ex-plaining

Somehow I feel this obligation to explain to you what I mean by this blog. I wonder, always, what you mean by it. Can we make it plain?

Explanation comes in four sorts. The ancient Greeks say so, and so does Jesus. (I'm bringing this up because a blogger friend, John Hobbins, has boxed me into one position of only two possible positions on "translation [method]"; and a blogger friend, Henry Neufeld, has now rightly written of his problem with John's "division of the types of translations" and how that too may mis-type him. Henry also notes in passing how he doesn't "claim to completely understand" this blog of mine.)

So back to the four sorts. First, men tend to reduce explaining to proposition. Second, when listeners or readers don't "get it," then men tend to explain by imposition. Third, more clever men tend to explain by transposition. And, lastly, even fewer men will find answers in apposition.

What's that mean? Well, appositions may help us here. In other words, we may have to use other words. We may best paraphrase. We might put one story beside another to see how that helps us interpret better.

Historian Bettany Hughes remembers how one Greek man gave this parable (i.e., one story thrown alongside another), as a joke:

When, in Ancient Greece, the rhetorician Gorgias stood up and delivered his 'Encomium of Helen' (a defence of Helen of Troy's indefensible character) - this was a great joke. How can you laud the most sluttish femme fatale of all time? But the rhetoric also got people thinking - maybe, just maybe the skilled speaker had a point.

Why would this woman ever leave the Greek men to join an enemy, a Trojan? In short, Gorgias said Helen was obedient to a command (i.e., a proposition of the gods), was forced by might (through imposition by Trojan men), or was conned by words (i.e., a kind of transposing "If you go with us, then we'll give you this and that and such"). Or, she might have been in love, her story voluntarily put in position right beside her so-called abductor's story.

Mark's Rabbi told a parable (the parable to explain all parables) that is similar. Actually, Mark "translated" what this Joshua (aka Jesus) spoke into another language -- two languages side by side. Wow, this is hard to claim to understand completely. Joshua said (and Mark said Jesus said) that there are four positions for sown seed to find itself in. First, seed falls along the wayside (like a proposition falls without being understood). Second, seed falls into shallow soil where rocks and sun force it to die (like an imposition forces a reduced understanding of a statement). Third, seed falls among other plants to engage with them (but like Hegel's synthesis of a thesis with an antithesis, the thesis dies). Fourth, seed falls and dies but in good soil without rocks or too much sun or the choking of other plants comes up multiply, after its own kind but different that way too (like a parable or an appositive or Helen's love beside her lover's love).

What I'm wondering is whether the first Jewish translation of their scripture is like this fourth sort of ex-plain-ing. The translators put Hebrew into Hellene, and they put themselves into it. It's very personal. It changes them and their Greek and Jewish readers in exponential ways.

Tomorrow, I'll try to begin with the Jewish story of the Beginning. In Greek, it is a parable, a throwing of one story alongside another. The story dies but comes up something different, something more, something still after its own kind.

Sucking the Body right out of Translation

Just so you know, I'm limiting my composing on this blog to 15 minutes a post.

Now, here's the thesis statement today:

We western men suck the personal right out of translating.  

This isn't what women tend to do.  Nor is it how the Jews translating their own scriptures translate.

Let me try to explain the thesis.  We westerners, mostly us men, mostly us non-Jews, have mostly translated "the Bible."  But rather than translate by the methods that the Hebrews used, at least in legend, to translate what we know as the Septuagint and as the New Testament -- we western men (and some women) have chosen Western methodologies.

"Dynamic equivalence," "formal equivalence," "literary equivalence," and "relevance theory" are the King methodologies in the Western world today.  To be sure, missionary Bible translators are exporting these methods as if they're straight from God himself, as "infallible" as the text of the "Word of God" surely must be.  

When a woman such as Karen H. Jobes comes along to suggest that translation really is better conceived as "simultaneous interpretation," then the Western men (and some women) get all excited to consider the "new" idea.  But then they return to what they've always been doing:  using Aristotelian and Platonic (i.e., Greek women-hating male) theories of language and of language translation.  Some time back I read an article about how the translators for the U.S. military in Iraq jeopardize their own person, their own families even, when they are simultaneous translators.  The enemies of America don't take too kindly to such translators.  There's personal risk.  Jobes knows that too.

When a family such as Kenneth L. Pike, Evelyn Pike, and Eunice Pike come along to suggest that translators are outsiders looking in, then the Bible translation establishments that they work for get all excited to consider the "new" idea.  But then they "progress" to "relevance theory" leaving the Pikes behind.  Ken Pike named outsiderness "etics" and insiderness "emics" -- and this got the attention of scholars in twenty-five different academic disciplines because it was so useful.  I say it's pretty humble too.  

Pike used to say to some of us his students that some languages don't have much of a mathematics and no formal Aristotle logic and nothing of Plato's idealism (as in Chomsky's syntactic theory).  Pike also used to do this language translation on the spot -- something he called "monolingual demonstration."  He'd play the "etic" outsider and let another "friendly person" he'd never met nor talked with in her language play the "emic" insider.  The "monolingual" part was her language, not his.  But this outsider, etic role of Pike's was always personal.  He'd ask us, "Aren't etics a kind of emics"?  In other words, "Even if I play the outsider, aren't I coming from my own personal perspectives?  Can I ever be totally objective?  Don't the data observed and the person observed and the person observing all change in the observation?"

Alright, I'm into my 14th minute so just have to end by saying this:

I'm reading along in Genesis this morning that part about God changing his mind about having ever made human beings in the first place.  The Jews translating the original Hebrew into Greek use these loaded terms:  καὶ ἐνεθυμήθη ὁ θεὸς.  Somewhat literally in English that is:  "and the god enthymemed."  

"Enthymemed?"  Yep, that's English in our western academics we call "Rhetoric."   It's a loaded, personal term for the Greeks, even for Aristotle and Plato -- both of whom theorized "rhetoric" as something changy and slimy and womany and what the "sophistas" did with language.  Aristotle goes on right at the start of his book Around Rhetoric to say that the "enthymeme" is the "body" of "beliefs" or of "proofs," as in mathematical proofs.  Now, that notion of the "body" is a feminist one.  "Beliefs" and "change" really are things that our mothers do, when they conceive us and carry us to full term and then nurture us through life.  Sort of like translating.  (Which reminds me too of reading something the Jew named Mark said the Rabbi Joshua aka "Jesus" would teach:  μετανοεῖτε καὶ πιστεύετε, quite literally "change your minds and believe." Kinda personal stuff, huh? Which makes me wonder whether Mark changed and believed any? Whether most western men translating the bible by their Western methods do at all. Whether instead they tend to suck the incarnation, the personal, right out of their translations.)