unwitting consequence. Most Bible translators will very explicitly and publicly express their commitment to the value of women. And Bible translations born out of masculinist logic do not hide the fact that Luke gives historical attention to women.
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So what difference does a feminist translation make? Well, let’s look. First we’ll look at the King James Version; the Revised Standard Version; and the Nyland. Then we’ll check the texts of Luke. Finally we’ll examine feminist translating. (My formatting of the texts is for purposes of comparisons and contrasts).
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KJV
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And they remembered his words,
And returned from the sepulchre, and told all these things unto the eleven, and to all the rest.
It was Mary Magdalene and Joanna, and Mary the mother of James, and other women that were with them, which told these things unto the apostles.
And their words seemed to them as idle tales,
and they believed them not.
Then arose Peter, and ran unto the sepulchre;
and stooping down, he beheld the linen clothes laid by themselves,
and departed, wondering in himself at that which was come to pass.
RSV
And they remembered his words,
and returning from the tomb they told all this to the eleven and to all the rest.
Now it was Mary Mag'dalene and Jo-an'na and Mary the mother of James and the other women with them who told this to the apostles;
and returning from the tomb they told all this to the eleven and to all the rest.
Now it was Mary Mag'dalene and Jo-an'na and Mary the mother of James and the other women with them who told this to the apostles;
but these words seemed to them an idle tale,
and they did not believe them.
……
……
Nyland
Then they remembered what he’d said.
They returned from the tomb and reported all this to the Eleven and to all the others.
And it was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and their companions who told this to the apostles,
but they didn’t believe them,
because they thought their words were a lot of nonsense.
However, Peter got up and ran to the tomb.
He bent over to peep in and saw the strips of linen lying by themselves,
and he went off wondering what on earth had happened.
.
.
Luke
.
.
καὶ ἐμνήσθησαν τῶν ῥημάτων αὐτοῦ
καὶ ὑποστρέψασαι ἀπὸ τοῦ μνημείου ἀπήγγειλαν ταῦτα πάντα τοῖς ἕνδεκα καὶ πᾶσιν τοῖς λοιποῖς
(ἦσαν δὲ ἡ Μαγδαληνὴ Μαρία καὶ Ἰωάννα καὶ Μαρία ἡ Ἰακώβου καὶ αἱ λοιπαὶ σὺν αὐταῖς ἔλεγον πρὸς τοὺς ἀποστόλους ταῦτα)
καὶ ὑποστρέψασαι ἀπὸ τοῦ μνημείου ἀπήγγειλαν ταῦτα πάντα τοῖς ἕνδεκα καὶ πᾶσιν τοῖς λοιποῖς
(ἦσαν δὲ ἡ Μαγδαληνὴ Μαρία καὶ Ἰωάννα καὶ Μαρία ἡ Ἰακώβου καὶ αἱ λοιπαὶ σὺν αὐταῖς ἔλεγον πρὸς τοὺς ἀποστόλους ταῦτα)
καὶ ἐφάνησαν ἐνώπιον αὐτῶν ὡσεὶ λῆρος τὰ ῥήματα ταῦτα
.
καὶ ἠπίστουν αὐταῖς
(ὁ δὲ Πέτρος ἀναστὰς ἔδραμεν ἐπὶ τὸ μνημεῖον
καὶ παρακύψας βλέπει τὰ ὀθόνια μόνα
καὶ ἀπῆλθεν πρὸς ἑαυτὸν θαυμάζων τὸ γεγονός)
.
καὶ ἠπίστουν αὐταῖς
(ὁ δὲ Πέτρος ἀναστὰς ἔδραμεν ἐπὶ τὸ μνημεῖον
καὶ παρακύψας βλέπει τὰ ὀθόνια μόνα
καὶ ἀπῆλθεν πρὸς ἑαυτὸν θαυμάζων τὸ γεγονός)
.
Feminist Translating
.
.
The women remembered the sayings he’d spoken.
They returned from the memorial grave announcing every bit of this to the eleven men and to the other men.
(There were Miyam from Magdala and Johanna and Jacob’s Miryam and the other women with them, stating this to the men he’d sent out.)
.
They returned from the memorial grave announcing every bit of this to the eleven men and to the other men.
(There were Miyam from Magdala and Johanna and Jacob’s Miryam and the other women with them, stating this to the men he’d sent out.)
.
They appeared in front of the men as if this were a bunch of silly sayings.
The men disbelieved the women.
(There was “Rock” standing up; he ran to the memorial grave;
bending over, he looked at the linen cloth only;
he left, amazed at what was birthed.)
.
The men disbelieved the women.
(There was “Rock” standing up; he ran to the memorial grave;
bending over, he looked at the linen cloth only;
he left, amazed at what was birthed.)
.
Commentary:
As mentioned, the blip of history that Luke provides here does not obscure women (in his Greek or in any translation above). Women are the first on the scene at Jesus’s tomb; they’re the first to remember what he said (because they listen to the angels jogging their memories); the women are the first believers; the first apostles (i.e., the male apostles’ apostles); and the first disciples to follow Jesus’s kinds of rhetorics (i.e., parable that requires personal reflection; hyperbole that appears silly; and miracle that can make radical changes for and in a body). We might say Jesus’s rhetorics are feminisms. Luke and the translations are not masculinist with respect to these facts of history.
.
.
(Oh, one more little thing that Luke plays with, from verse 7 just before the lines noted above: He has angels reminding the women of the sayings of Joshua--i.e., Jesus--and ends with the one in which Joshua says this
.
τὸν υἱὸν τοῦ ἀνθρώπου ὅτι δεῖ παραδοθῆναι εἰς χεῖρας ἀνθρώπων ἁμαρτωλῶν καὶ σταυρωθῆναι καὶ τῇ τρίτῃ ἡμέρᾳ ἀναστῆναι
.
.
Of course, that last word is the one Luke picks up when he describes what “Rock”--i.e., Peter--does when he hears the women repeating the sayings of Joshua. “Rock,” like Joshua from the dead, stands up. That Joshua and the women can have such an effect is no small thing. Matthew hints at this power, and so does the feminist translation.)
Thursday, December 6, 2007
Around Equivalence (in Translation)
At the end of this long post, I’m going to define “translating feministically.” Most people think that “feminism equals ___________,” and I’ll just risk losing readers who could care less.
But please hold on. Several in the blogosphere are discussing another issue, not unrelated (and I’ll link to those at the end of the post). I write mainly, here, on that other issue.
Here goes:
One huge issue for translators, perhaps the biggest, is equivalence. Does “pan” in Spanish equal “bread” in English? Does “pan” in English equal “Padella” in Italian? Does the Italian pun “traduttore, traditore” have a good equivalent in any other language? Is “Dynamic Equivalence” in translation theory equal to lesser forms of equivalence such as “Formal Equivalence” or “Literary Equivalence”? Does it all equal Greek to me?
For Aristotle, in the science of knowing things, equivalence was the first thing. Is the rock equal to the bird? No. Clearly one is inanimate and the other is an animal. But is the parrot equal to the sparrow? Yes. Both are animals; both are birds. But are these two birds equal? No. One is an expensive mimicker; the other is a cheap chirper. They are equal in class but not equal in order. (Are barbarians equal to Greeks; are women equal to men; are slaves equal to masters? Is a barbarian language equal to the Hellene? Is rhetoric equal to truth? Is a translation equal to the original?)
And, we could say, Aristotle’s essential principle of equivalence is equal to Noam Chomsky’s linguistic principle of equivalence. Chomsky IS equal to a linguistic scientist, we could add. So he asks these questions: Is a subject equal to a verb? No. The two different parts of speech have two different sets of features. Their features are, clearly, not equal. Is “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” the equivalent of a Sentence? In English, in terms of the feature of “grammatical,” the answer is Yes. In terms of the feature “meaningful,” the Sentence is not equal to a sentence. Are homo sapiens equal to other species? No. The feature of grammatical Sentence separates humans from other animals.
So, we humans might continue to ask equivalence questions:
Does Science equal Art?
Does linguistic Science equal linguistic Art?
Does translation Science equal translation Art?
To answer the first question above, Alan Lightman came to visit the university where I study and work. Lightman is an acclaimed scientist, whose textbooks have been used in our Physics department. Lightman is also an acclaimed artist, whose novels have been on bestseller lists. To be sure, Lightman the scientist is equal to Lightman the artist. But the same Lightman says this authoritatively: Science writing is not equivalent to Artist writing. Scientists play the equivalence game; they find the features of the thing and Name it. Scientists use their heads, says Lightman. In contrast, Artists play the belief game; they want those in the art gallery or in the concert hall or in the cozy chair in Barnes and Nobles with a Starbucks coffee in hand to suspend their own previously conceived categories. The artists want those appreciating their art to Unname, if you will. Artists use their hearts and their stomachs, says Lightman. Therefore, Science does not equal Art, when the contrastive feature or the essential difference is Writing.
Fair enough. But Lightman the Artist has a problem. Several of his novels have been translated into some 30 different languages. And I get to ask Dr. Lightman the question at the Q & A session: “If you could read the best translations of your novels [and before I can finish, he says he hasn’t], then would you expect the translators to have been Scientists or Artists? That is, should the translators use their heads and precisely name in the target language those words as equal to the source English words? Or should the translators be Artists who use their hearts and stomachs to unname the source English words as various different, not necessarily equal-in-form or equal-in-concept, target language words?”
How would you have answered this question? Lightman, without batting an eye, responds: “both.” It’s the correct answer, but he is saying, don’t you see, that he wants translators equally to be scientists and artists. As a scientist talking with us, he has to say Science is NOT equal to Art. But as an artist who wants his novels to be read, and appreciated, he believes he can say, with equal credulity, that Science IS equal to Art.
Can Lightman have his cake of Science-and-Art Difference but eat it as Equivalence too?
A good, pure scientist like Aristotle, would answer: NO!
(This might be equal to saying, “You can’t eat your cake and then have it too,” which is how I’d reverse the difficult saying to make more English sense. But, for Aristotle, I’d be playing and saying too much with language.)
For didn’t Aristotle warn us all of difficult sayings (in the Rhetoric, Book III, Chapter 5, Verse 6)?
ολως δε δει ευαναγνωστον ειναι το γεγραμμενον και ευφραστον:
εστιν δε το αυτο,
οπερ οι πολλοι . . . ουκ εχουσιν, . . . ωσπερ τα Ηρακλειτου
τα γαρ Ηρακλειτου . . . το αδηλον
What is written ought to be, on the whole, equally both easy reading and easy listening.
This is, in fact, an equivalence,
which much writing does not have, including the writings of Heraclitus.
For Heraclitus’s writing is unclear.
Now, to be clear, Aristotle is picking on the punctuation problems of Heraclitus. But we do remember other Heraclitean difficulties that are not the equivalent of easy reading and easy listening. Here’s the famous example (never mind Herclitus’s Greek writing itself or it’s bad punctuation):
“You cannot step into the same river twice.”
For translator Brooks Haxton, this is not equal to his translation. Haxton's translation goes like this:
The river
where you set
your foot just now
--is gone.
those waters giving way to this,
now this.
But Haxton is looking for English that is equal to the Greek. Fortunately, his publisher agrees to show Herclitus’s Greek side by side with Haxton’s English in Fragments: The Collected Wisdom of Heraclitus. So Listen to Haxton write clearly (like a Scientist) in English about his translation choices:
“My rephrasing tries to clear away distractingly familiar language from a startling thought. It seems unlikely to my mind that the ancient authors who refer to this idea [such as Plutarch, translating it the now-familiar way] quote Heraclitus exactly” (page 96).
So listen again to Haxton wanting (like an Artist) for you the reader, the listener, to get a severe “startling.” Is Haxton really after exact equalness between the Greek quotation and some familiar English? No. If the punctuation problems distracted Aristotle’s eye, then the familiarity of language should not distract our ears. Rather, Haxton has to clear away certain equivalences in our heads, so that we also get something in our hearts and in our stomachs too.
There is a way around, or a way through, this huge issue of equivalence. I really do think it can be clear. I really do think Lightman is brilliant, that he can insist we use our heads and / or our hearts and / or our stomachs in translation. The crucial issue is personal perspective and willingness to change.
Let me say that again, just to be clear. The crucial issue is dynamic subjectivity.
Let me say that again three more times. Rather, in three different ways, let’s hear the same thing from Jacqueline Jones Royster and from Lydia He Liu and from Kenneth Lee Pike. I’ll paraphrase so that it’s me, not them, saying exactly what they say. They’ve changed me!
Royster writes an incredible history of black women in the United States. She entitles it, Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change Among African American Women. (The same-stream-changing-stream allusion to Heraclitus here is purely accidental on my part). The incredible thing is Royster writes not only as a mainstream scholar but also as one of her own subjects, one of the literate, socially changing African American women in the traces of the stream of history. This book is equal in impact to one of Royster’s much shorter works, her article, “When the First Voice You Hear is Not Your Own.” In the essay, Royster notes that many scholars of black women are not all black and not all women; and yet she argues that the subjective perspective is the only one that really counts if we are to talk across the different disciplines and / or to listen to those who are not necessarily scholars.
Lydia He Liu also writes social history, but of Chinese who have appropriated the modernism of the West. Her works include: Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity—China, 1900-1937 and The Problem of Translation in Global Circulations (Post-Contemporary Interventions) and The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern Worldmaking. One might say Liu’s research is the equivalent of post-colonial studies, but was China ever a colony of any Western empire? No. And Liu, who is Chinese writing in English in a superpower in the West, notes that the subjective history of the Chinese gives them much agency in deciding what is equal and what is lesser. Even Liu’s own conception of translation takes on this subjective perspective. She rejects the notion of “equivalence” as anything more than an imagined ideal in translation, in which the “target” language must be “equal to” the “source” language. Deconstructing this whole modern construct of objective “translation” and “equivalence,” Liu asks which language is to be favored? Thus, she reconstructs subjective “translingualism” in which the “host” language and the “guest” language do best by interacting together to effect change and permanence.
Kenneth Lee Pike discovers what it’s like to be an insider and an outsider. These two are not equal. And Pike says and demonstrates that either the subjective insider or the would-be objective outsider has varied perspectives. Personal perspective, says Pike, is not equal to calculating logic. No, person is above logic.
Pike has been reading creative and artsy and difficult scientists like Albert Einstein. First, such physicists observe that Light has the properties of a wave, as it travels in vibrating frequencies. Second, such scientists also observe that Light has the properties of particles, since it appears to have mass with its energy. Third, such physicists likewise observe that Light has properties relative the field of other things, to space and to time, and it helps us formulate and extrapolate useful notions like the Theory of Relativity. Fourth, such physicists say that subjective perspective (i.e., whether it’s wave or particle or field; and where one stands or rides) makes critical differences in the observer and in the observed. These three alternative perspectives on the properties of Light (i.e., wave or particle or field) are not equal perspectives. And the subjective perspective of the scientist, whichever is chosen, actually changes the scientist.
In Pike’s terms, the “emic” insider perspective and the “etic” outsider perspective are not equal. To become an insider, one has to change. And one really can learn.
(Wave: “Green” is not equal to “blue” in my English until it’s “xanh” in my Vietnamese; or a fading “green” is what has been happening to my socks as the color is getting washed out over time. Particle: “Green” is the color that my roommate in college could not see on the squares of his red and green plaid shirt; he is colorblind. Field: “Green” socks do not go with those pants, Dad – is what my children sometime have to tell me kindly, because I am fashion-blind. By starting as an outsider, a Vietnamese learner of English can learn “green,” and a college roommate can mark the corresponding “green” checks, and I can work on being less nerdy with style of dress. The real fun or the real disturbing thing, depending on your perspective, is that my observing changes me. Your observing changes you. Pike the linguist, and his colleagues, Richard E. Young the rhetorician and Alton L. Becker a linguist and teacher of freshman rhetoric, certainly understood this when they co-wrote Rhetoric: Discovery and Change. None of the three ever looked at his own specialization again without reconsidering it or himself in light of the others.)
The crucial issue is dynamic subjectivity. Whether any two things are equal (in dynamic equivalence or otherwise) is always subject to what the person holds them to be. And to let go of that hold is -- invariably, humbly, ambiguously -- to discover and to change.
Translating feministically is discovery and change. It is to name (as a scientist might), but to name such unnamed things as misogyny and slavery. It is to mark the subjective positions of all going inside or out. It is to be part of the we who hold these truths to be equal, that all men and women are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. It is to regard (as an artist might) the body, as the embodiment of my beliefs, those things I can’t help but believe because of my body. It is to imagine my language and the language of other’s I’m translating as carried metaphorically by where my heart goes, where my mind goes, where my soul goes, where my strength goes. It is to care for the other’s language as equally as I care for my own.
Related conversations:
But please hold on. Several in the blogosphere are discussing another issue, not unrelated (and I’ll link to those at the end of the post). I write mainly, here, on that other issue.
Here goes:
One huge issue for translators, perhaps the biggest, is equivalence. Does “pan” in Spanish equal “bread” in English? Does “pan” in English equal “Padella” in Italian? Does the Italian pun “traduttore, traditore” have a good equivalent in any other language? Is “Dynamic Equivalence” in translation theory equal to lesser forms of equivalence such as “Formal Equivalence” or “Literary Equivalence”? Does it all equal Greek to me?
For Aristotle, in the science of knowing things, equivalence was the first thing. Is the rock equal to the bird? No. Clearly one is inanimate and the other is an animal. But is the parrot equal to the sparrow? Yes. Both are animals; both are birds. But are these two birds equal? No. One is an expensive mimicker; the other is a cheap chirper. They are equal in class but not equal in order. (Are barbarians equal to Greeks; are women equal to men; are slaves equal to masters? Is a barbarian language equal to the Hellene? Is rhetoric equal to truth? Is a translation equal to the original?)
And, we could say, Aristotle’s essential principle of equivalence is equal to Noam Chomsky’s linguistic principle of equivalence. Chomsky IS equal to a linguistic scientist, we could add. So he asks these questions: Is a subject equal to a verb? No. The two different parts of speech have two different sets of features. Their features are, clearly, not equal. Is “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” the equivalent of a Sentence? In English, in terms of the feature of “grammatical,” the answer is Yes. In terms of the feature “meaningful,” the Sentence is not equal to a sentence. Are homo sapiens equal to other species? No. The feature of grammatical Sentence separates humans from other animals.
So, we humans might continue to ask equivalence questions:
Does Science equal Art?
Does linguistic Science equal linguistic Art?
Does translation Science equal translation Art?
To answer the first question above, Alan Lightman came to visit the university where I study and work. Lightman is an acclaimed scientist, whose textbooks have been used in our Physics department. Lightman is also an acclaimed artist, whose novels have been on bestseller lists. To be sure, Lightman the scientist is equal to Lightman the artist. But the same Lightman says this authoritatively: Science writing is not equivalent to Artist writing. Scientists play the equivalence game; they find the features of the thing and Name it. Scientists use their heads, says Lightman. In contrast, Artists play the belief game; they want those in the art gallery or in the concert hall or in the cozy chair in Barnes and Nobles with a Starbucks coffee in hand to suspend their own previously conceived categories. The artists want those appreciating their art to Unname, if you will. Artists use their hearts and their stomachs, says Lightman. Therefore, Science does not equal Art, when the contrastive feature or the essential difference is Writing.
Fair enough. But Lightman the Artist has a problem. Several of his novels have been translated into some 30 different languages. And I get to ask Dr. Lightman the question at the Q & A session: “If you could read the best translations of your novels [and before I can finish, he says he hasn’t], then would you expect the translators to have been Scientists or Artists? That is, should the translators use their heads and precisely name in the target language those words as equal to the source English words? Or should the translators be Artists who use their hearts and stomachs to unname the source English words as various different, not necessarily equal-in-form or equal-in-concept, target language words?”
How would you have answered this question? Lightman, without batting an eye, responds: “both.” It’s the correct answer, but he is saying, don’t you see, that he wants translators equally to be scientists and artists. As a scientist talking with us, he has to say Science is NOT equal to Art. But as an artist who wants his novels to be read, and appreciated, he believes he can say, with equal credulity, that Science IS equal to Art.
Can Lightman have his cake of Science-and-Art Difference but eat it as Equivalence too?
A good, pure scientist like Aristotle, would answer: NO!
(This might be equal to saying, “You can’t eat your cake and then have it too,” which is how I’d reverse the difficult saying to make more English sense. But, for Aristotle, I’d be playing and saying too much with language.)
For didn’t Aristotle warn us all of difficult sayings (in the Rhetoric, Book III, Chapter 5, Verse 6)?
ολως δε δει ευαναγνωστον ειναι το γεγραμμενον και ευφραστον:
εστιν δε το αυτο,
οπερ οι πολλοι . . . ουκ εχουσιν, . . . ωσπερ τα Ηρακλειτου
τα γαρ Ηρακλειτου . . . το αδηλον
What is written ought to be, on the whole, equally both easy reading and easy listening.
This is, in fact, an equivalence,
which much writing does not have, including the writings of Heraclitus.
For Heraclitus’s writing is unclear.
Now, to be clear, Aristotle is picking on the punctuation problems of Heraclitus. But we do remember other Heraclitean difficulties that are not the equivalent of easy reading and easy listening. Here’s the famous example (never mind Herclitus’s Greek writing itself or it’s bad punctuation):
“You cannot step into the same river twice.”
For translator Brooks Haxton, this is not equal to his translation. Haxton's translation goes like this:
The river
where you set
your foot just now
--is gone.
those waters giving way to this,
now this.
But Haxton is looking for English that is equal to the Greek. Fortunately, his publisher agrees to show Herclitus’s Greek side by side with Haxton’s English in Fragments: The Collected Wisdom of Heraclitus. So Listen to Haxton write clearly (like a Scientist) in English about his translation choices:
“My rephrasing tries to clear away distractingly familiar language from a startling thought. It seems unlikely to my mind that the ancient authors who refer to this idea [such as Plutarch, translating it the now-familiar way] quote Heraclitus exactly” (page 96).
So listen again to Haxton wanting (like an Artist) for you the reader, the listener, to get a severe “startling.” Is Haxton really after exact equalness between the Greek quotation and some familiar English? No. If the punctuation problems distracted Aristotle’s eye, then the familiarity of language should not distract our ears. Rather, Haxton has to clear away certain equivalences in our heads, so that we also get something in our hearts and in our stomachs too.
There is a way around, or a way through, this huge issue of equivalence. I really do think it can be clear. I really do think Lightman is brilliant, that he can insist we use our heads and / or our hearts and / or our stomachs in translation. The crucial issue is personal perspective and willingness to change.
Let me say that again, just to be clear. The crucial issue is dynamic subjectivity.
Let me say that again three more times. Rather, in three different ways, let’s hear the same thing from Jacqueline Jones Royster and from Lydia He Liu and from Kenneth Lee Pike. I’ll paraphrase so that it’s me, not them, saying exactly what they say. They’ve changed me!
Royster writes an incredible history of black women in the United States. She entitles it, Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change Among African American Women. (The same-stream-changing-stream allusion to Heraclitus here is purely accidental on my part). The incredible thing is Royster writes not only as a mainstream scholar but also as one of her own subjects, one of the literate, socially changing African American women in the traces of the stream of history. This book is equal in impact to one of Royster’s much shorter works, her article, “When the First Voice You Hear is Not Your Own.” In the essay, Royster notes that many scholars of black women are not all black and not all women; and yet she argues that the subjective perspective is the only one that really counts if we are to talk across the different disciplines and / or to listen to those who are not necessarily scholars.
Lydia He Liu also writes social history, but of Chinese who have appropriated the modernism of the West. Her works include: Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity—China, 1900-1937 and The Problem of Translation in Global Circulations (Post-Contemporary Interventions) and The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern Worldmaking. One might say Liu’s research is the equivalent of post-colonial studies, but was China ever a colony of any Western empire? No. And Liu, who is Chinese writing in English in a superpower in the West, notes that the subjective history of the Chinese gives them much agency in deciding what is equal and what is lesser. Even Liu’s own conception of translation takes on this subjective perspective. She rejects the notion of “equivalence” as anything more than an imagined ideal in translation, in which the “target” language must be “equal to” the “source” language. Deconstructing this whole modern construct of objective “translation” and “equivalence,” Liu asks which language is to be favored? Thus, she reconstructs subjective “translingualism” in which the “host” language and the “guest” language do best by interacting together to effect change and permanence.
Kenneth Lee Pike discovers what it’s like to be an insider and an outsider. These two are not equal. And Pike says and demonstrates that either the subjective insider or the would-be objective outsider has varied perspectives. Personal perspective, says Pike, is not equal to calculating logic. No, person is above logic.
Pike has been reading creative and artsy and difficult scientists like Albert Einstein. First, such physicists observe that Light has the properties of a wave, as it travels in vibrating frequencies. Second, such scientists also observe that Light has the properties of particles, since it appears to have mass with its energy. Third, such physicists likewise observe that Light has properties relative the field of other things, to space and to time, and it helps us formulate and extrapolate useful notions like the Theory of Relativity. Fourth, such physicists say that subjective perspective (i.e., whether it’s wave or particle or field; and where one stands or rides) makes critical differences in the observer and in the observed. These three alternative perspectives on the properties of Light (i.e., wave or particle or field) are not equal perspectives. And the subjective perspective of the scientist, whichever is chosen, actually changes the scientist.
In Pike’s terms, the “emic” insider perspective and the “etic” outsider perspective are not equal. To become an insider, one has to change. And one really can learn.
(Wave: “Green” is not equal to “blue” in my English until it’s “xanh” in my Vietnamese; or a fading “green” is what has been happening to my socks as the color is getting washed out over time. Particle: “Green” is the color that my roommate in college could not see on the squares of his red and green plaid shirt; he is colorblind. Field: “Green” socks do not go with those pants, Dad – is what my children sometime have to tell me kindly, because I am fashion-blind. By starting as an outsider, a Vietnamese learner of English can learn “green,” and a college roommate can mark the corresponding “green” checks, and I can work on being less nerdy with style of dress. The real fun or the real disturbing thing, depending on your perspective, is that my observing changes me. Your observing changes you. Pike the linguist, and his colleagues, Richard E. Young the rhetorician and Alton L. Becker a linguist and teacher of freshman rhetoric, certainly understood this when they co-wrote Rhetoric: Discovery and Change. None of the three ever looked at his own specialization again without reconsidering it or himself in light of the others.)
The crucial issue is dynamic subjectivity. Whether any two things are equal (in dynamic equivalence or otherwise) is always subject to what the person holds them to be. And to let go of that hold is -- invariably, humbly, ambiguously -- to discover and to change.
Translating feministically is discovery and change. It is to name (as a scientist might), but to name such unnamed things as misogyny and slavery. It is to mark the subjective positions of all going inside or out. It is to be part of the we who hold these truths to be equal, that all men and women are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. It is to regard (as an artist might) the body, as the embodiment of my beliefs, those things I can’t help but believe because of my body. It is to imagine my language and the language of other’s I’m translating as carried metaphorically by where my heart goes, where my mind goes, where my soul goes, where my strength goes. It is to care for the other’s language as equally as I care for my own.
Related conversations:
- Is it time for a new translation acronym? (Elshaddai Edwards)
- Lost in Translation: A Plea for “Ouch!” Level Referential Accuracy (John Hobbins)
- How do you render jilted love in language strong as an arm with its veins popping out? On translating Matthew 23:1-10 (Round Two) (John Hobbins)
- Do we think in words? A Reply (John Hobbins)
- Malformed Equivalence in Matthew 23:2 (David Ker)
- Excuse me, I think you’re in my chair (David Ker)
- Do we think in words? (Richard Rhodes)
- No harm, no foul? (Richard Rhodes)
- ABCs of DE (J.K. Gayle)
- Listening into Translation (J.K. Gayle)
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