BLT: a new blog on the Bible, Literature, and Translation

- Racism in Translation

- an announcement of The Jewish Annotated New Testament coming soon from Oxford University Press

That's just a foretaste of what you're to find at BLTnotjustasandwich.com, a new blog on the Bible, Literature, and Translation.

The most informed and informative literary blogger, Theophrastus, is the one starting the blog.  (He's also the best biblioblogger with a pseudonym, although the Biblioblogger Library has yet to include him or his blog.  Likewise, he has more insight on translation theory and translation practice with respect to the Bible and other literature than many of us.)  He announces the formation of the blog, here and also here, where you are welcomed! 

Welcome to the blog named BLT. It is not just a sandwich.  It stands for a set of topics that we hope to discuss:  Bible, Literature, and Translation.  We’ll talk about the Bible as literature and the literature of translation and the translation of Bibles and the translation of literature and literature of translation and Bible as a translation and literary translations of Bibles and so on.  And we are certain to throw in the arts, the sciences, philosophy, mysticism, religion, and pretty much everything else.

The initial crew of bloggers represents a diverse set of viewpoints but one that is unified in our openness to new ideas and a fundamental belief in the dignity of all humans.  This blog is open to all: Jews, Catholics, Mainliners, Evangelicals, Eastern Christians, Atheists, Theists outside the Judeo-Christian tradition, etc.  For me a strong underlying theme of this blog is that  everyone has a voice — especially people that have been traditionally marginalized.

I’ll let my co-bloggers (currently J. K. Gayle, Suzanne McCarthy, and Craig Smith) introduce themselves, but I’ll simply mention that I am a professor at a US university with strong interests in applied issues in linguistics.

There won’t be any bacon or other treif meat in my posts, but there will be lots of substance.  I look forward to hearing from you.

Notice that Suzanne McCarthy, whom Theophrastus mentions, is the most current top and #1 Biblioblogger in the Top 10 Biblioblogs by the most recent vote among all bibliobloggers in the world, the most democratic measure of the Top.  Her blog, Suzanne's Bookshelf, is also #37, in the most current top 40 of the Top 50.

Notice that Craig Smith, whom Theophrastus mentions, blogs at Notes from the Dreamtime and is the only biblioblogger to have produced an entire translation of all the Hebrew and the Greek of the whole Bible, actually The First Egalitarian Translation ever, although he also is yet to be included in the Biblioblogger Library.

And Theophrastus mentions me.  But you already know me.  More importantly, you are invited to BLT!  Feel free to get the word out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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


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


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

from Six Masters of the Spanish Sonnet

Growing an Audience

"Growing an Audience" sounds like Aristotle's concern. And it really is if you read Julia Purdy's essay, "How to Write for an Audience: Use Aristotle’s Triangle to Connect With Your Reader." If you do read what Purdy wrote, then as part of her audience you read things from Aristotle's Poetics and become part of his audience.

But "Growing an Audience" is Julia O'Brien's essay. James F. McGrath had been posing a similar question to O'Brien's query about "the angles from which authors and scholars seek to connect the Bible to concerns and interests of modern readers," and so he (now part of the O'Brien audience) encourages his readers to become her readers. And Jim West (who's interested in size when it comes to his own biblioblog audience) says that "Julia O’Brien has a nice and useful essay" so he can also shout down atheists in Iowa (so as to keep out all poachers and encroachers on his territory).

O'Brien has more to say. She says more than the bit McGrath relays, and her issue is not just "nice and useful" as West would characterize her article. She notes that in pop scholarship on the Bible what she doesn't find:

What I don’t find is any popular treatment of what most interests me about the Bible: how it shares with other literature the ability to invite reflection on the human conditions. I use the plural of “conditions” because I’m not interested in resurrecting an old Bible as Literature approach in which intellectuals of a particular social class, gender, and sexual orientation claim to speak for all people. Rather, I’m interested in how the Bible, like novels, helps illumine the particularities of humans and their societies. On my website, I’ve launched Reading the Bible as an Adult as an attempt to do this kind of reading (http://juliamobrien.net).

When we go to her website, we find titles of studies such as "Joseph: Queering Categories." And that reminds me of Rodney's recent post "a questionable interpretation of Matthew 8:5-13?" in which he looks at the Greek word pais, which really was used for boys (perhaps enslaved) in gay relationships with their teachers. Our English word pederasty comes from παῖς (pais) "boy-child" and ἐραστής (erastēs) "lover." Greek literature is full of this, which makes it very surprising that the Bible would be rid of it so easily.

So it's important to see the Bible (even Matthew) as literary, as we would read Aristophanes's "The Clouds" or Plato's "The Phaedrus" and "The Symposium." Then when we can see ourselves as part of Matthew's audience, we might come to see him as not only an author but also as a translator. And translation, like storytelling, is also rhetorical.

If we're uncomfortable with the Greeks, and their debates about rhetoric and story and translation, then we might turn to others. But we might see that the others haven't said much different than the Greeks said. Gorgias (as Plato tried to straighten him out) sounds like George Steiner, who sounds like Mark translating Jesus. Literature is difficult. The bible is too. It connects us to human conditions.

Barnstone, Aristotle & Paul

Its disturbing message reveals how strong were the ties of many early Christian Jews with the Roman Empire and its vast slave network, which Paul, as a possible Roman citizen, espouses without criticism.

     For all these good reasons, because the Bible should sing us into its depths and rapture, Romans and Corinthians begin the letters.  A Bible like a novel, play, or opera has a movement leading to the reader's pleasure and enlightenment.  As with the classical drama, following Aristotle's dictum, we have suspension of disbelief in order to become fully involved in the drama and achieve catharsis.  All these instructions are applicable to the Bible, and they work for the believer and the skeptic.

     The Bible is a work of art.  Were it not art, were it simply an instruction manual, it would not satisfy or convince, and very likely wound not have survived.

--Willis Barnstone, "Introduction, Canon of the Restored New Testament," page 116, The Restored New Testament: A New Translation with Commentary, Including the Gnostic Gospels Thomas, Mary, and Judas