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Wednesday 17 August 2011

Considering an essay on translation

I have written all sorts of things about my experience learning and translating from Hebrew to English. (See e.g. the posts under the label translation) I was prepared in the most tortuous way for this work and I have approached it in the only way I could have - by barging right in and just doing it. I began August 2006, exactly 5 years ago. I had tried to read Lambdin and Brown, Driver, Briggs - perhaps I had them on my shelf for 6 months or so, I can't remember, but now I think I could read Lambdin fluently - for the most part.  My copy is quite dog-eared.  At first BDB was a magical mystery tour every time I picked it up. I could scarcely distinguish one letter from another. Now it's not a bad read - but the Arabic, Akkadian, and other languages in the lexicon text, I still cannot read - though I have a book that I may start some day.

Decisions - here are some of the ones I wasn't aware of at first

  1. Colour - like the highlights in a picture of dried grasses, music, rhythm
  2. Games - assonance, chaism, parallels, metaphor
  3. Concordance - glossing, Rules to follow and break, avoidance, discovering your prejudice
  4. Structure - recurrence, parallels, circles, micro and macro, word pairings, whole phrases and thoughts
  5. Hearing - unplugging ears and opening eyes to humour, idiom, irony, sarcasm, anger, fear, shame
  6. Grammar - juxtaposition, conjunctions, prepositions, gender, verbs, pronoun and point of view shifts (especially in poetry), detail of word order, teasing out the details to highlight or let be.
  7. Audience - If I am reading with an 8 year old, I have a different strategy from reading with teens or more senior citizens.  But for all groups, the potential rigidities of soul are the same and one needs to allow, trick, beguile the reader / listener to fill in the gaps. Then the lessons are not lost.
  8. Policy - theology, government, piety, religious practice, history. What influence is expected from a translation? Do you want to obscure resurrection or enforce the domination of one or other party?
  9. Elapsed time - did words evolve and morph over the period of composition?  This is a question particularly for a long book.
  10. Meaning and explanation and other heretical thoughts.
What other topics and questions should I consider in an essay on translation.  Does the above taxonomy collapse into a smaller number of prismatic surfaces?



3 comments:

  1. Kathryn Rose18 August 2011 at 12:07

    Completely off topic, but I've started my own psalmody project here:
    Psalter Commons

    Background on it is here.


    Are you interested in participating?

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  2. Jenny19 August 2011 at 12:01

    I'm curious about words and languages evolving over time. Does word study make sense across books that we're quite sure weren't written around the same time?

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  3. Bob MacDonald19 August 2011 at 18:24

    @Kathryn - I will have a look when I am back with reliable internet connection - how might I participate? Let's consider...

    @Jenny - yes words evolve over time. But redactors seem to have been able to read all the psalms together even if they were composed over 500 years. I still read 500-year-old English poetry without much problem. So we must be able to study words, phrases and usage in this body of poetry. Whether we do it well or accurately, I know I have been touched by these poems - and that they informed the mind of many in that first century of the common era including Jesus, Paul, the writer of the epistle to the Hebrews and the community at Qumran. They were considered a unit at that time. They have been lovingly preserved. I search out the decisions translators have made on my behalf - because I don't think they are all decisions I would necessarily agree with.

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