The Languages of Biblical
Translation by Fr. Paul Mankowski
The beginning of the Holy Gospel according to John:
Before the origin of this world existed the LOGOS —
who was then with the Supreme God — and was himself a divine person. He
existed with the supreme Being, before the foundation of the earth was
laid: For this most eminent personage did the Deity solely employ in
the foundation of this world, and of every thing. This exalted spirit
assumed human life — and from this incarnation the most pure and sacred
emanations of light were derived to illuminate mankind: This light shot
its beams into a benighted world — and conquered and dispelled that
gloomy darkness, in which it was inveloped. To usher this divine
personage into the world, and to prepare men for his reception, God
previously commissioned and sent John the Baptist. This prophet came to
give public notice that a glorious light would shortly appear — to
excite all the Jews to credit and receive this great messenger of God.
John himself openly disavowed all pretensions to this exalted character
— declaring, that he was only appointed of God to give public
information of this illustrious personage.
The Gospel, very approximately, of the Lord. You’ve just heard a
reading from Edward Harwood’s New Testament of 1768, or, to give its
full Harwoodian title, A Liberal Translation of the New Testament;
being An Attempt to translate the Sacred Writings with the same
Freedom, Spirit, and Elegance, With which other English Translations
from the Greek Classics have lately been executed, with select Notes,
Critical and Explanatory. The unadorned prose of the Bible, plainly,
was not to Harwood’s taste. Being a child of his age, he preferred
marble to granite for every purpose. Listen to his rendering of the
Lord’s Prayer (Matthew 6:9-11):
O thou great governor and parent of universal
nature, who manifestest thy glory to the blessed inhabitants of heaven
— may all thy rational creatures in all the parts of thy boundless
dominion be happy in the knowledge of thy existence and providence, and
celebrate thy perfections in a manner most worthy of thy nature and
perfective of their own!
You get the point. Harwood wanted prose that could take a polish, and
the New Testament just wasn’t marmoreal enough, whence he was obliged
to provide improvements and corrections in those places where the
unsteady hand of the sacred author — the uncouth sacred author — had
blundered. As a critic, Harwood makes common cause with one of our
contemporaries, an American bishop, who recently objected to the
literal translation of the words praeclarum calicem in the First
Eucharistic Prayer:
“Precious chalice” — when I hear those words, I
think of a gold vessel with diamonds on it. Did Jesus, at the Last
Supper, use a precious chalice or a cup? The gospels clearly say “cup”,
but even in the lectionary from Rome we have the word “chalice” imposed
on the inspired text to carry out this “sacred language”.
It’s important to understand that, concretely, this taste is
diametrically contrary to Harwood’s at every point: where Harwood was
shocked at the rusticity of the Bible, the bishop is shocked that the
Roman Canon is insufficiently biblical. Yet both men were so confident
of the superiority of their taste as to see it, and not the text, as
the translator’s touchstone. Each would translate what he wished the
original author had written.
“Translations are so much more enjoyable than originals”, Ephraim
Speiser laconically observes in his introduction to the Anchor Bible
Genesis, “because they contain many things that the originals leave
out”.1 The history of biblical translation knows its share of Harwoods,
eager to remedy perceived defects by creative interpolation, but more
interesting is the case of those striving to do it right — to include
everything that God put in the sacred text and to add nothing that He
didn’t — for the study of biblical renderings shows that each choice
for fidelity in one dimension of transmission involves a sacrifice of
fidelity in another. Apart from ideologized targums or the work of
gross incompetents, every attempt at translating the Bible involves a
series of compromises or trade-offs in which that which is transmitted
intact from the original to the translation is achieved at a cost:
namely, the cost of diminished accuracy in some other aspect. Adapting
Herbert Butterfield’s quip about the term Realism, we might say,
“fidelity is not a coherent strategy of translation, but a boast”.
In the latter half of the 20th century, for example, it was considered
appropriate to translate the Bible thought-for-thought instead of
word-for-word: to forego formal for “dynamic equivalence”, as the
jargon has it. No one has made a stronger case for this approach than
Ronald Knox, in his work On Englishing the Bible. Said Knox:
Words are not coins, dead things whose value can be
mathematically computed.... Words are living things, full of shades of
meaning, full of associations, and, what is more, they are apt to
change their significance from one generation to the next. The
[biblical] translator who understands his job feels, constantly, like
Alice in Wonderland trying to play croquet with flamingoes for mallets
and hedgehogs for balls; words are forever eluding his grasp.2
Knox was dead-set against what he called “token words” — i.e., a single
English word consistently used to convey a given word of your original.
Suppose, he suggested, a translation committee faced with the text of
Virgil decides to render the word pius by “dutiful”. The translator
“very soon realizes”, he says, “that pius takes on a different shade of
meaning with each fresh context. Now it is ‘Aeneas, that dutiful son’,
now it is ‘Aeneas, that admirable host’, now it is ‘Aeneas, that
trained liturgiologist’”. The same context-conditioned meanings will be
found with biblical words. “If”, Knox continues, “you set out to give
[Latin] salus the meaning of ‘salvation’ all through the New Testament,
you find yourself up against Saint Paul inviting the ship’s company
during the storm to take a little food for the sake of their
salvation”.3
“To use such a token-word”, Knox argues, “is to abrogate your duty as a
translator. Your duty as a translator is to think up the right
expression, though it may have to be a paraphrase, which will give the
reader the exact shade of meaning here and here and here”.
Now this is a very strong argument, and if the Bible were a work on the
order of Virgil’s — from the fist of one man, completed on a single
afternoon, self-standing and self-ratifying — I think it would be
unanswerable. But in fact the Bible is a collection of books, written
in three languages by numerous human authors over the course of a
millennium and a half, not connected one with another by any intrinsic
design but assembled on dogmatic grounds by the Church. That means the
Bible translator may well have a different set of responsibilities than
the man envisaged by Ronald Knox.
Consider two grad students: one studying classics, given 50 lines of
the Aeneid to translate; the second, studying Hebrew grammar, given 50
lines from Isaiah. Both would accomplish their job by following Knox’s
strictures. But if the same 50 lines given the Hebrew student are to be
rendered for use in a biblical translation, the task and its attendant
responsibilities are markedly different. Many words and expressions in
Isaiah have a pre-history (in earlier parts of the Old Testament), and
others have a life of their own in later parts of the Old Testament and
New Testament as well. Translating in the Knox manner according to
passage context will obliterate these inter-textual connections, while
token translation will illuminate them.
Further, a Biblical text is not so much read as it is heard; not so
much heard as re-heard, often hundreds of times in a single lifetime.
It does not have to make us catch our breath, and the translator
doesn’t necessarily fail us by failing to rivet our attention on first
hearing. Again, the Bible is a liturgical book, and its use in the
liturgy means the translator has aids to understanding that the
translator of Virgil does not, while he also has responsibilities
toward the meanings or imagery bestowed by the liturgy in its own
history of scriptural interpretation.4
Finally, there is a tradition of doctrinal interpretation, embracing
not only the original text but its earlier translations, to which the
biblical translator must be accountable. While the Hebrew grad student
is perfectly justified in rendering Hebrew ha’almah by “young woman”,
in Isaiah 7:14, the man translating the Bible must be aware of the
Septuagintal translation parthenos en gastri hexei and the Vulgate’s
virgo concipiet, and of the unanimous doctrinal tradition that sees in
this passage a prophecy of the virgin birth. So, it is important to
appreciate that there are significant gains in intelligibility made by
the thought-for-thought or dynamic equivalence approach, and there are
significant costs as well.
And it seems to be the case that those costs have begun to impress
biblicists in recent years, and that the pendulum is swinging the other
way. The success of Robert Alter’s recent translation of the
Pentateuch, called The First Five Books of Moses, has done much to
vindicate the much-maligned token words, for Alter makes it a point to
preserve the token wherever possible. In his introduction Alter
deplores an expedient to which dynamic equivalence is prone, which he
calls the Heresy of Explanation. As Digby Anderson expounds it:
When accurate translation produces a word or phrase
that the translators feel is strange or “inaccessible” to modern
readers they adjust it so that it explains itself. The result is “a
betrayal” and, since strangeness is a quality of the Hebrew original,
the translation places “readers at a grotesque distance from the
distinctive literary experience of the Bible in its original language”.
The sort of thing Alter has in mind in speaking of the heresy of
explanation is the rendering of metaphors of body parts such as “hand”
by the function for which they stand e.g., power, control,
responsibility. The substitution is needless — the meaning was clear
anyway — and it subverts the literary integrity of the story in which
it occurs where “hand” is repeatedly used in a connected way. 5
This Heresy of Explanation is nowhere more rampant than in the New
American Bible (NAB) and the Revised NAB (RNAB), where, e.g., Mary’s
“for I know not man” becomes “for I have not had relations with a man”.
Matthew 19:12 gets the same makeover. The traditional token-treatment
(Revised Standard Version [RSV]) is this:
For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth,
and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are
eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of
heaven.
And here is the RNAB version, in which we are spoon-fed the exegesis:
Some are incapable of marriage because they were
born so; some, because they were made so by others; some, because they
have renounced marriage for the sake of the Kingdom of heaven.
I don’t deny that the passage is hard to understand or that the RNAB’s
paraphrase is edifying, but it is impossible to recover the word
“eunuch” from the RNAB’s explanation — or explanations, more
accurately, since being incapable of marriage is not the same as having
renounced it — quite apart from the fact that marriage is not the
activity of which eunuchs are incapable.
There’s another problem with the Heresy of Explanation beyond the
distancing of the reader from the text and the loss of the verbal
connections when the metaphor is decrypted: namely, the translator who
locks himself into an explanation locks himself into an interpretation,
even where that’s a risky business. Take the common word for “seed” —
Hebrew zera, Greek sperma — that falls victim frequently to the
explanatory impulse. Its metaphorical meaning of offspring,
descendants, etc., is almost always recoverable from the token “seed”
itself, which makes decoding unnecessary. But sometimes it’s not even
prudent.
Consider I John 3:9. The King James Version gives: “Whosoever is born
of God doth not commit sin; for His seed remaineth in him: and he
cannot sin, because he is born of God.” Now there are several problems
of interpretation in this verse, the thorniest of which is what is
meant by sperma autou, “His” — that is, God’s — “seed”. One can
understand the desire to ride out ahead of the text here, since there
is no direct apprehension of the phrase “God’s seed” that is not either
heretical or grotesque. The RSV, while ordinarily conservative and
cautious, renders it “God’s nature abides in him”, which would seem to
affront the hypostatic union; the New Living Translation gives us
“God’s life”, and the Contemporary English Version goes for broke with
“God’s life-giving power lives in them and makes them His children.”
Five remarks about these explanatory translations: 1) they are not the
same; 2) while each may be said to be lucid, the lucidity leads to
theologically problematic misunderstandings, each of which requires a
further explanation to avoid heresy; 3) biblical Greek had words for
nature, life, and power, none of which the sacred author here chose to
employ; 4) the notion of God’s seed would have been as difficult for
the original audience of John’s letter as it is to us; and 5) if the
original phrasing “His seed” were preserved in translation, the reader
or homilist would be at liberty to follow his own lights in recapturing
its meaning, whereas the explanatory translation cuts him off from
other possibilities. What’s the point, then, of a gain in lucidity, if
the translation becomes more lucid than the original text permits?
There’s a certain amount of chicanery on the part of the translator in
suggesting that the intelligibility he puts in the translation reflects
an intelligibility found in the original text. C. S. Lewis found the
underlying theological problem already vexing 16th-century Catholic and
Protestant controversialists.
All parties were agreed that the Bible was the
oracles of God. But if so, are we entitled to worry out the sense of
apparently meaningless passages as we would do in translating
Thucydides? The real sense may be beyond our mortal capacity. Any
concession to what we think the human author “must have meant” may be
“restraining the Holy Ghost to our phantasie”.6
The problem may be broadened yet further, since the fact is that in
several places the Bible is awkward, or ugly, or ungrammatical, or — as
was suggested — flatly incomprehensible. Should its awkwardness,
ugliness, grammatical solecism and incomprehensibility be reflected in
the translation? I am aware of no rendering, ancient or modern, that
does not iron out at least some of the rough spots, either by way of
way of conscious tinkering or as a consequence of the translator’s
superior control of his own grammar and diction. More fundamentally, I
propose, the translator’s approach will be guided by his own
understanding — or lack of understanding — of the Bible as the Church’s
book, addressed in response to the Church’s purposes.
Take a homely example, that of the Hebrew vulgarism mastîn
bqîr. It occurs seven times in the Old Testament, always in the
connection of mass slaughter of male citizenry. Douay and the King
James Version (KJV) give the intrepidly literal rendering “any that
pisseth against a wall”. All modern translations, by contrast, launder
the expression as “males”, making use of an explanatory paraphrasis.
But the Hebrew phrase was deliberately unseemly, intended to depict an
ugly act by an ugly expression. Does the duty of fidelity require
conservation of ugliness? Well, the Bible is the Church’s book; it can
be argued both ways.
A more politically charged problem is the translation of I Corinthians
6:9f: “Do not be deceived. Neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor
adulterers, nor malakoi, nor arsenokoitai ... will inherit the kingdom
of God.” The late Yale scholar John Boswell denied it,7 but it’s beyond
dispute that both terms refer to homosexual mischief, and as a
consequence they have come under intense scrutiny. The difficulty is
perhaps more pastoral than linguistic, as delicacy is here the enemy of
accuracy. The first word literally means “soft”, but the RNAB is almost
certainly right to understand it to mean “boy prostitutes”. The second,
arsenokoitai, is a coinage of Hellenistic Judaism consciously
reflecting the Septuagintal Greek rendering of Leviticus 20:13: those
who lie with males.8 The translation “homosexual”, confusing as it does
appetite and activity, obviously misses the mark. For my money, the
most accurate rendering is that of the 1560 Geneva Bible, “neither
wantons nor bouggerers”, but even that requires a gloss on “wantons”.
Or again, almost all of the New Testament, and some of the Old, was
written in a language that was not the author’s mother tongue, with the
consequence that literary beauties are rare and, not infrequently, the
syntax is hopelessly snarled. The second sentence in Paul’s Letter to
the Ephesians contains 160 words in Greek. Almost no translator has the
stomach to give us the English equivalent — as Ronald Knox says,
“nothing ... is so subtly disconcerting to the modern reader as having
his intellectual food cut up into unsuitable lengths’’9 — yet it can be
argued that turning clumsy Greek into snappy English for aesthetic
purposes is a kind of infidelity — traduttore, traditore.
And what of the beauties of the Bible? It is a sad irony that
translators are easily able to reproduce the ugliness of their
originals, and only very rarely able to reproduce the beauties. An
Ecclesiastical Committee may decide that a beautiful translation is
desirable, but you can’t order up verbal felicities the way you order
olives on a pizza — the Muses don’t come running at the snap of one’s
fingers. (I would maintain, by the way, that the ability to make
beautiful prose translations from ancient languages is one of the most
stingily endowed of all artistic talents.) Then too, the 16th-century
translators Coverdale and Cranmer (who were endowed with that gift) had
almost too much natural music in their prose. In his famous Cambridge
lecture on the Name and Nature of Poetry, A. E. Housman spoke of the
way the supervenient beauties of poetry had physiological effects on
his person:
One of these symptoms [of poetry, says Housman] was
described in connexion with another object by Eliphaz the Temanite, “A
spirit passed before my face, the hair of my flesh stood up.”
Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch
over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory,
my skin bristles so that the razor refuses to act.10
Moreover, Housman found himself thus put upon by Coverdale’s Psalter:
As for the seventh verse of the forty-ninth Psalm in
the Book of Common Prayer, “But no man may deliver his brother, nor
make agreement unto God for him”, that is to me poetry so moving that I
can hardly keep my voice steady in reading it. And that this is the
effect of language I can ascertain by experiment: the same thought in
the bible version, “None of them can by any means redeem his brother,
nor give to God a ransom for him”, I can read without emotion.11
So the question presents itself: was the poetry Housman found in Psalm
49:7 poetry the psalmist put there and that Coverdale conveyed, or was
it absent in the Hebrew and simply the gratuitous effect of Coverdale’s
melodious prose? I confess this verse in its Hebrew original does not
transport me, but this may result from my own obtuseness in the matter.
Yet the point is rather: where the original is drab, is beauty in the
translation a betrayal? Does it make the hearer of God’s word a
dilettante where He would have a disciple, or does it compensate for
the deficiencies of our own culture by making the text more memorable,
and thus an object of contemplation? The question in our own time is
moot, since various considerations have made it certain that, of all
the hazards presented by biblical translation, a dangerous excess of
beauty is not one of them.
I began my remarks with a quotation from Edward Harwood’s rewriting of
the New Testament as an example of translation as conscious correction
of its original. Harwood’s foppishness had no lasting effect — indeed,
as far as I can tell, no effect whatsoever. A far more serious threat
to fidelity has arisen in our time in the form of so-called “inclusive
language”— a threat, in fact, to the very possibility of biblical
translation. The feminist ideology behind inclusive language explicitly
regards the authors of the biblical text as suspect, and it explicitly
views language itself with suspicion. It thus brings a moral fervor to
a wide-ranging project of ideologically informed correction in which
both the message of the original text and the vocabulary by which it is
to be transmitted are subject to planned manipulation. Though it serves
as a pretext for political emendation, the activity of translation
itself is of no intrinsic value to proponents of inclusive language.
In this company, it is not necessary to expatiate on the harms visited
upon the Bible by inclusive language. But we can illustrate the problem
by looking at analogous attempts to right injustices by dislocating one
part of the language, i.e., the Receptor Language, of translation.
Some years ago an Indian Jesuit12 told me that he was part of a team
that translated the Bible into Tamil. He explained that Tamil has
honorific and non-honorific forms of address, and that in the common
spoken language males are addressed by means of the honorific and
females by the non-honorific. He said that, in order that the Bible
might be a political tool for cultural change, viz., acknowledgment of
the equality of women, the translation team decided that the honorific
form of address would be used for all persons in the Bible, regardless
of sex. The only exceptions, he went on to mention, were Satan and
Judas, who were assigned the non-honorific.
I trust you can spot the problem. By withholding the honorific forms of
address from some characters and not others, one is implicitly
conceding the derogatory semantic value — and extra-linguistic
appropriateness — of the non-honorific form. But you have thereby
created a private world in which the reader must decode your own value
judgments — which are not those of the biblical authors — from your own
encryption. Yet why stop at Judas and Satan? Why do Manasses and Simon
Magus and Jezebel escape the treatment? The fact is that, once you have
declared the common language untrustworthy and taken it upon yourselves
to improve it, you can never, for any reason, put down your
responsibility. Thus, once you have decided that it is immoral to use
certain constructions of your mother tongue earlier understood to be
innocent, and depart from that tongue in translation, the whole work
comes under moral scrutiny whether you wish it to or not.
The impact of morally motivated translation was made, indirectly but
wittily, by William Laughton Lorimer in his brilliant 1985 rendering of
the New Testament into Scots dialect: a good-natured exercise in
Scottish nationalism as well as minor masterpiece of philological
scholarship.13 In his alternative version of Matthew Chapter 4, the
temptation of Jesus in the wilderness, Lorimer exploits the potencies
of moral evaluation latent in his patriotic project:
Syne Jesus wis led awà bu the Spírit
tae the muirs for tae be tempit bi the Deil.
Whan he hed taen nae mait for fortie days an fortie
nichts an wis fell hungrisome, the Temper cam til him an said, “If you
are the Son of God, tell these stones to turn into loaves.”
Jesus answert, “It says i the Buik:
Man sanna líve on breid alane,
but on ilka wurd at comes
furth o God’s mouth.”
So endeth the reading. If Lorimer was tongue-in-cheek, the inclusive
language proponents are in dead earnest. And yet this very earnestness
demolishes their only tool of communication. This is evident even in
the “compromise” biblical translations that boast of limiting
themselves to “horizontal” inclusive language. Once the translator
eliminates the unmarked generic to a perceptible extent, he
paradoxically puts exaggerated and misapplied emphasis on the maleness
of the masculine forms that remain: In effect all masculines become
marked for gender.
For example, Father John Rock pointed out to me that the New Revised
Standard Version (NRSV) is generally ruthless in excising English “man”
for Greek anthropos, but retains it in Romans 5 — not unreasonably,
when one considers the problems with the alternatives. But when we read
in the NRSV, “sin came into the world through one man”, our confusion
is genuine; precisely to the extent that our expectations are based on
the NRSV grammar (without generic “man”), we will understand Saint Paul
to be speaking about one male. In introducing exactly the kind of
misunderstanding for which they are invoked as the cure, the inclusive
devices cut their own throat. And this is only to be expected. For the
Bible is the Church’s book. And once you find the Church untrustworthy,
you may at points agree with her, but you can never let yourself be
taught by her. Whence every time you suspect the Church has God wrong,
your own position wins by walk-over. A Pyrrhic victory.
In conclusion, let me ask: has it ever occurred to you how coy God is
with respect to His ipsissima verba? At all events it seems we were not
meant to mistake the shell for the kernel by worshipping God’s
utterance instead of Himself. Jesus spoke in Aramaic, yet apart from
half-a-dozen transliterated vocables, we have nothing. The Old
Testament goes out of its way to teach us we’re not getting God’s mind
main-lined. In Genesis 11, we’re told that all the earth had the same
words and pronounced them the same way. Then God, coming down to
destroy the pretensions of the builders of the Tower of Babel, confused
their language — all language, no exception being made for Hebrew. This
means that, on the Bible’s own terms, Hebrew is itself a corrupt
language — and not, e.g., the language God spoke to Adam and Eve in the
Garden. We were not given a Qur’an or a Book of Mormon containing
unmediated divine utterances. As George Macdonald wrote, God saw to it
that the letter, as it could not give life, should not be invested with
the power to kill.
In taking as my title, “The Languages (plural) of Biblical
Translation”, I hoped to show that both source languages and receptor
languages are multiple, that there will never be a final definitive
translation, that every choice for fidelity by one manner of speaking
comes at the cost of fidelity elsewhere, and that, by viewing the Bible
as the Church’s book, created for her purposes and subject to her
judgments, we might arrive at the humility to receive God’s word, not
as a political platform, but as did she who received it as a person.
Notes
1 Ephraim Speiser, Genesis (Anchor Bible), Garden City, NY: Doubleday,
1964, p. lxiv.
2 Ronald A. Knox. On Englishing the Bible, London: Burns & Oates,
1949, p. 13.
3 Knox, pp. 11f.
4 The nature of those responsibilities (viz., of the bible-translator
toward the liturgy) is a vast question, and one that remains to be
addressed. My claim is that to translate the Bible is to pay deference
to the Church that produced it, whence to ignore the Church’s
liturgical understanding of the Bible is a performative
self-contradiction.
5 Digby Anderson, “The Heresy of Explanation”, (review of Robert Alter,
The Five Books of Moses), The Spectator, December 18, 2004.
6 C.S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding
Drama, Oxford: Clarendon, 1954, p. 212.
7 John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay
People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the
Fourteenth Century (Chicago : U. of Chicago, 1980), p 107.
8 See David F, Wright, “Homosexuals or Prostitutes?: The Meaning of
arsenokoitai (I Cor 6:9, I Tim 1:10)”, Vigiliae Christianae 39 (1984),
p.129.
9 Knox, p. 96.
10 A.E. Housman, “The Name and Nature of Poetry” (the Leslie Stephen
Lecture for 1933, at Cambridge, May 1933).
11 Housman, ibid.
12 S. Michael Idurayam, S.J.
13 William Laughton Lorimer, The New Testament in Scots, London:
Penguin, 1985, Appendix 11, p. 455. I am grateful to Monsignor Gerard
McKay for bringing this delightful example to my attention.
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