Schedule of posts

It was not planned by me, but my schedule of notes at PoC makes psalm 79 fall on Sept 11 and psalm 112 on Christmas day. These are interesting coincidences.  I read the brief on psalm 79 and this morning it morphed into an essay on atonement - been wanting to write that for ages... How would you relate Psalm 79 to Romans 3:25?

State of the project

Patient readers, I have now drafted and scheduled all the posts for Poetry of Christ. They are scheduled to run till the end of March. I have essentially treated the Songs of Ascent as a single thought and release a post every day. That saves a month. Some of them are quite brief (like today's on psalm 78). I may beef them up a bit as I consider them in advance... But the real point is to read the psalms themselves and not keep them at arms length.

As far as the translation is concerned, I will continue to work with it and need now a way to test my work against a wider vocabulary.  Any ideas how to do this?  I could redo Job - or maybe there is a bit of narrative I should try?  I will sleep on it. Maybe several nights. I am having a hopefully mild relapse of a childhood disease and I have some other medical things to attend to that must have fostered some stress in me.  What happens to faith during illness?  I am on trial.  I know I will fall apart eventually - it's in the genes as it were. So given my joy, can I remember, or am I as transient in my memory as I will have been some day in body?  Perhaps I am being cast in a hyper-dimensional amber, ready for the great assize.

Anyway, my project to translate the psalms is now completed for the third, or is it fourth or fifth time. Nothing stopping me from rereading them too.  I am now going to think about how to present and document what I have learned over the last 5 years.  Maybe a little book.  The Story in the Psalter?  But if for some reason, I really retire to a waterfront home and stop all this religious stuff and swim and drink and eat and be merry, still the posts will keep on coming till the end of March 2012. (I'm sure you remember psalm 73: If I had said, This is how I will recount it then I would have betrayed a generation of your children.)

I don't expect to leave quite so suddenly. (But there was this rather nice house for sale ...)

Translation and cultural competence

There is a new blog on translation with some of my favoured bloggers contributing. Also others of my favoured bloggers are posting on translation issues - catching the flavour of Jerome's Latin, and avoiding the worship of ancient tongues where a dispute is noted linking to many discussions some of which are quite flavourful though they are not among my favorites (sp!). [But this is the first post I have read that really reminded me of the style of the first NT Wrong] This 'discussion' is relevant to the Venuti-Nida dispute concerning mono-lingual America - I am not sure whether the call is for 'advance' or 'retreat'.  Perhaps more later...

Retired though I am, today is a work day in a work week.

What we did on our summer vacation

We traveled by train from Montreal to Seattle via New York, DC, Chicago, Santa Fe, and LA. A selection of pictures is here. This one below taken on the High Line in NY. Lots of nifty scenery, grand architecture, and beautiful flowers.

Change of state

I may spin faster around a smaller circle, or slower in a wider sphere, but I am in a change of state. Sept 1, 2011 is my first day of retirement. For the first time in 45 years, I do not have to go to work. Mind you I do have to attend several days of director's meetings Sept 6-8 - but that won't happen too frequently, and I will continue to use and test our software as I finish my work on the psalms. And that will benefit both me and the company.

So I may have more time for posts and comments and things. In the next month, I expect to complete my full draft of notes on the psalms. I am currently working on 116, so 35 to go.  These notes will appear at the other blog, Poetry of Christ, every three or four days till late April, 2012.

There's always a chance that I won't make it that far, but let's hope for a useful retirement subject of course to the gifts that come my way from the (what shall I call you, my Love) Great Mystery of the Cosmos who engages us with Invisible marvels in our extraordinary space.

I must admit I would love some interaction on the psalms - those guys at BBB are all on about natural language and Greek NT - they almost never discuss TNK. Marcion would be proud.

Anyway - blessings to all my patient readers - I will try not to blather on too much.

Faith and scholarship

Hey - another minefield

Alan Bandy at Cafe Apocalypsis has reposted a whole bunch of scholar's opinions on this potential controversy. I haven't read them (yet maybe I will). But I did see this in the foundational document, part 2

Faith, by definition, is belief when evidence is absent

Well, how shrewd are you? Is this a correct statement? Or is it even adequate as a starting point?  It's not Alan's point of view but a quote from someone else. It's not a definition of faith that I could agree with.

I think it is largely true that scholarship should deal in verifiable evidence. But there is plenty of evidence that is not verifiable. For example, one person's subjective experience is not able to be verified by another person. That does not prove that there was no experience. Surely we need a language to talk about such things. Such a language might include words like spirit, life, God, relationship, obedience to an invisible, faith, self-delusion - and many other aspects of religious language. Defining the language is not without its difficulties. Using it requires some story telling.

Strangely enough, the following statement I agree with:

In other words, according to this view, if I depend on the illumination of the Holy Spirit as part of my argument or if my argument only makes sense when you accept Jesus as the Resurrected Son of God—it is not “evidence” and cannot be submitted in any scholarly argumentation.

The reason I agree is that both statements of faith above involving 'illumination of the Holy Spirit' and 'Jesus as the Resurrected Son of God' are either theological propositions, or language that some person is using to express experience. Theology can be talked about, and even form the basis of some logic in its own realm, but experience cannot, except to say that 'it happened to me' or some such statement (story) - in the way that psalm 34 invites the engagement with the mysterious. This faith, that the psalmist exhibits in the poetry, is not a theological proposition that you can discuss. But it is not a case of absent evidence.  The evidence is the psalm.

So what does the evidence mean? Perhaps it is a coercive culture where failure to conform to the propositions was punishable by death or expulsion. Some religions seems to work this way. This is not a type of culture that we like in the West. (At least not some of us some of the time). And such coercion is not conducive to experimentation. You taste and see - or else! Or perhaps it is a real psychology that is being wrestled to the ground and that calling on God is a way around the horror of the destructive tendencies we find in the world, the enemy within.  This might be worth exploring.

Still, without the scholars, I would be lost. Alan next moves to 2 Peter. I think that's a good place to stop. I have my ideas of why the NT is written the way it is, and what the transfiguration 'means'. It is a very full cup. But I am not ready to say that some story or other 'did not happen' - say that the trees-walking-partial-healing-of-the-blind-man is Mark's personal signature and not actually something that happened in 5 minutes, but maybe 15 years.  There is the problem - it is experience of seeing and not seeing, hearing and not hearing (Isaiah 35 - alluding to Genesis 3 - eyes open, ears unplugged).  We could talk about these aspects of our shared life, but not if coercion or violence is the only resolution to the discussion.

That's why I like the psalms. But I have experienced correction in mysterious ways. I can't explain it - I can only interact, and it's too good to miss out on. Nevertheless... my experience is not subject to another's verification, and my theology may be true to itself and useless to another (like some kinds of infallibility or inerrancy).

I suppose if I said anything useful, someone might comment....

On poetry and form

poetry or prose
A friend labelled my translations of a psalm as a 'prose psalm'. Well, they don't rhyme, and they don't scan, but they are not prose.  They are Hebrew poetry, trying to preserve Hebrew thought forms and drama, in English. And my desire is to hear and see them as they would have been heard or appeared to those who read them say any time between 2000 and 2500 years ago. What is poetry as they knew it?  It is not as foreign to us as we might think. We have blank verse, and free verse, and these days (compared to my youth) poetry is poetry if the poet says it is. (Too postmodern).

But it is foreign and not only in language but also in time and place. How does one see Hebrew poetry?

structure
John Hobbins (Ancient Hebrew Poetry) has a very nice rule of 2 and 3 which we discussed in 2007 - also a long time ago in a different place. He suggests that the total number of lines in a poem may follow a rule.

A poem, if it contains more than 10 lines, typically consists  of 12, 18, 22, 28, or 36 lines, or combinations thereof. Among the Psalms, 14 lines is also a common length.

I did a quick test (I can count the occurrences of a line feed in the data) and it's not impossible that my psalm lengths in lines might cluster around these numbers. But I wonder if I 'made it happen' whether it would be proof of form.

Tim Bulkeley (Sansblogue, 5-minute-Bible) sent me this response to my question on form:

I think there will always be disagreement about poetry, and that we are having delusions if we expect it to neatly fit any "rule". But I find that counting word units usually gives a fair sense of regularity. With 3 as the commonest line length and 2 or 4 as variants (with often a shorter line at the start and/or end of a unit).

I like John's approach for its simplicity, though we will find more numbers than 2 and 3 as part of the forms. I like Tim's comment because it leaves me free to read (and I always found poetry difficult).

formal elements
While the brilliance of the poetry of the Countess of Pembroke is to be delighted in, it is not Hebrew poetry that she writes - though there is no doubt she heard it well and, I might add, her training in the classics far surpasses my own. She writes English poetry, I do not. (Her book is linked here under psalm 123.) Whatever the Hebrew forms are, they only occasionally rhyme, and there is no agreement on meter that I can hear at the moment. There is pulse as there is in Latin and English plainsong - so the rhythm of the final form will be important.

But I do not want to obscure what I have found in the words I have read and that is obscured in every translation I have looked at. What I have considered the most important is evident in all the tables of recurrence that I have put in my posts on the psalms. Also important are the ways in which such recurrence works: chiasm, parallels, and larger ring and cell structures. These structures work in tandem with the traditional parallel rhyming thoughts that we have recognized since the work of Lowth. (Though it is to be noted that Medieval commentators often interpret both sides of a parallel as if they were independent.)

Also I want to note that while I cannot imitate the language games that Hebrew poets play such as alliteration, or assonance, I do try to point them out. Metaphor and simile are easier to retain, and of course letter games, palindrome and acrostic are often poignant and sometimes structurally significant on a large scale. The large scale forms are both memory aids and teaching aids. I always translate an acrostic as acrostic using the Hebrew letter sequence.

Within these parameters, however, is the life-giving and life-sustaining interaction in covenant of the elect poet, expressing and representing individual and corporate lament, praise, joy, and story.

the choice of words
I have voluntarily constrained my glosses primarily in order to preserve recurrence, secondarily in order to facilitate hearing and seeing larger scale structures in the Psalter. I have had to search out many English synonyms because Hebrew has a large number of different words that mean similar things. In earlier work in 2009 on Job, I wrestled in public with many word groupings. I have not been so public with the psalms, but the wrestling was deeper and more prolonged. Many of the same groups appeared - like fear, dread, terror, or shake, shudder, and quake, or destroy, annihilate, cut off, or man, male, warrior, human, and so on. These groups of words are much larger than two or three and often overlap. Sometimes I have been chasing up to a dozen words at once. I have disallowed overlap to prevent the same English gloss from reflecting more than one Hebrew root. Exceptions are for homonyms and for acrostics - where I let myself go quite silly at times.

an example:
A single root in Hebrew may carry many meanings and shades of meaning just as homonyms do in English. אל for example may be a negative particle, a preposition, or a short word for God, or even a phrase implying importance, strength, power, or rank. We hear the different connotations in context. Most of the time, this little word gets ignored. It's just part of another thought. Occasionally, it is a puzzle as in psalm 82:1 where, at the moment, I am trying out 'rank' as a gloss (uniquely). This colon plays on the sound of אל (El). And the same word Elohim translates differently within a few words of itself.

אֱלֹהִים נִצָּב בַּעֲדַת אֵל

בְּקֶרֶב אֱלֹהִים יִשְׁפֹּט

So how would one approach these 7 words.

אֱלֹהִים stands in the counsel of אֵל

in the midst of אֱלֹהִים he judges

These are traditional glosses. I did not choose stands because I have already used it as the preferred gloss for עמד. In this case, I chose takes a stand. At least for now. I also allow stand to be distinguished from stand firm. As I describe this, I feel there are a lot of other choices I could consider. I also chose in the close combat of rather than in the midst of since again I have used in the midst of for בתוך. Further, I did not use counsel (עצה) but assembly (עדה). But which Elohim should be God and which Gods or gods? And what will we do with El?

אֱלֹהִים takes a stand in the assembly of אֵל

in the close combat of אֱלֹהִים he judges

The choices depend on who is doing the judging. It is singular like the singular form of takes a stand but I wonder, could El be the subject? I tried a few ideas

God takes a stand in the assembly of rank

in the close combat of gods he judges

I intended rank as signifying importance, not its homonym, putrid or smelly. But I think the adjective divine works. It fits the parallel: the divine A assembly B, the close combat B` of gods A` (just think politics). Verses 6 and 7 also helped determine my choice.

God takes a stand in the divine assembly

in the close combat of gods he judges

Close combat also reminds us of psalm 55. Why? The word recurs there 6 times.

You can find some other renderings of psalm 82:1 from the glue factory here.

The whole psalm as it currently stands for me is here. [p.s. my comments on the 'meaning' of this psalm will be posted on Sept 19 at PoC. I was surprised that this example arose in me today.]