Levine on Amy-Jill

Amy-Jill Levine writes her own story (marking herself, as Christians often to do her kind, as a Jew) in her introduction to The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus:

When I was seven, this early fascination with Christianity came to a head with two events. First, I became insistent upon making my First Communion. All my friends were preparing for this special event, and I didn't want to be left out. My desire was not motivated by religious fervor or even religious understanding; I lacked both. Rather, I wanted the dress with the matching white patent-leather shoes. To provide me some consolation, my mother bought me a wedding gown for my Barbie doll. I'd dress Ken in his groom suit, with the jacket on backwards and with white construction paper for the clerical collar. Then, practicing what I learned from my friends, I'd have Barbie, in her bride dress, take Communion from Ken every morning before school.

Second, that year a friend on the school bus said to me, "You killed our Lord." "I did not," I responded with some indignation. Deicide would be the sort of thing I would have recalled. "Yes, you did," the girl insisted, "Our priest said so." Apparently, she had been taught that "the Jews" were responsible for the death of Jesus. Since I was the one one she knew, I must be guilty. But at the time I did not understand the reason for the charge or have the means to address it.

Barnstone on "Barnstone"

I think I may have been too hard on Rich Rhodes in the previous posts because he explains, as he confesses it in a comment, what he was intending: "I wasn't intending to poke fun at Barnstone, but some 30 years ago I was at a big charismatic conference in Kansas City and one of the speakers from Jews for Jesus . . . had none of the awkward/archaic wordings of the English of Barnstone's translation." Jews who just don't get it, you see, sound nothing like (Jewish) Christians. (All Christians know that).

Willis Barnstone writes his own story in more than one place. But then he has lived in many places, always as a Jew, maybe an archaic one. And his life itself has had the awkwardness of an orphan, he notes in We Jews and Blacks; his father ("who never tried to pass [racially]") committed suicide and left the boy with "Marti," his Mexican stepmother, and "with her mother Rebeca, a Sephardi from Constantinople, who normally called [him] mancebico, young man (in Medieval Spanish)." He goes on:

The one school I applied to was Yale, and they turned me down. For the religious blank, I wrote "Quaker" [a lie.] I didn't have my brother and mother prodding me. I did it on my own. I think they turned me down because my application, the smudgy work of a fifteen-year-old, wasn't very good, not because they suspected that Barnstone [another lie] was Bernstein (meaning "amber" in German or literally "burning stone"). When I say Barnstone, and my pals in the know often kid me for having a phony name. I love the name Barnstone, as I do Willis (one lacking will). A "barn stone" is a thing in nature. And I've lived most of my adult life in a rebuilt barn, which my brother designed.

Since my father was a jeweler, importing Swiss watches, he imported, at my sister's suggestion, a watch with our own mark on it: Pierre Grange (meaning Stone Barn). They were beautiful watches that he designed, with Corbusier-like shapes, and in the last years I always quote Pierre Grange in scholarly and creative books. He's very kind to me and lets me say what I would not feel as comfortable saying myself. He also has a mind of his own and gets inspired to say aphoristic words and quotable parabraphs I'd never come upon or dream up. For my book The Poetics of Translation: History, Theory & Practice (Yale, 1995), he was unduly generous. I cited him epigraphically and in many tight spots. Conforming with proper acknowledgments, in the bibliography I had his diverse books and essays all translated from the French by a Pole living in France, Velvel Bornstein. If my grandparents had stayed on in eastern Poland until the village of Haradok was bulldozed by the Nazis and the people taken away or if I had ventured to live with my parents in Warsaw itself, I would have carried the good name of Velvel Bornstein. Soon after the war I wen to Warsaw and was taken to the ghetto by a friend, Bronislaw Zielinski. He had been in the Polish resistance, was captured by the Germans and tortured by them; later he was tortured by the postwar government as a Catholic opponent.

[here Willis Barnstone includes his dark, awkward poem: "Vevel Bornstein in the Warsaw Ghetto." The last two lines go like this. . . .]

My witness. That Jew and visitor
Is writing this. He could be me.

There were surely many joyous and fated Velvel Bornsteinns in the prewar Pale, perhaps in my own unknown and disappeared family in the village of Harodok. But was there a real Pierre Grange? "Grange" is rare in France; "La Grange" plentiful, like "Miller." My dear friend Professor Pierre Citron recently wrote, informing me that he had found just two authors in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris with the names Pierre Grange. . . . One day in those early postwar years, as we were walking through the ghetto--already elegantly rebuilt and no longer a site for Jews--Bron [i.e., Bronislaw Zielinski] told me he had experienced and seen too much raw cruelty: "I am a ruined species. The option of forgiving or forgetting is not an option. We cannot forget. My generation must die."

Marrying Foreignness and Naturalness: As If That's NOT Translation

"Marrying Foreignness and Naturalness:
As If That's NOT Translation
(And I, the Christian Bible Translator,
Am Only Natural But Never Foreign)"

This is my second post, responding now to Rich Rhodes' linguistic commentary on his attempt to sound like Willis Barnstone, who rather instead attempts to sound less like what Rhodes wants Jews in the Bible to sound like.

(In the initial post, my response was to a second meaning in Rhodes' attempt; his unintended meaning was this: that there can be no unmarked position for the translator. Rhodes, of course, first assumes for himself the unmarked, default position as expert linguist and objective Bible translator. Rhodes does not question whether he, Rhodes himself, is being rhetorical. He wants to be the logical one, the a-rhetorical one. In marked contrast, Barnstone, the Jew, is the rhetorical one when he tries to make the Jew in the bible sound, well, foreign and Jewish and not naturally Christian.)

Maybe in a third post, we can see how Barnstone actually translates what Rhodes mimics - the way, perhaps, that Plato mimics Gorgias (by putting words in his mouth while talking with Socrates) . Listen to Plato mimicking the slimy slick sophist Gorgias, who is made to say of his craft and of himself: "I practice rhetor-ic, Socrates; I am a rhetor-i-shun." What Plato never admits (nor does his Socrates) is that he himself by his very mocking mimicking of the real Gorgias is actually as subjective as his ideal Gorgias. Plato, by his act of standing in the position of the expert knower, actually unintentionally takes the position of the slippery sophist: Plato here invents, he coins, the Greek neologism, rhetoric. (This is all very well documented in, and by, the Platonic dialogue, "The Gorgias," by the way. And several historians of rhetoric have noted that Plato's word is never used by anyone, not even by Gorgias, before Plato's writing of "The Gorgias.")

Notice what Rhodes does as he rushes to judgment:

"This is [i.e., where Barnstone goes in translation is] beyond where I’m willing to go at this point, but it does illustrate that if you are willing to think outside the box you can marry foreignness and naturalness in a single passage — something that much of the argument about how to translate has not admitted is possible."

My response, as the title of this post suggests, is that (even if you are unwilling) you do marry foreignness and naturalness in translation (whether you are willing to admit going there or not). And whose foreignness and whose naturalness can you bring yourself to acknowledge?

Here now, I'd like us to listen to Barnstone in his own words, as he writes the words of others in his (auto)biographical book, We Jews and Blacks: Memoir with Poems. As you read page vii, ask yourself whether you know who Pierre Grange and Velvel Bornstein must be:

God created the world and us and the others. And he commanded us to believe in him and to punish the others. And when necessary to kill the others. But everywhere in the world, God changed appearance and ideas and to many even he has been the infidel. Jews and Blacks understand God's problems of appearance and identity, for they've been uniquely plagued by the same dilemma. But they're lucky too, as God is, for their otherness. Who wants to be all the same? Years ago God was a woman and in the Hebrew Bible he even began as several gods. Genesis 1:1 reads "In the beginning the gods (elohim) created heaven and earth."* So God started out as a team. But we Jews and Blacks have often been seen as a strange species, as if no god had remembered to make us, or had done so in an alien land under a wrong name. And with our difference came divine punishment: slavery, demonization, and murder. But that distinction of otherness has also given Jews and Black a knowledge of affection and play, and a habit of compassion.

--PIERRE GRANGE, On God and the Other

God cooked up birth and billed us with death, leaving us in a global soup bowl filled with every different plant under the sun. And then abandoned us to stew in tasty mystery!

--VELVEL BORNSTEIN, Laughter of the Stoics

*Although el is God and elohim gods (as in Psalms), in Genesis 1.1 elohim is called a "plural of majesty," whose meaning is singular.