TRANSLATING RELIGIOUS TEXTS

From the same publishers

David Scott Arnold LIMINAL READINGS

Forms of Otherness in Melville, Joyce and Murdoch

John D. Barbour THE CONSCIENCE OF THE AUTOBIOGRAPHER Ethical and Religious Dimensions of Autobiography

Tibor Fabiny THE LION AND THE LAMB

Figuralism and Fulfilment in the Bible, Art and Literature

Max Harris THEATRE AND INCARNATION

David Jasper (editor) POSTMODERNISM, LITERATURE AND THE

FUTURE OF THEOLOGY

Ann Loades and Michael McLain (editors) HERMENEUTICS, THE BllLE AND LITERARY CRITICISM

LindaMunk THE TRIVIAL SUBLIME

George Pattison KIERKEGAARD: THE AESTHETIC AND THE RELIGIOUS

Translating Religious Texts

Translation, Transgression and Interpretation

Edited by

David Jasper Director, Centre for the Study of Literature and Theology

University of Glasgow

Foreword by George Steiner

lSOth YEAR

M St. Martin's Press

© The Macmillan Press Ltd 1993 Editorial matter and selection © David Jasper 1993

Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1 st edition 1993

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First published in Great Britain 1993 by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD

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Companies and representatives throughout the world

This book is published in Macmillan's Studies in Literature and Religion series General Editor: David Jasper

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-349-22843-0 ISBN 978-1-349-22841-6 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-22841-6

First published in the United States of America 1993 by Scholarly and Reference Division,

ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC., 175 Fifth Avenue,

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ISBN 978-0-312-08668-8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Translating religious texts: translation, transgression, and interpretation / edited by David Jasper: foreword by George Steiner. p. em. Includes index.

ISBN 978-0-312-08668-8 1. Christian literature-Translating. 2. Religious literature­-Translating. 3. Translating and interpreting. 4. Christian art and symbolism. I. Jasper, David. BR117.T73 1993 418'.02-dc20 92-23115

CIP

Contents

List of Plates vii

Acknowledgements viii

Notes on the Contributors ix

Foreword George Steiner x

1 Introduction: The Painful Business of Bridging the Gap 1

David Jasper

2 The Changing of the Host: Translation and Linguistic History 4

Stephen Prickett

3 Interpreting the Language of St Paul 21 Dennis L. Stamps

4 The Knox Version, or the Trials of a Translator: Translation or Transgression? 44

Solange Dayras

5 On Retranslating John Henry Newman's Callista 60 Michel Durand

6 Judith and Holofemes: Changing Images in the History of Art 80

Elizabeth Philpot

7 From Roublev to Gunn: A Trinitarian Approach 98 Christiane d'Haussy

8 'La Meme Voix, Toujours': Yves Bonnefoy and Translation 106

David Jasper

v

vi Contents

9 The Myth of Translatability: Translation as Interpretation

Bernard Zelechow

Index

122

140

List of Plates

1. Johann Liss, Judith and Holofernes (National Gallery, London). 2. Artemesia Gentileschi, Guiditta e Oloferne ('Judith and

Holofernes') (Alinari/Galleria Uffizi). 3. Gustav Klimt, Judith I (Osterreichisches Galerie, Vienna). 4. Andrei Roublev, Icon of the Trinity (Tretjakov Galerie, Moscow). 5. Sir James Gunn, Chesterton, Baring and Belloc (National Portrait

Gallery).

vii

Acknowledgements

Part of the essay by Christiane d'Haussy was first published, in a different form, in La Parole et les voix, ecriture et memoire: melanges offerts a Andre Bordeaux par ses amis (Tours: Publications de l'Universite de Tours, 1989) pp. 129-32. Andre Bordeaux is the author of a thesis on Belloe: Hilaire Belloc (Lille: Service de reproduction des theses, 1972).

The essay by Solange Dayras is adapted from part of a paper previously published in French, in Henri Gibaud (ed.), Les Problemes d' expression dans la traduction biblique, Cahiers du Centre de Linguistique Religieuse, no. 1 (Angers, 1988) pp. 19-32.

The publishers and editors thank Mercure de France (Paris) for permission to reprint Yves Bonnefoy, 'L'Imperfection est la dme' from Hier regnant desert (1958), and the Menard Press for the English translation of this poem as 'Imperfection is the Summit' by Anthony Rudolf in Things Dying, Things Newborn (1985).

viii

Notes on the Contributors

Solange Dayras is Professor of English Literature at the University of Paris Nord.

Michel Durand is Professor of English at the University of Lyons II.

Christiane d'Haussy is Professor of English at the University of Paris XII.

David Jasper is Director of the Centre for the Study of Literature and Theology at the University of Glasgow.

Elizabeth Philpot is Tutor in Art History in the Department of Educational Studies, University of Surrey.

Stephen Prickett is Regius Professor of English Literature and Language at the University of Glasgow.

Dennis L. Stamps is a doctoral student in the Department of Theology, University of Durham.

George Steiner is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Geneva, and Extraordinary Fellow of Churchill College, University of Cambridge.

Bernard Zelechow is Associate Professor in the Division of Humani­ties, York University, Toronto.

ix

Foreword George Steiner

Translation lies at the heart of speech. Every semiotic exchange, every communication and reception of meaning entails the model of translation. The receiver of any act of signification must, as best he can, decipher the message. Such decipherment demands the transfer of the signals which he has received into what he judges to be the context, the equivalences, the frames of reference most faithful to them. Necessarily, he performs this carry-over (literally, translation) with the formal and psychological instruments which constitute both his own personal speech-world, the part of idiolect in every human being's language, and which constitute the wider semantic field which he shares with the other speaker (or writer, or painter or composer).

The resulting decoding will be more or less homologous with the emitted message. It will never correspond to it totally. The intentionalities of a speaker, in even rudimentary discourse, are never tautologically transparent even to himself. The connotative context of even a 'simple' proposition always comports a hidden narrative, this is to say, an ambience of memory, association, pho­netic choices, subconscious impulses or repressions, rigourously sin­gular to 'an individual. The receiver 'reads' this vital sub-structure and surrounding as far as he is able. But the quotient of partial understanding or misprision can never be eliminated in any natural language-act. Only mathematical symbolism and the meta-algebraic algorithms of formal logic are transferable, that is, translatable in their totality.

Translation within the same tongue is indeed carried out more or less spontaneously. But its process and the obstacles encountered are paradigmatic of all translation. It is poets and dramatists, it is the masters of prose fiction who intuit that verbal and written exchanges between men and women, between women and men are, more often than not, only fragmentarily or erroneously deciphered. Extreme pressures of love and of pain attend on the asymmetries, on the radical incongruency of language-usage between parents and chil­dren, between generations. Inside the same society, different social classes, different faiths, different professions find it difficult to com-

x

Foreword xi

municate, to interpret more than a certain proportion of each other's language. Where schooling of diverse levels, where region and ac­cent interpose, the decipherment is even more fragile and subject to error. We existentially and concretely 'mis-take' the other. His ache and his ironies, his refinements or argot, escape us. Thus, translation between languages-is, formally and substantively, a special case of translation within the same language. To attempt understanding is to attempt translation. Put forward in my After Babel (Oxford, 1975), this view has been very largely adopted.

The centrality of translation to the phenomenology of speech and of meaning and the location of the investigation of language at the very focus of recent philosophy (what philosophers call 'the language-tum') has meant that translation is now of prime concern to philosophers, logicians and psychologists, as well as to linguists stricto sensu. In such thinkers as Walter Benjamin, Heidegger and Quine, the possibilities or impossibilities of translation come to stand for the problematic nature of meaning itself. Under pressure of the 'Heidegger case' and of the 'untranslatability' of certain texts in the modem canon - Paul Celan's poetry is, in this regard, a touchstone - Paul de Man and Derrida have closely engaged the study of translation. At the same time, the failure of the claims invested in machine-translation (except at the grossest level of approximate transfer within narrowly defined speech-fields) has underlined both the complexity, the intuitive generation of this 'exact art' (Wittgenstein's phrase) and our almost complete lack of access to its eventual neuro-physiological foundations. The human brain decodes messages, however imperfectly, at levels of efficacy and of nuance altogether beyond either our analytic grasp or mechanical simulation.

To metaphysical-religious sensibility in the West, certainly after the Fourth Gospel, the neo-Platonists and Hamann and Herder, this inadequacy of analytic or 'scientific' grasp is an imperative banality. It declares the ontological transcendence of the source and being of language. It identifies the linguistic capacity of man and of woman with their humanity. We are the 'language-animal' (zoon phonanta). But the gift of speech, which distinguishes us from the rest of the animal order, is the manifest of our provenance out of an act of creation transcendent to our will or understanding. To speak, to convey and apprehend the meaning of meaning, is to partake of existence in its non-organic essence. Hence the cardinal interplay of doctrine and of metaphor in the concepts of 'being' and of 'saying'

xii Foreword

from Parmenides to the Fourth Gospel, from St John to Heidegger. It is this interplay which is crystallised in the term Logos.

Myths and taboos attach to the translation of religious texts. One tradition has it that the Septuagint is the direct product of angelic concordance. But the Megillath Taanith (first century AD) records the belief that three days of darkness enveloped the earth in mourning for the translation of the Law into profane Greek. Even more than lyric and epic poetry, religious texts are rooted in orality. The first, and in many cultures insuperable, transgression - where 'transgres­sion' is itself a motion of transport, of translation - is that which crosses the line between oral and written. Transcribed, the Ur-text has suffered irreparable derogation and, very likely, falsification. It is no longer numinous. It need not have its assurance of life in human inwardness, in the guard of exact memorisation. It is now part of a general and impure textuality, subject to amendment and circumstantial revision. It is the unwritten which is sacred. So, in a celebrated defiance, proclaims Sophocles' Antigone. Within the reli­gious domain itself, a complex web of regret and of fear in the face of the second-hand haunts Judaic tradition concerning Moses's destruction of the first Tables of the Law which had been immediate to divine dictation and written in letters of fire. All dictation, all graphic setting-down thereafter, whether inspired or not, runs the evident danger of error. And it is, opines the Kabbala, via one minute erratum in the writing down of the Law (one false consonant, per­haps) that evil enters the hitherto sanctified cosmos and descends on man.

Further inhibitions arise over the issue of the interlingual rendi­tion of religious texts. In numerous 'primitive' societies, one's true name is kept jealously from the knowledge of outsiders. In strict analogy, a priesthood or its immediate flock will seek to prevent the uninitiated, the stranger, from obtaining access to its sacred books and the myths and rituals they contain. Translation then becomes an act of sacrilegious larceny (strong traces of this dialectic of taboo and appropriation can be made out in the Roman 'capture' of Etruscan religious and magical manuals and prophetic books). Here again, the intralingual and the inter lingual vexations are exactly parallel. In the English tradition, retranslations of Scripture after the Authorised Version have provoked incessant malaise and a sense of grievous loss. It is the voice of 1611 which, for millions still, rings (be it opaquely) with the near-echo of origination. Later translations, what­ever their scholarly edge, convey the letter and muffle the spirit.

Foreword xiii

Here we flounder in deep waters. If a text is 'revealed', if its initial encoding is then transferred into a mundane and fallible sign­system, that of secular and post-Adamic speech, to what truth­functions, to what correspondent faithfulness can any translation aspire? Is there not a covert but intractable 'contradiction of catego­ries' (to use Aristotelian terms) in the mere notion of the translation of a revealed text? As in the case of great poetry, but with graver implications, is it not the primary life of meaning which is left behind by the most skilful of translations? Very few have squarely addressed the dilemma. Benjamin encircles it with darkly lit meta­phor. Emanuel Levinas subtly and astutely makes of Talmudic commentaries the only legitimate process of translation. The vio­lence done ineluctably to the infinitely modulated, to the self­withdrawing real presence (that of God's enunciation) in the re­vealed text by even the most pious of translators, is debated in the Rosenzweig-Buber correspondence. These rare expositions are primers for anyone seriously concerned with the antinomian tenor of the revealed and the translatable. But they do not hope to resolve the contradiction.

The great majority of working translators of religious writings do not, I imagine, dwell on these perplexities. The actual concept of the 'revealed' leads only a vestigial, somewhat embarrassing after-life in the semiotic and deconstructive grammatologies now prepotent. We have, since Benjamin and Maritain, all but relinquished the idiom in which to formulate the challenge of revealed textuality. (It is just this challenge which seems to me to enforce itself on the reader in respect of, say, Job, of deutero-Isaiah, of Ecclesiastes, of passages in the Gospels and Pauline epistles, in ways which - but where, what is the discrimination to be felt and made? - do not enforce themselves on the reader of, say, even Dante or Shakespeare.) Today, translators get on with their task knowing that difficulties of a philological, stylistic, historical sort are so arduous as to make superfluous the invocation of transcendence. And it is to this professional scruple that we owe, during recent decades, the growing availability in the West of religious books from other faiths and cultures, notably ori­ental. It is to this 'adjournment' of the fundamental question - what is revealed in a revealed act of discourse? - that we owe the sequence of endeavours, scholarly, philanthropic in the true sense, to retranslate our Bible so as to make it 'at home' in the demythologised and positivist climate of our speech-worlds. Fundamentalist malice (but need it be only that?) would, to be sure, suggest that the utter

xiv Foreword

mediocrity of the results obtained proves how damaging, how intel­lectually and even technically mendacious, is the avoidance of the underlying issue. How is the 'word of God', the Logos, to be trans­lated into Newspeak? Should it be?

Nothing is more enigmatic in that book of secrets we call the New Testament than the moment (unique) in which Jesus writes in the dust at the feet of the woman taken in adultery. He at once effaces his inscription. In what language did he write? What was the mes­sage? This, it may be, is the enduring parable of necessary unknow­ing at the heart of translation.