No Play in Translation

Robert Alter famously writes against (and avoids the practice of) what he calls, "the heresy of explanation." He doesn't think a good translator should "explain" to the new audience what the original surely must mean. (Explanations, if necessary, belong in the footnotes, not in the translation as the translation). And Alter's right in this - because the original and the translation both have "play" in them. (By "play," I mean both wiggle room and playfulness.) An explanative (thus heretical) translator robs the audience of the play.

Alter will say things like this: "the translation of terms on the basis of immediate context--except when it becomes grotesque to do otherwise--is to be resisted as another instance of the heresy of explanation" (page xxxii of The Five Books of Moses).

But it's very easy for a translator to fall into the heresy. Alter himself does. For example, he writes (to explain his translation without confessing or even seeming to recognize his own heresy of explanation):

The other most common designation of the deity is 'elohim, a word that is plural in form (perhaps, though this is far from certain, a plural of "majesty") but that is generally treated grammatically as a singular. "God" is the natural English equivalent, but in some contexts, where the generic character of the name seems prominent, I have rendered it with a lowercase g as "god," and when the name is treated as a plural, especially when the narrative context involves polytheism, I have translated it as "gods." (page xlvi)

Notice how Alter gives his audience a different form depending on context, as if the reader in Hebrew (and now in his English) would need the explanation to disambiguate the words. This, as I've suggested, is to steal the wordplay from both the original and the translation. The reader is robbed.

Two other posts today get at this. danielandtonya at Hebrew and Greek Reader have up a fascinating example in "Clean Choices in Translation?." Wayne at Better Bibles Blog piggy backs on Rick's post at The Lamp to argue that there really ought to be "audience-oriented translation."

(Later this week, I'll try to post on a word-play translation of the first section of Numbers 5. There may be an allusion or two then to the "heresy of explanation.")

"Against the patriarchal backdrop": the Bible's "Private, Complex Subjectivity"

This is a post of two long but important observations of Carolyn Custis James and Tod Linafelt, respectively, about the literary play in the Bible. By "play," I mean both interpretive "wiggle room" and hermeneutic "playfulness." It's the kind of "reading" against which Aristotle taught. It's the kind of perspective that feminists tend to find useful in overcoming profound misogyny and gynophobia in texts that would perpetuate sexist or racist inequalities.

James is a speaker, researcher, and writer who is the founder and president of the Synergy Women’s Network, Inc. Linafelt is an associate professor of biblical literature at Georgetown University and a humanities professor in the English department at Loyola College in Baltimore.

James writes in The Gospel of Ruth (pp 30-33):

I once asked a seminary professor if he saw a pattern in the biblical text where men interacting with strong women become stronger themselves. I'll never forget the blank look I got in return. In Christian circles, there is sometimes an assumption that when women step into the spotlight, the men will pay a price. The spotlight of recent research may train its sights on Naomi and Ruth, but until now this beam of light belonged to Boaz, the Kinsman-Redeemer Christ figure, traditionally identified as the hero of the story. . . .

[A] Western, American, middle-class point of view can actually interfere with our understanding of God's Word.

The story of Naomi and Ruth takes place against the backdrop of an ancient patriarchal culture. If we want to grasp the message, we must enter Naomi's world. We can do this better with the help of our sisters in the Third World whose cultures more closely resemble the ancient biblical culture. The payoff is well worth the effort, especially in biblical passages that focus explicitly on women, as we are about to see. Against the ancient patriarchal backdrop, the Bible's strong message for women packs a punch that we completely miss when we ignore the [male-dominant] cultural context. . . .

In five short verses, death wipes the men off the scene, leaving three grieving widows behind. In a male-centered culture that ascribed value to women based on their relationships to men, these husbandless, sonless women hold no interest to anyone. In many minds, especially in the minds of the three women themselves, the story is over. Nothing is left to tell. Yet ironically, this is where the narrative heats up as the biblical spotlight settles on Naomi and an all-female case. Now the real story begins.

And so we begin our journey by entering a downward spiral of suffering with Naomi, the female Job, who from ground zero of her own life wants to know, "Is God good for women?"

Linafelt writes in "The Bible's Literary Merits":

David's sexual taking of Bathsheba . . . is indeed reported [in the Bible] as [his] seeing Bathsheba bathing and then [his] acting to bring her into his bed. David's thinking isn't reported, but the reader is nonetheless encouraged [by the silence in the text] to imagine what David is thinking. After seeing Bathsheba, David pauses and considers his next action: He sends to "inquire about the woman" and learns that she is "the daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite." Only after learning those things does David carry out his act of adultery.

Why? Well, he learns that the woman's husband is a Hittite, and so perhaps we are to understand David as having fewer scruples about taking the wife of a non-Israelite. (There is irony in the fact that, as the story unfolds, Uriah in fact proves a much better keeper than David of Israelite law.) David learns too that Bathsheba is the daughter of Eliam, who in turn, the attentive reader will notice, is the son of Ahithophel, one of the court counselors who will soon betray David by siding with David's son Absalom in his attempted coup.

What, then, motivates David's taking of Bathsheba? [One easily] assumes that David is "instantly struck with lust" upon seeing her. Perhaps, but in fact the narrator never reveals whether David lusts after Bathsheba or not. And it is possible to imagine his taking of Bathsheba as a calculated political act against a rival faction within the court. Besides, lust and political ambition are far from being mutually exclusive. The point, in any case, is that though we are not told David's motivations, he clearly has some.

In biblical narrative, such examples of unstated but important character motivation abound. What are Eve and Adam thinking when they reach for the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil? What is God thinking in forbidding that fruit? (Despite Christianity's long tradition of original sin, the answer to neither of those questions is immediately clear, and both prove quite interestingly complex if taken seriously.) Why does Moses kill the Egyptian who is beating a Hebrew slave in Exodus 2? (It is not clear whether Moses, raised an Egyptian, knows that he was born a Hebrew; and so his motivation might range from an elemental sense of justice, unrelated to ethnicity, to a specifically ethnic identification with the victim.) What is going through Aaron's mind when his two sons are burned alive with fire from God in Leviticus 10? (The narrator reports only that "Aaron was silent." Does that indicate mute acceptance? Crippling grief? A barely controlled anger? Pure shock?) Why does Naomi try to send Ruth back to her Moabite family in the first chapter of the Book of Ruth? (Is she genuinely concerned for Ruth's welfare, or does she simply want to be rid of the burden of a non-Israelite woman as she returns from Moab to Bethlehem?)

As those examples show — and there are many, many more that could be adduced — biblical narrative counts on and exploits . . . a genuine inner life and a private, complex subjectivity.

Feminisms and You

Three important posts from Sunday on the relevance of feminisms to you.

1. Andrea Sachs at time.com interviews Suzanne Braun Levine.

What do you think about the state of feminism in 2009?
I think feminism is strong and pervasive and vibrant, and I think the fact that the generations are in dialogue over what the agenda should be and who is a real feminist is really not a bad thing. I think that my generation sometimes gets impatient and feels like the battles we won are now being sort of put aside or rethought on different terms. And the other women feel like we don't take their issues seriously enough. But I do believe that the force of independent women of all ages is really changing everything. I have a 22-year-old daughter who cannot really comprehend that when I got married, I was unable to take out a loan without my husband's signature, or that jobs were listed [as] male and female in the paper. It's inconceivable to her. . . .

Do you think that men are more amenable now to the idea of female equality?
Oh, I do. I do. I think men are so much more comfortable working with and for women. You see them all picking their kids up at school, taking them to the playground. When I wrote "Father Courage: What Happens When Men Put Family First," men would tell me that when they took their child to the playground, it would happen that somebody might call the police thinking that they were either kidnapping or molesting the child because they were so unusual. It's night and day now. Of course, women are still doing the most housework and the most caretaking.

Are you still optimistic that [women . . . still doing the most housework and the most caretaking] might change?
I think it's going to change, but . . .

2. Renee at her blog Womanist Musings takes on a reader's notion of "reverse racism."

WOC [women of color in 2009] must not only deal with sexism that is aimed at them from men of color and white men, we must deal with racism from white men and women. It is not a matter which group participates in the most oppression, simply because the smallest amount of oppression is unacceptable. . . .

Simply because white women exist with less social power than white men, does not mean that are unable to wield white privilege to their advantage. Why is it that NOW has never had an African American woman leader? With more and more WOC achieving higher education, do you really believe it is because there were no qualified candidates? Look at the blogosphere, why are there no major feminist blogs written or maintained by WOC? Daily we provide excellent critiques on everything from sexuality, race, class, politics, and gender, yet the majority of the [feminist] traffic ends up at blogs written and maintained by white women. It is purposeful to choose not to read or engage with women of color on the internet.

There has never been a day that WOC have not had to fight for recognition of our worth and our humanity. When we speak out against the exploitation, marginalization, and oppression that we face, we are called angry and summarily silenced. No matter how many polemic blog posts I author regarding the systemic inequality in which we live, the hierarchy of beings will not change unless those who exist with undeserved privilege make a commitment to change. To be silent is to accept that I deserve to be understood as a second class citizen. . . .

3. Suzanne at Suzanne's Bookshelf reviews Carolyn McCulley's mis-characterization of Elizabeth Cady Stanton's views on marriage.

Let's look at what Elizabeth Cady Stanton said [in actuality and with a bit more context]. . . .

Can anyone help me out here? Which early feminists were against marriage. . . .

I am aware that Stanton called marriage "slavery" and "legalized prostitution." However, it seems that the extreme of her position was that a woman ought to be able to escape a violent marriage and take her children with her. She deplored the inequity of the wife's legal position in marriage. She depicts the woman who is dragged by the hair across the floor, kicked and pounded in front of the children. Personally, I find much sympathy in her writing.

I am sad that a published author like McCulley would provide such a misleading charaterization of the early feminists.

Others are reporting sexism, racism, and distortions of the history of women and men, around us in our world this weekend, here and here.