Literally Using vs Misusing "Literally"

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

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

David Ker's BBB posts (and this one)

update: I'm including links to .pdf versions of posts referred to in my post here below (so keep scrolling down to find them)
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David posted a two-parter this week at BBB and then he promptly took it down, noting in a third post: "But the comment threads are too volatile and I don’t have the time or energy to monitor them." He also invited: "If you would like to react you may do so by writing a post on your own blog and linking here." He's confirmed to me in email that a continued discussion here at my blog would be fine. (And he's posted on a related topic, with perhaps more to come, at his own blog.)

Below is a copy of David's second post, and below that is the comment I made. I was interested in David's posts especially because I am interested in the limitations of pure DE and of essential FE translation - both of which seem to me to ignore the wordplay in both a text and its translation. I tried to show this some, some time ago, by translating the Greek text myself. (David gave a couple of useful comments then). Feel free to comment at my translation there or related to David's post here if you like.

David's Post2 (you have to double click it to see it):



My Comment on David's Post2:

With respect to DE, FE, but also to expressing wordplay, David, NRSV seems to be the better update of the RSV translation of Philemon 8-14.

First, for ex., “to command you to do your duty” is a fine English dynamic equivalence (DE) to ἐπιτάσσειν σοι τὸ ἀνῆκον (v 8). And “as a prisoner” works better with the English adverb “now” (in v 9) than the wooden-literal (less DE) “now a prisoner” as that repetition of δέσμιος Χριστοῦ Ἰησοῦ (fr the first line, the identifying appositive, in v 1). Also the re-arrangement of the Greek order phrases (as in vv 9 and 12 and 14) seems to read more like “normal English.”

Second, in terms of FE, the literal “both” (in v 9) and “that is” (in v 10) are examples of a stronger NRSV relationship to the Greek structures (than RSV or the ESV update has in those couple of clauses).

Third, although both NRSV and ESV (like RSV) fail to get at much of the play in Paul’s language (or to play with English), NRSV does much much better. The obvious plays are on the mood and the aspect of the English verbs. There’s a rhetorical build in the NRSV (absent in the RSV and ESV), for example, by starting with the subjunctive “would rather” (in v 9) but then making “wanted” the (recollective) simple past (in v 13) to parallel the simple past of “preferred” (in v 14) as the powerful set up to the (subjunctive) clause “in order that your good deed might be. . . ” (of v 14).

And the use of the present tense with progressive, continuous aspect gives a breathless feel to the letter. Paul’s readers (of the NRSV) get to hear and to watch him signing the letter with his own hand while a prisoner imprisoned.

Mind you, the translators aren’t trying to tell us what Paul intended. As if he always and only intended one thing - or could know all the meanings and all of the effects of his one intention, if he had only one once in writing this little letter. Phyllis A. Bird (1 of 4 women on the 30 member NRSV translation team) says translating is “to overhear an ancient conversation, rather than to hear [one]self addressed directly”; and Bird adds “I am not certain that the translator is even obliged to make the modern reader understand what is overheard.” (“Translating Sexist Language as a Theological and Cultural Problem” page 91). The men (all men) on the ESV team might not agree–Paul’s singular agenda (as the translators must understand it) is to come through the translation, with the dogmatic force it deserves. The NRSV team, therefore, does a better job, I think, with the wordplay in translation. And some of the examples mentioned show this. (Interestingly, they do pretty well - at least better - with DE and FE too).

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David in an email to some of us says this:

Dear friends,

I didn't feel it was quite fair to the commenters on my posts to withdraw them so I have made the posts available as PDFs. I actually found many of your comments very enlightening but there was an air of hostility as well that made it difficult for me to consider what people were saying and was eating up a lot of my emotional energy as well as time. I welcome you to link to these on your own blogs and make use of them as you see fit.

These posts were an attempt to try to look dispassionately at the ESV especially but I see that isn't really an option.

Here are the files:

http://lingamish.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/philemon-1.pdf
http://lingamish.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/philemon-2.pdf

If you reply to this post I ask that you don't refer to any of the other commenters involved in those posts. I love all of you imperfectly of course but I am trying. "I plead with Euodia and I plead with Syntche to agree with each other in the Lord."

David

Out of respect to David (and to the ones he's also giving much respect to), I'm asking you - anyone reading here - to honor his request: "don't refer to any of the other commenters involved in those posts."

(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.

"Woman" is another famous poser

"Woman" is another famous poser

For none can seriously contemplate

An American president or a German composer

In a viable context with the word for mate.
--Vladimir Nabokov

These are curious words from the Russian novelist-poet-translator, outsider to American culture. They're timely words, given Hillary Clinton's lost bid for the U.S. presidency and John McCain's choice in Sarah Palin as his running mate.

Jane Stranz posts Nabokov's entire poem, "Pity the Elderly Grey Translator." I think the Russian man understands American sexism in English, and is flaunting it as if he's not committing it himself. (He is.)

The opening lines go like this
(with impossible American references to the likes of the elderly McCain and chosen Palin;
how could Nabokov know?):

Pity the elderly gray translator

Who lends to beauty his hollow voice

And - choosing sometimes a second-rater -

Mimes the song-fellow of this choice.

This couplet shows a female as the male's traitor
(as if a Palin or a Clinton steals McCain's poetic thunder):

The incorruptible translator

Is betrayed by lady rime.

And Nebokov's evidence comes earlier
(in lines where masculinism seems
inherent in prostituted language):

It is not the head of the verse line that'll

Cause him trouble, nor is it the spine:

What he really minds is the cursed rattle

That must be found for the tail of the line.

Some words by nature are sort of singlish,

Others have harems of rimes. The word

Nabokov, in fact, may be speaking from experience. There are rumors of his sexism, translated out of what he perceived to be Lewis Carroll's. In 1923, Nabokov translated Alice in Wonderland into Russian, and some critics think his English novel Lolita of 1955 is some perverted translating of Carroll (aka Charles Dodgson) as Humbert Humbert and of Carroll's Alice Liddell as Humbert's Dolores Haze. For the novel, Nabokov coins the English word, nymphet.

The Russian had been accustomed to coinages. The second page of a later edition of his first translation notes the faithfulness to Carroll with added creativity (although none of the sexism is revealed):

As might be expected, Nabokov’s version is not only accurate and faithful in the passages that are susceptible of straight translation, but also exceptionally imaginative whenever the English text features a pun, parody or other linguistic tour de force. For instance, the Russian name of the Mock Turtle is Chepupakha, a conflation of cherepakha (tortoise) and chepukha (nonsense). When the Mock Turtle substitutes “Reeling and Writhing” for “Reading and Writing,” Nabokov has chesat’ i pitat’ (combing and feeding) instead of chitat’ i pistat’ (reading and writing). In place of “Twinkle, twinkle, little bat!” Nabokov transmutes a native Russian children’s rhyme, but in all the other verse passages he seems to be adapting Carroll’s text as it stands in English. Once in a while his high spirits lead him into linguistic extravagance even where the English is normal. A striking example is his version of the first chapter title. “Down the Rabbit Hole” in the original, it emerges in Russian as Nyrok v krolich’ yu norku. Literally, on the face of it this reads “A Dive into the Rabbit Hole,” but the words chosen for “dive” and “hole” are also the Russian designations of two other animals: nyvok is a type of diving duck (its Latin generic name, Nyroca, is based on its Russian common name) and norka, a diminutive form of nora, “hole,” also means “mink.” Nyrok and norku are also amusingly similar in sound and appearance.

In 1964, Nabokov completed his most famous translation of Aleksandr Pushkin's Евгений Онегин, which he entitled Eugene Onegin.

With Pushkin's work, he was as rigid and as masculinist as many Bible translators are with God's. And he seems consistently insistent on faithfulness, though ranging between his creativity with Carroll and his textuality with Pushkin--a kind of progression from literary to literal, from dynamic equivalence to formal equivalence, his own answer to the translators' wars: translate either one way or the other, but never fail the original text.

(He was much different, perhaps hypocritically so, with taking his own Russian works into English or even his English back into Russian. Marice Friedberg notes:

Interestingly, in translating his own work Nabokov avoided both extremes. He did not anglicize a Russian narrative or russify an English one; in many cases he inserted explanations into the translated text or substituted a reference from the culture of the target language for the original reference. It is possible, of course, that Nabokov regarded his self-translations not as translations at all, but as similar works by the same author, which he thus felt free to rewrite. Still, the contrast between these and his earlier free renditions of Lewis Carroll and Pushkin is quite striking.

Not translations? Or translational kindnesses to his own works that he won't afford to Carroll or to Pushkin?)

Jane Grayson quotes Nabokov as famously saying with respect to his modern(istic) translation of Pushkin: "I want translation with copious footnotes, footnotes reaching up like skyscrapers to the top of this or that page so as to leave only the gleam of one textual line between commentary and eternity." Willis Barnstone repeats this statement, calling him "[t]he most intractable of the anti-translators." Ruben Brower quotes Nabokov as saying, "In my translation [of Pushkin's novel] I have sacrificed to total accuracy and completeness of meaning every element of form save the iambic rhythm, the retention of which assisted rather than impaired fidelity."

And then, as if to show he can flaunt rhythm (his own lady rime; No, his harems of rime), Nabokov nastily writes another translator's poem, "On Translating Eugene Onegin." Here are the ending lines:

Elusive Pushkin! Persevering,
I still pick up Tatiana's earring,
Still travel with your sullen rake.
I find another man's mistake,
I analyze alliterations
That grace your feasts and haunt the great
Fourth stanza of your Canto Eight.
This is my task--a poet's patience
And scholastic passion blent:
Dove-droppings on your monument.

Lest he hasn't spoiled it for you Russian readers already, Nabokov on page 134 of his commentary of his translation of Pushkin's novel in verse gives away "Tatiana": "The code name for Elizaveta Vorontsov was 'Tatiana'—Pushkin's heroine."

As we think about Nabokov as a translator, then, we ask Who's the famous poser?