- Racism in Translation

- an announcement of The Jewish Annotated New Testament coming soon from Oxford University Press

That’s just a foretaste of what you’re to find at BLTnotjustasandwich.com, a relatively new blog on the Bible, Literature, and Translation.

The most informed and informative literary blogger, Theophrastus, is the one starting the blog.  (He’s also the best biblioblogger with a pseudonym, although the Biblioblogger Library has yet to include him or his blog.  Likewise, he has more insight on translation theory and translation practice with respect to the Bible and other literature than many of us.)  He announces the formation of the blog, here and also here, where you are welcomed! 

Welcome to the blog named BLT. It is not just a sandwich.  It stands for a set of topics that we hope to discuss:  Bible, Literature, and Translation.  We’ll talk about the Bible as literature and the literature of translation and the translation of Bibles and the translation of literature and literature of translation and Bible as a translation and literary translations of Bibles and so on.  And we are certain to throw in the arts, the sciences, philosophy, mysticism, religion, and pretty much everything else.

The initial crew of bloggers represents a diverse set of viewpoints but one that is unified in our openness to new ideas and a fundamental belief in the dignity of all humans.  This blog is open to all: Jews, Catholics, Mainliners, Evangelicals, Eastern Christians, Atheists, Theists outside the Judeo-Christian tradition, etc.  For me a strong underlying theme of this blog is that  everyone has a voice — especially people that have been traditionally marginalized.

I’ll let my co-bloggers (currently J. K. Gayle, Suzanne McCarthy, and Craig Smith) introduce themselves, but I’ll simply mention that I am a professor at a US university with strong interests in applied issues in linguistics.

There won’t be any bacon or other treif meat in my posts, but there will be lots of substance.  I look forward to hearing from you.

Notice that Suzanne McCarthy, whom Theophrastus mentions, is the most current top and #1 Biblioblogger in the Top 10 Biblioblogs by the most recent vote among all bibliobloggers in the world, the most democratic measure of the Top.  Her blog, Suzanne’s Bookshelf, is also #37, in the most current top 40 of the Top 50.

Notice that Craig Smith, whom Theophrastus mentions, blogs at Notes from the Dreamtime and is the only biblioblogger to have produced an entire translation of all the Hebrew and the Greek of the whole Bible, actually The First Egalitarian Translation ever, although he also is yet to be included in the Biblioblogger Library.

And Theophrastus mentions me.  But you already know me.  More importantly, you are invited to BLT!  Feel free to get the word out.

I just finished The Hours by writer Michael Cunningham, in English.  Kept wondering how Mrs. Dalloway was going to die again, and how tragically Mrs. Woolf; and whether Mrs. Brown, with her own rock in her pocket walking into the river – a metaphorical rock mind you – was going to kill herself at all in the end.  I kept wondering, in the hours, whether Jane Stranz would think these chapters, their episodes, were “improbably long.”   She, if she were reading the novel, could rather find herself engaged in Die Stunden and Les Heures and The Hours. Of all people, Jane could tell us whether the author, Michael Cunningham, is accurate and intentional enough, when he claims that all three of these works are “actually unique works in their own right.”

Please, Jane, tell us. I’m dying to know.

Is this novel in German translation, or in French, really the same novel?

Are these three books, bound by a single author’s intention for one novel, instead, rather, different, all unique works? Is Mrs. Brown different in German? Does Mrs. Dalloway in French start by saying she would buy the flowers herself or does she, in a much different way, like a Spaniard decide without saying so? (“La señora Dalloway decidió que ella misma compraría las flores”) Will Mrs. Woolf always, as Maureen Howard says she does, write with “the confidence of the writer”?

Please, Jane, tell us. I’m blogging to know.

If you must know how I died as a blogger, then note it was on Halloween. A trick or treat. If you must understand how I died as a blogger, then see how David Ker is blogging it, as an author, with intention, in English only. Did he do it himself, without assistance, did he leave a note, which languages did he use, did he give a translation, was it dynamically equivalent, did he commit the heresy of explanation, did he offer footnotes, did he remember all of his blogger friends, did he forget to name one, was his note long, did he say it was for personal reasons or professional, did he resort to logic above person in the end, did the witch of endor get his email address, why was Exodus 33:11 his favorite verse in the Bible, why was he okay with the septuagint translation of it, why did he agree that the book of J may have been written by a woman, and the book of hebrews too, why did he even use the made up word afrafeminism, why was he so difficult, why did he always insist that humans are above their language, their languages, that listeners and readers and translators get and give as much as speakers and writers, would he reply if somebody left a comment, and why are we reading his blog anymore?

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions
– some well-intentioned translator or two of the proverb of St. Bernard

Let me just start this post by stating my intention: I intend for this one to end my blogging. I never intended to be a biblioblogger, much less a Top 50 one, more than once, but…. Earlier this week, I posted something else in a thread on Facebook, and I, writing, intended it to be amusing. This prompted a responder to tell an inside joke on me. Then from a different person another response came; it came from a person who knows both me and the one joking with me; the separate response came from one of the professional translators who has studied English here in a university program I run. The translator has interpreted for the U.S. government in both of the ongoing wars of America. He’s a native speaker of Pashtun who is quite fluent also in Arabic, in Farsi, in French, and now in English as he studies here for a degree in Nursing to go back to Afghanistan, where he intends to assist with the medical need. I am intending to give you this background of this Facebook responder, not to bore you with details but, to make the point that my Afghani friend knows language, and knows languages. Now, verbatim, this is what he wrote: “please spell it for me! All I was trying to say or my intention was to say that, wish you more success.” Yes, I intend to make another point with this paragraph, so stay tuned for it in the next. Let me just wrap up this story by saying that, in our Facebook conversation, several different things were going on. And each of us writers had certain intentions which turned into more of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux’s bonnes volontés et désir. As a writer, I always say more, and invariably say less, than I intend. Cette intention de la mine, en tant que traducteur, est le même, si elle est différente.

So I intend to make a point about “The Intentions of Better Bible Translators.” And I intend to write that point in English. And I intend for you to read it and to make of it only what I intend. But I just now remembered something. I intend for you to hear me out about my interviews of great writers. I intend now for you to listen through one more paragraph (after this one or maybe two) and then to understand that titular point of this blogpost of mine. You do understand I have some sure intention, some thing in my head that will find its way into yours, and so you already know my only writerly intention, don’t you?

Yes, that’s right. I interviewed Virginia Woolf and asked her specifically what she intended by her use of the word of in her title for her essay (or perhaps her intended book), “A Room of One’s Own.” Then Walt Whitman gave me a few minutes; so I asked him about his intentions for of in “Leaves of Grass.” In a separate meeting, Harper Lee confessed to me her intention for The Killing of A Mockingbird and for her only novel to make it to print, To Kill A Mockingbird, which seems to be the same intention of translator Femmy Syahrani, who declined my interview because she intends, of course, only to convey the intention of Ms. Lee, which was not, the translator insists, for the novel to become more popular than the Bible. Next, I was able to chat with John Steinbeck who agreed to tell me exactly what he intended by using his original English phrase “The Grapes of Wrath” for a long novel and for its short title and particularly what he meant by the of in it. And, wonder of wonders, Steinbeck sent me to Julia Ward Howe, whom I also had the privilege of interviewing. After telling me out loud that she intended her songs to be songs of the abolition of slavery (and whispering to me that she did not intend for it to get out that she was also a feminist), Ward Howe explained her intentions of her of in the grapes of wrath. She sent me across the Atlantic, where the Bible translators of King James were, intentionally, writing words of English on paper just as winemakers drop grapes into the winepress, which turns out and churns out the good intentions of fermentation like this: “the great winepress of the wrath of God” and “the winepress of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God.” (Nobody intended good French words like de or L’enfer). By bringing up the translators of the English Bible, I’m not sure what I intend yet except I want you to know that I don’t intend to get ahead of myself. The KJV translators were as forthcoming to me with their intentions for their “winepress of.” But I still had to go to Patmos and listen to heavenly intentions as John got his vision of the apo-calypse. Well, if we read Revelation 1:1, it practically gives the whole thing away: it’s a clear message (in the KJV) intended by “Jesus Christ” from God, through angels, to John, now to you and to me. (For the life of me, I can’t figure out how so many preachers and Sunday School mess this all up.) It was too late to ask the English Bible translators what they had intended by of in “The Revelation of Jesus Christ.” And the angels weren’t talking to me; neither was Jesus or God. So I asked John what was “originally” intended. He told me that the intentions of ἐκ and of εἰς related to the mouth of God and from the actions of the angels (of Revelation 14:19 and of Revelation 19:15) were important since the Greek genitive case, as intended by the Socrates of the Republic of Plato (not of The Battle Hymn of of Julia Ward Howe in her room of one’s own), made mere shadows of those intentions of him as translator of the message of the angels. He also reminded me of the fact that the angels were merely messengers of the revelation of Jesus of Nazareth, which, of course, was the intended message of God, who is the only real character of the parable of the cave. He also acknowledged that the only real intention of Plato was also for God to be the only real character of the Book of Revelation. I replied, “Oh, I never thought of that.”

And that brings me to my real intention for this post. As Bible translators and translation fans convene and bibliobloggers take note, there will be intentions. The intention of the “international” “version” that was once “new” is now old; and the intention of “Today’s” new international version is now yesterday’s; hence, there is the intention of 2011. The common intention is to assign intention. Intention is to be assigned either to the intention of the Hebrew words and the Greek words or to the intention of the real meaning behind those words. No one will be talking with Moses or Elijah. No one can talk with Jesus. No one wants to talk with Virginia Woolf. No one will be worried with his own writing either, with his own intentions for anything he wrote, with the plurality of those intentions of his, with what he intended by writing that of of his, with his intentions of the sure and real meaning behind his of even if he is one who (like Noam Chomsky) intends for his English preposition of to be “semantically empty.” No one will be worried with the intentions of the foreign-language translators of anything that he himself intended with his English writing. No one will be worried because each will presume his position of understanding, of under-stander of the real and only intention of each one of the others of the Bible, the writers of the Bible who are in most cases also the translators of writers with a multiplicity of intentions, some of which are yet to be revealed and recovered and discovered. No one will think of himself as foreign, or of the bible writers who are translators of foreign words as foreign.

And it will be only the occasional bible blogger (maybe also an intentional Top Biblioblogger) who will intend and then will intend again, and who will confess written intentions (hardly the final and singular last word) of this sort: “Sorry about that, … I was thinking of … I now note, ….”

Not wanting to disappoint David or Friedrich, I still have something to blog. I think I mentioned this week that another friend lent me some books to read and that one was by Brennan Manning. There’s an online preview here, but I’m going to post below here on a Bible verse writer Manning says is transformational for him. It’s a verse from “Song of Solomon” which the author and his publisher quote as follows:

I AM MY BELOVED’S,
AND HIS DESIRE IS FOR ME.
(7:10 NASB)

If I were David, I’d try to ignore the preposition. If I were Friedrich, then I’d try to take some contrary extreme position to say it has nothing to do with God (or no longer does). If I were Brennan, then I write that the “FOR” is huge and that the “MY BELOVED” is God alive.

Since I’m J. K. Gayle, blogger for a few days more, I’ll just look at the Hebrew in the MT and the earlier Hebrew translation to Hellene in the LXX. I’m curious about blogging and prepositions and God and extreme contrary positions and love and lyrics and language and such.

Here’s the MT:

אֲנִ֣י לְדֹודִ֔י וְעָלַ֖י תְּשׁוּקָתֹֽו׃ ס

Here’s the LXX:

ἐγὼ τῷ ἀδελφιδῷ μου καὶ ἐπ᾽ ἐμὲ ἡ ἐπιστροφὴ αὐτοῦ

Now, whatever you make of it, there’s an extreme reason to believe that the Hebrew word ועלי is positional. It’s extremely pre-positional, and by that I’m suggesting that the language itself is playful, that it is alliterative with the other words, that it plays or enacts a relativity between the other words. There’s a relationship established. No, that’s too strong. There’s a relationship presumed. It’s a presumptive little word in a big sense. We don’t really have to go into commentary on whether the lovers are a king and a concubine or an uncle and a niece or God and Brennan Manning, not even a Jew but a Catholic, and perhaps not even now much of a Catholic if you know his story. The point is somebody’s singing about somebody else. And it’s a song that can be prayed, with MT vowels in Hebrew and CAPITAL LETTERS IN THE NASB.

When we turn now to the LXX, we get a different preposition. It’s ἐπι. Again, there’s this presumption of relationships, some also like the Hebrew, something similar to the conjoining AND in English, but we tend to use it more for “over and above” in English. It’s mashed up in the extreme with another phrase to make ἐπιστροφὴ. The Greek NT readers are quickly going to note how it’s very uncommon there. David might even call it dead Greek. It’s the word most English translators call “conversion,” as in Acts 15:3, where the nations or the goyim or the ethnics or the Gentiles are converted. But this is much more an LXX word, although not much more of one. The “turning over” here suggested by the Hellene phrases in the Hebrew Song turns the Greek reader back to the repetitive calls to the Lover (in verse 6:13). In Hellene, it’s ἐπίστρεφε ἐπίστρεφε ἡ Σουλαμῖτις ἐπίστρεφε ἐπίστρεφε. In later sung Hebrew, it’s the mirrored שׁוּבִי שׁוּבִי הַשּׁוּלַמִּית שׁוּבִי שׁוּבִי. Interesting thing is that Brennan Manning says he prayed this one verse (IN NASB we guess) repeatedly and it converted him. In a “significant interior development” he suggests, that moved him, turned him over “from I should pray to I must pray.” I’m noticing the prepositions here, how very personal, how extreme this is.

Now, I’ve helped all three of my kids with their Math. And in high school, I helped my Algebra II class with their Math. Yes, I was an A student doing that. (The backstory is, however, that I had made a D-, a near failing grade, the year before. I was in an international secondary school in Indonesia, a school in which the language of instruction was primarily international English. The year before, my Algebra II teacher was an American, like me; but I was completely disrespectful, was one of those rebellious Missionary Kids who hadn’t chosen his parents or their religion. Mrs. Brewster applied her logic, and I couldn’t keep up, just didn’t, even though I’d come into her class having made an A in Algebra I. The next year, after I’d earned my D- in Algebra II, my school’s administrators agreed to let me have a second go at the class, to take it again, and to take whichever grade was highest. They also insisted that I take the class from another teacher, from Ibu Liem. The trouble for most of Ibu Liem’s students was the fact that she didn’t speak English well even though her math and logic were more perfect; and most of Ibu Liem’s students couldn’t speak either Indonesian or Mandarin. What ended up happening is I became Ibu Liem’s translator. She’d teach in logic and in Indonesian; I’d interpret that into international English. This is how I made my A in Algebra II).

As an undergrad student, my first semester, in the USA, at the university my parents earned degrees from, I took Calculus. I did fine; I’d learned to use logic. So for my philosophy elective, I took logic. Happened to take logic from the same professor my Dad had had when he was an undergraduate student. I say he was the same professor, but let me assure you he was surely different by the time I was in his class. This, to me, explains the fact that he gave my Dad a slightly better grade than he did me. The plus and the minus were big things for me, having nothing to do with my GPA and everything to do with my pride. There’s a certain logic I’m getting to. This was before I started taking Japanese or Greek.

As a graduate student, in a seminar with Kenneth Lee Pike, I remember him saying “Person above logic.” He’d also tell us this story of when he was a student and when one of his teachers would say, “What we need is for language to have one meaning for each word.” Pike would then remember how he, as a student, finally came out with his reply; it was this: “But sir. How then would we learn languages?” By the time he was speaking with us in English, Professor Pike himself had learned a few languages. He’d learned of a few more. Some, he said, didn’t have words for numbers, at least not for many numbers. No math for the speakers of those languages. No real logic. And yet, he exclaimed, their language, those languages of those people, was rich. Their language was a rich as rocket scientists’ language. Their language above logic, their personal ways of speaking, was as multidimensional as Albert Einstein’s German, as radically relative. Pike called it N-Dimensional. It was an algebra he invented in which N = infinity. Now, to be clear, Pike wasn’t just talking about language or a particular language as a thing in itself. Rather, he was talking about talked-about language. And we people were doing the talking.

As a PhD student, I could tell you more stories. But I started blogging when I was a Ph.D. researcher, reading more logic than ever. And the blogging’s going to stop in a few days. So now I just want to share with you what I read this weekend. It’s something Martin Buber wrote, something translated from German into English. Buber was partially translating from Aristotle’s Greek. Aristotle invented logic, or at least he claims he did, and invented the name for it, “logic.” “Logos” was too much like “dissoi logoi” for Aristotle; it was too rhetorical, and “Rhetoric is the anti-strophos of dialectic.” In the hierarchy of means of knowing, of doing science, logic is above everything. Logic is even what many translators today, in the West, will use to translate one language into another. Aristotle may have liked it that many of us tend to use logic today, at the expense of language, and above persons. But he would probably, logically, insist that we Barbarians learn and only use elite and educated and logical Greek. He didn’t even like the Greek of his teachers Plato and Socrates very much; theirs was too dialogical, he explained. And he would probably, logically, say that Mona Baker’s and Gabriela Saldanha’s Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, Second Edition is in the same family with the sophists’ Δισσοι Λόγοι (or “Dissoi Logoi“) and that this is NOT logic, not either one of these books. Of course, we’d all be speaking Greek, his Greek, and even if we were being logical somehow, he’d comment on our accents, and on our stuttering. Why was Martin Buber interested in logic?

Well, here’s something Martin Buber wrote in German on logic. We get it in English (in Asher D. Biemann’s The Martin Buber Reader: Essential Writings, page 100):

…It is only when reality is turned into logic and A and non-A dare no longer dwell together that we get determinism and indeterminism, a doctrine of predestination and a doctrine of freedom, each excluding the other. According to the logical conception of truth, only one of two contraries can be true, but in the reality of life as one lives it they are inseparable. The person who makes a decision knows that his deciding is no self-delusion; the person who has acted knows that he was and is in the hand of God. The unity of the contraries is the mystery at the innermost core of the dialogue.

So, listening in here to Buber write to somebody, we hear that there’s a “dialogue.” This is not “logic.” There’s the talked-about reality of life, and there’s the talked-about reality of logic. There is talk, language above logic. It’s mysterious, sort of. Martin Buber can say something (something that Hans Küng can quote, something further that Edward Quinn can translate into English from German): “God [is] the most loaded of all human words.” Buber can say this, talking and writing in German, because German is loaded. English is too. These things, as mysteries, can be troubling. Logic, however, is neither troublesome nor loaded. It is above person. We humans are troublesome and loaded, perhaps the way our word “God” is.

Last night, as my daughters were learning Math, were using logic, they were talking. Logic wasn’t enough for logic. Human language was. And these two very beautiful persons are above logic. My one daughter in the Math class told me this morning as I drove her to school, “Dad, I’m making all As, except in Math. But I’ve got a good tutor [her sister] for Math, and I’ll make an A in it too.”

“After Auschwitz there can be no more excuses.  Christendom cannot avoid a clear admission of its guilt.”

He had already insisted (when discussing Christians being anti-Jewish) that

“It was not the Reformation, but humanism (Reuchlin, Scaliger), then pietism (Zinzendorf) and particularly the tolerance of the Enlightenment (with its declarations of the rights of man in the United States and in the French Revolution) which prepared the way for a change and up to a point also brought it about.”

Do we see what the Christian Küng (as Quinn translates him into our English) is clearly admitting? It is something, somethings of people, of us humans, beyond the Bible, beyond the New Testament, beyond its Jesus Christ that provides helpful change to the hearts and behavior of Christians.

What I did then was to read Martin Buber in Asher D. Biemann’s The Martin Buber Reader: Essential Writings. I had just finished up Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and was well into Michael Cunnigham’s The Hours. I’m telling you all of this because there are connections. There are connections not just because I’m reading all of these things at once, or, rather, in some sort of rapid succession. There are connections also because I’m finding my trouble with Jesus. I’m finding that it’s our universal trouble. And, believe me if you can, I absolutely hate imposing trouble on anyone, especially you.

So let’s just get to it. I do remember Küng’s having said something about Jesus to an interviewer for Newsweek magazine, was it now a decade ago, more, nearly two? Yes, there it is, right there in the English language wikipedia (though not in the Deutsch):

“If you cannot see that divinity includes male and female characteristics and at the same time transcends them, you have bad consequences. Rome and Cardinal O’Connor base the exclusion of women priests on the idea that God is the Father and Jesus is His Son, there were only male disciples, etc. They are defending a patriarchal Church with a patriarchal God. We must fight the patriarchal misunderstanding of God.”

I could keep quoting, Küng, Buber, Manning, Woolf, Cunningham, Shakespeare. And you could read my quotations in English, or in German, or in Spanish, perhaps in Chinese. I’d love to give you what Buber says about translation, or to show you his translations, or to give you his statement on logic, on how logic is not troublesome (which, of course, is very problematic). A feminist Küng, a translational Buber, what’s the connection here? What is our universal trouble with Jesus?

Well, everything anyone of us has from Jesus is translational. It’s translated. Yes, and even Küng clearly admits that scholars of Plato do better finding Socrates who never wrote a thing himself than Christians do finding Christ. Maybe feminist scholar Cheryl Glenn does a better job reading Plato and finding Aspasia than most do with Jesus. “Jesus” is a loaded term for us humans, like Buber’s “God.” He calls it our term. But the trouble universally is not that Jesus said something, like Socrates did, as Aspasia did, as God did and likely still does. Our trouble is that what Jesus said only comes to us in translation. What he spoke that we read crosses the boundary of one language before it gets to any of us.

Now we have to get translation. Would even a third edition of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies help us all, universally?

“Translation” is a loaded human word.

I’ve been reading Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. I’ve been seeing things analogous to reading the Bible. By analogy, I’ve been thinking about translation, about novel translation, about Bible translation. So I’m posting. Did that with To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee. (Think far more of you read my post “Whose Mockingbird? A Parable for Bible Translators” far more than any other so far.) Do our novel writers do with their language things similar to what our Bible writers have done? Yes, I believe so.

So, in my edition of Mrs. Dalloway, there’s a wonderful forward written by Maureen Howard, in which she begins getting us readers noticing Virginia Woolf’s language. (I’d tried to get us looking also in this post and in this one. Anyway.) Howard pays attention (like some of us might pay attention to the Hebrew of the Bible, and the Hebrew Aramaic, and the Hebraic Hellene), and she begins with this paragraph:

With what pleasure we read the famous opening sentence of Mrs. Dalloway, for it rings with the confidence of the writer: “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” Virginia Woolf knew exactly what she was up to–title and heroine’s name sprung in her first line, the clarity of diction, the very simplicity of the domestic errand suggesting a world that we will comprehend. The novel is tempered by such easy lines: “That is all”; “I am unhappy”; “I have five sons.” Placed like stones at the rim of a billowing tent, these clear little sentences seem necessary stakes in the shimmering flow of language and emotion that strains, in paragraph after paragraph, to contain the intricacies of life.

Now if you’ve already read my two earlier posts on Mrs. Dalloway‘s language, then you’ve already read a couple of really really long English sentences from the novel. What Howard is trying to peg down for us is this “billowing tent” of a novel, and she notices how its author stakes it down with “clear little sentences” that are “like stones” well placed. And this, she suggests, is for the writer and for us her readers not just language of communication but is somehow our look into life. How did Howard put it? Isn’t it life with some few bits of language also “to contain the intricacies of life”?

But what if a translator, concerned for the “message” of the novel, comes along? What if native English speakers are polled, if natural language is field tested? What if the first sentence constructed and the long billowy ones and the short stony ones, what if they just point to the clearer meaning? What if the translator could just get that? What if he could be accurate then? And clear and precise? Well then. Readers would get it. Sure, they still might argue over who is over whom. Whether men really should be the head of the homes in the novel. Whether the marriages really ought to be complementarian or egalitarian. But the translators, of course, could reassure everyone that the copy of Mrs. Dalloway that they are now buying is better because it is linguistically based now. By linguistic, rather than theological or feministical or some such biased perspective, one must see that it is pragmatic. Yes, if we need a label for pragmatic linguistics, we know it’s Relevance Theory. That is better like Better bibles. It’s a better Mrs. Dalloway because we’re looking at context and such and coming up with what Virgina Woolf (like God and Paul) actually meant, the actual language, the actual message communicated in inferences from her (like Peter) to you and to me (like little stones). Wordplay does not matter because meaning does.

If you’re a Spanish reader, then know that the sentence length must be consistently natural Spanish sentence length. Otherwise, well, otherwise your novel La Señora Dalloway might come across unnatural; and that is not good. If you’re a Spanish reader, then know too that “La señora Dalloway decidió que ella misma compraría las flores” is a better translation than what the English readers got. We all know now, of course, that “When Mrs. Dalloway said” then it was Virginia Woolf deciding that this Mrs. had “decided.” When Woolf was saying, she was, rather, deciding. This is the essence of the communique, the practical inference, that implicature.

Just sayin. That is all.

ee um fah um so
foo swee too eem oo—

What I’m wanting us to do is to listen to words. Are they ours? What’s a reader of Mrs. Dalloway to do with these words? What’s a translator of this novel to do with them?

By analogy, what’s a Bible translator to do with old-sounding Hebrew “original” words that may hearken back somehow to someone else from some time back? What’s a Bible translator to do with some new-fangled Greek neologism in the New Testament? Oh, I could give you examples. I’d love for you to give me some examples. Is the communicated meaning really always a message we much somehow apply? Is Revelance Theory (i.e., communication science applied to missionary Bible translation) really relevant?

Does it always help us to know exactly with some accurate precision what a writer is doing? Does a footnote help you read? Or, if you’re reading in translation without footnotes, does some translator’s give-away-the-meaning translation really help you?

Oh well, why not? Let me just give you the skinny on Woolf’s phrase. Remember? It’s “ee um fah um so / foo swee too eem oo—.” (After that, then, you can read it for yourself.) What follows here is the detailed commentary from a couple of experts, from page 150 of Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life, by Julia Briggs, who is one of the experts. Briggs makes sure we all understand that the singer of the lines noted here is a “beggar woman” who belongs to the present, the distant past, and the distant future; Briggs continues:

Her song consists of a series of meaningless syllables – ‘ee um fah um so/ foo swee too eem oo –’, noises that mean nothing to her listeners (or readers), yet they are also, and antithetically, given a specific point of reference, for as Hillis Miller has pointed out, they are a rough translation of a German poem Allerseelen (‘All Souls’ Day’), by Hebert von Gilm. It was set to music by Richard Strauss, and also by a Belgian composer, Eduard Lassen (1830-1940).
…Concerned with the past, lost love and the return of the dead, his melancholy version was popular in its day (1894), and was apparently part of Leonard’s repertoire (he [Leonard Woolf, Virginia's husband] was impressively well versed in German poetry and music). In January 1931, [Virginia] Woolf reported to her nephew Quentin that Leonard had sung it at a family party (though whether seriously or as a joke is unclear). The English version (written by Mrs. Malcolm Lawson) runs thus:

Lay by my side your bunch of purple heather,
The last red asters of an autumn day,
And let us sit and talk of love together,
As one in May, as once in May.

Give me your hand, that I may press it gently,
And if the others see, what matter they?
Look in mine eyes with your sweet eyes intently,
As one in May, as once in May.

What is fascinating is that Woolf, according to the experts, is offering us readers and listeners some neologistic sounds for a love song. It’s supposed to sound old, and foreign, and ancient perhaps. To Woolf, the experts suggest, this is a loose translation of some English translation of some German, the English once sung by her husband, perhaps in jest, perhaps not. At any rate, the explanation is fairly recent (relative to Bible commentaries) and extremely precise and accurate (compared, again, to what Bible commentary writers can offer us).

With that bit of information, then, a Spanish translator might (and does) do the following. The translator of La Señora Dalloway might just render the song from English (which of course is from German from English from German, and old and female and nonsense sounding) into English thusly:

i am fa am so
fu sui tu im u

So what does that sound like in Spanish?

But I’m reading Mrs. Dalloway again, hearing again, in English. It’s not “original” English that I’m hearing, even though it’s Virginia Woolf’s original English writing. She is its author. She has her own meaning, her own intent. The Revelance Theory Bible translator wants us to get in our heads what was surely in Virginia Woolf’s head. We must get this accurately, in context, with precision.

So let’s do it in English. Again, here’s that perplexed Peter Walsh and what he hears upon remembering reading Daisy Simmons’s infuriating letter to him, upon walking into Regent’s Park. Listen for the song, like the “pompatus of love.” Oh yeah, we’ve said nothing yet of that original English. So stay tuned. Here’s just Virginia Woolf:

That was what tortured him, that was what came over him when he saw Clarissa so calm, so cold, so intent on her dress or whatever it was; realising what she might have spared him, what she had reduced him to — a whimpering, snivelling old ass. But women, he thought, shutting his pocket-knife, don’t know what passion is. They don’t know the meaning of it to men. Clarissa was as cold as an icicle. There she would sit on the sofa by his side, let him take her hand, give him one kiss–Here he was at the crossing.
…A sound interrupted him; a frail quivering sound, a voice bubbling up without direction, vigour, beginning or end, running weakly and shrilly and with an absence of all human meaning into

ee um fah um so
foo swee too eem oo—

the voice of no age or sex, the voice of an ancient spring spouting from the earth; which issued, just opposite Regent’s Park Tube station from a tall quivering shape, like a funnel, like a rusty pump, like a wind-beaten tree for ever barren of leaves which lets the wind run up and down its branches singing

ee um fah um so
foo swee too eem oo

and rocks and creaks and moans in the eternal breeze.
… Through all ages—when the pavement was grass, when it was swamp, through the age of tusk and mammoth, through the age of silent sunrise, the battered woman—for she wore a skirt—with her right hand exposed, her left clutching at her side, stood singing of love—love which has lasted a million years, she sang, love which prevails, and millions of years ago, her lover, who had been dead these centuries, had walked, she crooned, with her in May; but in the course of ages, long as summer days, and flaming, she remembered, with nothing but red asters, he had gone; death’s enormous sickle had swept those tremendous hills, and when at last she laid her hoary and immensely aged head on the earth, now become a mere cinder of ice, she implored the Gods to lay by her side a bunch of purple-heather, there on her high burial place which the last rays of the last sun caressed; for then the pageant of the universe would be over.

Now you understand Mrs. Dalloway or at least Mrs. Dalloway. The words make so much more meaning now that we know what they mean, what the commentator knows that Woolf meant by them. But what about the “pompatus of love” that Virginia Woolf did not sing and could not have meant? What’s pompatus?

Well, that’s easy. We just find that it’s in an old sounding real Latin song, a Gregorian chant:

“Beatus martir domini pompatus vitae meritis a servis caesus gladiis martitium promeruit”

You tell me what that means. You read it with me in Einführung in die Gregorianische Melodien: ein Handbuch der Choralwissenschaft by Peter Wagner. Or you can read with me what an Urban Dictionary lexicographer says pompatus comes from: from “‘puppetutes’, a combination of ‘puppets’ and ‘prostitutes’. A puppetute was a woman of your fantasies who would do anything you wanted.” Or we can go to other experts, to Cecil Adams and his assistant J.K. Fabian. They give us the Straight Dope:

“Some people call me the space cowboy. / Yeah! Some call me the gangster of love. / Some people call me Maurice, / Cause I speak of the Pompatus of love.” — that’s the original authored by Steve Miller

“My dearest darling, come closer to Maurice so I can whisper sweet words of epismetology in your ear and speak to you of the pompitous of love.” — that’s Steve Miller’s original source [himself as original writer of these lyrics you just read now, the pompitous ones, also authored by Miller one year earlier]

Now, actually, according to yet another expert, Brent Mann, these words come from Vernon Green’s original words:

“Let me whisper sweet words of pismotology / And discuss the puppetutes of love”

And Fabian says that Jon Cryer says that Green says that comes from this:

“Pizmotality described words of such secrecy that they could only be spoken to the one you loved…. [and puppetutes is a] term I coined to mean a secret paper-doll fantasy figure [thus puppet], who would be my everything and bear my children.”

Mann says “pizmatology” was Green’s “more or less translating into sweet nothings.”

All that makes me just wonder if

ee um fah um so
foo swee too eem oo—

isn’t English for the original Latin

pompatus.

What I am sure of is that these are words of songs, of love.  How do you want to read and to translate that?

I’d been paying attention to such, I guess, as I was composing my sms poem for a context. And this week at the library, my daughter found for me a paper book called Twitterature, that pretends to have txtd Mrs. Dalloway and To Kill A Mockingbird (and it killed both Woolf’s and Harper Lee’s classic works by its awful mocking). Anyway, as I was saying, Virginia Woolf used terms in her great literary works and in her letters that the turn of the century info agers recently have claimed for their buzz.

Have a read for yourself:

And everywhere, though it was still so early, there was a beating, a stirring of galloping ponies, tapping of cricket bats; Lords, Ascot, Ranelagh and all the rest of it; wrapped in the soft mesh of the grey-blue morning air, which, as the day wore on, would unwind them, and set down on their lawns and pitches the bouncing ponies, whose forefeet just struck the ground and up they sprung, the whirling young men, and laughing girls in their transparent muslins who, even now, after dancing all night, were taking their absurd woolly dogs for a run; and even now, at this hour, discreet old dowagers were shooting out in their motor cars on errands of mystery; and the shopkeepers were fidgeting in their windows with their paste and diamonds, their lovely old sea-green brooches in eighteenth-century settings to tempt Americans (but one must economise, not buy things rashly for Elizabeth), and she, too, loving it as she did with an absurd and faithful passion, being part of it, since her people were courtiers once in the time of the Georges, she, too, was going that very night to kindle and illuminate; to give her party. (from Mrs. Dalloway)

The whole book is full of nooks and corners which I enjoy exploring. Sometimes one wants a candle in one’s hand though — Thats my only criticism — you’ve left (I daresay in haste) one or two dangling dim places. (in her letter to Vita Sackville-West)

The sounds of laughter, deep genuine laughter from Helen, a derisive twitter from Mr Pepper, came to her across the deeps; but, having loosed her grasp completely, she could not say why popery should make them laugh. (from Melymbrosia)

He withdrew the finger that was still thrust between the pages of Gulliver, opened the book, and ran his eye down the list of chapters, as though he were about to select the one most suitable for reading aloud. [The fulsome embraces of the young female Yahoo at the river arouse all the horrors of miscegenation in Gulliver...] (an allusion to Swift’s novel’s reference to yahoo, in Night and Day)

Arnold Bennett lies, it is said, like the picture of a dying fox in Uncle Remus… [Twel de day Mr. Fox got back fum de woods... an' sezee, ... "its 'Google-goody!' an' its 'Google-good!'"] (from her letter to Clive Bell referencing Uncle Remus and the Fox)

For it is a perennial puzzle why no woman wrote a word of that extraordinary literature when every other man, it seemed, was capable of song or sonnet. What were the conditions in which women lived, I asked myself; for fiction, imaginative work that is, is not dropped like a pebble upon the ground, as science may be; fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare’s plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in midair by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in. (from A Room of One’s Own)

Our English uses of the former word derive pretty directly from a phrase we could translate as “people power” transliterated from δῆμος (dêmos) and κράτος (krátos). The latter word, by our uses, comes from ψυχή (psūkhē) and λόγος (lógos) for “soul, or personality” and “study, or statement as in logic.” Incidentally, neither democracy nor psychology, as Greek phrases, is in the Bible. Nonetheless, coincidentally, our proper noun *Bible* is from the Hebraic-Hellene or Jewish-Greek phrase to refer to the Scriptures, as in the Greek translation of [or insert into] this excerpt of Hebrew Torah, which we now call Genesis 2:4

αὕτη ἡ *βίβλος* γενέσεως οὐρανοῦ καὶ γῆς ὅτε ἐγένετο ᾗ ἡμέρᾳ ἐποίησεν ὁ θεὸς τὸν οὐρανὸν καὶ τὴν γῆν

Here are the connections made. First, by Rabbi Marvin Hier in his op ed piece for the Washington Post:

Rashi, in his monumental commentary on the Torah points out that G-d made the patriarch Abraham two promises, that he would have children, even though he was 100 years old, and that the land of Israel would be his. On having children, Abraham was willing to take G-d’s word for it. But when it came to the Promised Land, he insisted on a pre-condition: that G-d show him a sign of ownership. G-d concurred (Genesis 15, v. 8). For 3,500 years, land ownership in the Middle East has always required pre-conditions…. In this region, there will be a Jewish democratic state, Israel, that is here to stay and to them belongs a ‘piece of the rock.’

Second, are the connections made by op-ed writer intern Paige Chapman for the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Elizabeth Earle-Warfel (right), says psych majors at Trinity College of Florida will need 30 hours of psychology courses, including research methods, as well as 54 Bible and theology credits….
Ms. Earle-Warfel says she treats all patients with empathy, as she says the Bible guides her to. “The only difference is, in a secular counseling situation, you’re not as open to using the Bible or Scripture to illuminate unless the counselee starts the discussion,” she says.

So what? It’s words, we might say; just words. Exactly. We want them straight and hard and fast; we mix and borrow and mean things by them, we together. We make nations with people power by them. We probe our personalities by them. We find them nowhere in the Bible or make this book find them in our realities. It’s talked-about reality. And my Dad used to tell me, Mind your language.