Infidelity In Translation of the Bible

I wish I didn't know "marital infidelity" so well. And I wish Bible translators, and Koran readers for that matter, wouldn't be so married to the marriage metaphor.

Just today met the lover of the parent of a nine-year-old girl--a broken home after a decade and a half. Just talked last week with a good friend and neighbor who's been cheating on the spouse, with another next door neighbor it turns out, for ten years - with none of the grandkids or the children suspecting at all. It's unnerving - all the secrecy and the revelations and the stuff that sells news (like the Bill and Monica and Hillary story that we all wish never happened and the Ted and Mike and Gayle Haggard story) and the American divorce rate and the expectations for "sham pearl" films such as Fireproof. In other words, infidelity is a stirrer and a shocker.

This is the way Aristotle looked at the reality of good Greek: he seemed stirred and shocked that rhetoricians (such as poets and sophists) were always cheating; and that women just could never be trusted with much, much less words. This may be why so many Bible translators (and those strict Quran readers) get so upset so often: they look at the holy word of God as a husband and suspect the translation of cheating on it somehow.

When I started blogging again, for example, John Hobbins came over and suggested that my posting on Numbers 5 may not be faithful to the culture of the Hebrew Jews in the desert as they fled slavery in Egypt. Robert Alter, in a different way but with a similar "unfaithfulness" concern, writes about the "heresy of explanation," as if the translator will have no fidelity to the linguistic, literary structure and poetry of the Hebrew (so in another post it may be worth showing Alter's own unfaithfulness to his principle of non-explanation by translation). Eugene Nida wants linguists to be faithful to both the source language and the target language, with ultimate faithfulness to the target language audience, which is even more faithfulness to God and his word--despite the problems of great disparity between languages with no equivalences, dynamic or otherwise. Similarly, Wayne Leman wants faithfulness to language that most people normally use, that a field test will best verify, even though he himself will slip into abnormal language from time to time. Likewise, Richard Rhodes wants faithfulness to the text of the Bible and not to the mistress of theology, even though his theology of plenary inspiration over-rides his view of the text. Moreover, many linguist-translators of the Bible in training today want Platonic faithfulness to the "message" carried and delivered and received, despite the fact that their Chomskyan ideal yields an impossible binary between neo-competence and neo-performance; such is the relevance of "relevance theory."

I sort of like it, in contrast, when languages don't have to be viewed as marriage partners, one invariably and shockingly unfaithful to the other. There are good alternatives to this view, even when it comes to Bible translation. Karen Jobes, for instance, suggests the simultaneous interpreter using a language on the fly is a good model. Lydia Liu notes that she (and other Chinese people translating English) consider one language the guest and the other its host. Tony Barnstone, working with a Chinese counterpart, says that

The Chinese poem [translated] in [American] English is like a stolen car sent to a "chop shop" to be stripped, disassembled, fitted with other parts, and presented to the consumer public with a new coat of paint. But despite its glossy American exterior, it's a Chinese engine that makes this vehicle run, and fragments of the poem's old identity can be glimpsed in its lines, the purr of its engine, the serial number, which we may still be able to read.

And feminist rhetoricians have offered a plethora of metaphors for translation that don't put the husband over the wife in historic, traditional patriarchal order. The alternative to the marriage metaphor is not an unfaithfulness metaphor or a divorce metaphor. No, others offer alternatives to this view. (I'm thinking again of Afrafeminist Jacqueline Jones Royster and of womanist Alice Walker and of Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison; of Phyllis Bird and of Mary Daly and of Krista Ratcliffe and of Nancy Mairs who play with language lest it keeps the order. So elsewhere today I blogged about Order and about Numbers 5 and about translation).

Male MPs Screw Over the Female MPs of Afghanistan (so they can go home and legally rape their own wives)

Shinkai Zahine Karokhail, like other female parliamentarians, complained that after an initial deal the law [allowing men to rape their wives] was passed with unprecedented speed and limited debate. "They wanted to pass it almost like a secret negotiation," she said. "There were lots of things that we [women MPs] wanted to change, but they didn't want to discuss it because [President] Karzai wants to please the Shia before the election."

Ustad Mohammad Akbari, an MP [a man] and the leader of a Hazara political party, said the president had supported the law in order to curry favour among the Hazaras. But he said the law actually protected women's rights. "Men and women have equal rights under Islam but there are differences in the way men and women are created. Men are stronger and women are a little bit weaker; even in the west you do not see women working as firefighters." Akbari said the law gave a woman the right to refuse sexual intercourse with her husband if she was unwell or had another reasonable "excuse". And he said a woman would not be obliged to remain in her house if an emergency forced her to leave without permission.

--excerpts from
"'Worse than the Taliban' - new law rolls back rights for Afghan women"
by Jon Boone in Kabul The Guardian, Tuesday 31 March 2009
--------------------------------------

Safia Sidiqi, a [woman] lawmaker from Nangarhar province who condemned the legislation, said she cannot remember parliament debating or even voting on the law and she does not know how it came to be signed by Karzai. She called for the law to be recalled to parliament for debate. "It is impossible in a two-month session for parliament to pass a law more than 200 pages long," she said of the 263-page law.

Sayed Hossain Alemi Balkhi, a [male] Shiite lawmaker involved in drafting it, defended the legislation saying it gives more rights to women than even Britain or the United States does. He said the law makes women safer and ensures the husband is obliged to provide for her.

--excerpts from
"Critics assail Afghan law that 'legalizes rape'"
By FISNIK ABRASHI, Associated Press Writer Fisnik Abrashi, Associated Press Writer – Thu Apr 2, 7:04 pm ET

HTs: Dr Jim West and Women In His Image

This is the body who works here.

an excerpt from

"Body at Work" by Nancy Mairs

A "feminine text," all my reading had taught me, can be produced (by a woman or a man) only through "writing the body," the "feminine" body, which is, by definition, repressed by the "phallogocentricity" of language. So far, so good. But if language systematically represses "the feminine," yet writing requires language, then what on earth would "writing the body" entail? How could one "do" it? What would it "look" like if it were done? The rational (that is, linguistically permissible) answer is something like: Nothing at all. If the feminine is the pre-symbolic, the unconscious, the repressed, then the feminine is silence.

And yet. And yet. I have a voice--a "real" voice, the one you'll hear if you call me on the telephone--which emanates from a body--a "real" body, you believe, even when you cannot see it--and which I experience as uttering a feminine existence insofar as I am aware of being a woman (which is really quite far, almost all the way). Am I doing it, then? Am I speaking the body? And if I write down my utterances, will I then be writing the body? Have I "got it" at last?

While I was stumbling around in my head like this, straining to catch faint echoes of "difference" yet privately convinced that I'd be too stupid to recognize it even if it blatted like a tuba straight in my ear, I kept myself busy at whatever writing tasks came my way. More and more often, what I wrote had bodies in it--my own body, sometimes crippled and sometimes not (the way it continues to occupy my dreams), and the bodies of others, Virginia Woolf and Alice Walker and Chinese women with bound feet--and after a while it came to me that I was writing about bodies because a body was writing: me. Incorporation is an act. The body writing: writing the body. I couldn't think such a thing, I could only do it.

After that, I stopped worrying about whether the feminine can or cannot be written. (I think, on balance, that it can but that reviewers won't like it much.) I just keep inscribing the fathers' words with my woman's fingers and hope that the feminine will bleed through. What has come to concern me more is the specificity that bodily existence confers. I have lost, or at least have tried to lose, the desire that underlay my early, academic writing--the desire to establish myself as an authoritative impersonal consciousness capable of generally valid insights drawn with the humanistic equivalence of scientific objectivity. Henceforth, knowing myself incapable of touching without transforming, I must be careful in a way I never dreamed before. I can never write as Authority, as Essayist, as Literary Critic. I can write only from this body as it is now: female, white, well-educated, moderately prosperous, crippled, a Roman Catholic convert, heterosexual. . . .

This is the body that works here.