Clivedurdle

Umberto Eco in Mouse or Rat (or via: amazon.co.uk) writes:

With regard to the Holy Bible we immediately have several major problems. A huge one is the fifth and sixth words of the previous sentence!

The negotiations have several unspoken assumptions - that these texts are somehow special, that they have common themes, that they can be understood as a whole, that they are important.

There are huge powerful institutions the representatives of which get to be the main item on the evening news on certain days of the year, and who have the power to make truth by their words - the Catholic Archbishop of Britain did this by noting that Joseph when he returned from Egypt with Jesus Christ was not welcomed home but treated as a refugee and outcast!

Translating the Bible is not a common or garden piece of work between two modern languages - as well as the serious problems of translation between modern languages - as eloquently shown in the example of mouse or rat from translations of Camus the Plague - we are also time traveling, not only to the original cultures, but via the myriad intermediary cultures and how they have tweaked meanings and sensibilities. For the British, the KJV did turn our world upside down and has constructed how we interpret these "works" - or as babel fish translators put that term after retranslating - plants!

The point of my ramblings?

I am trying to work out why is there such resistance to mythical ideas.

And it is actually very simple. We have a huge accretion of assumptions about how these texts should be translated and understood, that have been enforced through excommunication, torture and death.

The basic question - what is it that we have in front of us to translate - what type of work is it - has not been openly asked, and worse if it is, the people who ask those questions are shouted down as ignoramuses or astrologers or closet creationists.

No translation can be perfect, but something terrifying has occurred with these particular works - the basic questions have not been asked - what are these works?

Roger Pearse

Pardon me, but all this is entirely obscurantism, and of the kind that makes people laugh at the parochialism of Americans. Most of the people in the world are familiar with more than one language, after all. In UK schools we used to be taught French, German and Latin.

The best solution to these 'dilemmas' is to do some translation.

I apologise if that sounds rude, but watching people manufacture reasons not to know what billions of people know always makes me impatient.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

reniaa

here here roger

Clivedurdle

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umberto_Eco

And which literary genre does the Gospel of Mark best fit and what questions does that raise about how it is translated and the assumptions that are made about its meaning and the incidents in it?

Amaleq13

I swear, Roger, you are going to knock yourself out with that jerking knee of yours.

Dogfish

Yeah, creationists can be so frustrating!

:wave:

Roger Pearse

Stand closer. No-one laughs at my jerking knee once they've had it in the nuts.

Good reflexes are a mark of a well-brought up man, IMHO. (Also of someone accustomed to making a fast getaway).

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Amaleq13

I'm too well-trained to fall for that one but I always appreciate it when your violent tendencies emerge. It reminds me so much of Jesus. :angel:

Good reflexes are a mark of good training. When one's opponent(s) are disabled, however, there is no need for a fast getaway. Stop by sometime (you'll need directions) and I'll give you a free lesson.

I assume your "obscurantism" comment was directed at Clive since Eco explicitly contrasts that which is "purely theoretical argument" with that which actually happens. Is Clive supposed to be the parochial American?

spin

Not all of Roger's posts are a waste of space, but this one certainly is. Must have been too much xmas cheer to think straight.
Too bad, not any more. British people aren't good models for linguistic skills. They are usually just as lacking in linguistic skills as their co-lingualists across the Atlantic. But then Roger's comment seems more something he needed to say than related to what he is ostensibly commenting on, for as such a comment it is apparently off the track.

Some people find translation easier than others. Others do different things when they translate: some go for a more literal and others a more target language suited translation. Some project more of their own cultural baggage into a translation than others.

Nice appeal, but just as irrelevant as everything else in the post. I'm sure Roger would side with the minority in a Nazi Germany.

Texts can frequently be misunderstood by vast numbers of people: just think of Gulliver's Travels as a children's book or Wuthering Heights as a girlie book. (The first is a political satire of Swift's day and the second is a feminist romantic exploration of the effects of iniquitous inheritance laws and how they could be manipulated by unscrupulous people.) There is no substitute for understanding the text for its content. People who can't read the original text and have been indoctrinated into a particular range of understandings are not a meaningful sample of the content of the text.

I don't agree with Clivedurdle when he says, "the basic questions have not been asked - what are these works?" Every time I ask what genre are these texts, for what audience, why were they written, the question is asked, "what are these texts?"


spin

HelpingHand

I have no idea whether Clivedurdle's ideas make any sense, but I do know translation is a very difficult thing, even between two familiar languages.
I live in a bilingual country and it sometimes happens that even law texts do not say exactly the same in Dutch as in French.
I sometimes do some translation. A friend of mine once asked me to translate one of his speeches from Dutch to English. He told me afterwards his speech was a huge success, but I'm not sure what the audience heard was really what he wanted to say.
Now translating from a dead to a living language will even pose more problems.

Greetings

Walter