Translations from Greek to Latin

In the Roman Republic and the Western, Latin-speaking Western Roman Empire, many people were bilingual and could speak Greek as well as Latin. How many? I don't know, but I do know that some Classical Latin authors such as Cato the Elder and Juvenal complained that it was too many. Many other ancient Latin authors saw Greek very positively: from its beginnings in the third century BC, Latin literature very often copies Greek literature very directly. Many Roman young men were sent to Athens to be educated; some of them liked Greek culture and literature so much that they became poets, instead of lawyers as their families had intended (some things never change), some of them strew many Greek quotations among the Latin texts of their books. The Emperor Marcus Aurelius, although a native of the Latin West, wrote an entire book in Greek.

This all changed very quickly when the Western Empire declined and ceased to be in the 5th century AD.

Jerome's Latin version of the Bible, the Vulgate, dominated Western literature for 1000 years.

Although scholarly types in the West never ceased to read the Latin Classics, the ability to read Greek became very rare. The philosopher Boethius (ca480 -- 524), made some of the first translations of Aristotle into Latin. He had planned to translate all of Aristotle and Plato into Latin, but was imprisoned and executed on suspicion of treason before he could complete this project. Apparently already at this time there was a need, even among those inclined to philosophy, for translations of Greek works.

Another illustration of the lack of reading comprehension of Greek in the West is the popularity of the poem known as the Ilias Latina. PK Marshall (in: LD Reynolds (ed), Tests and Transmission, Oxford: 1983, p 191), with refreshing frankness, refers to the Ilias Latina as an "unatractive compendium." Written probably during the reign of Nero, it reduces the 15,693 verses of Homer's Iliad to just 1070, and those remaining lines often resemble Vergil's style much more than Homer's. Nevertheless, in the absence of either knowledge of Greek or fuller translations of Homer, the Ilias Latina enjoyed great popularity from the 9th century onward.

Many translations from Greek into Latin, most notably of the very numerous works of Aristotle, began to cause a great sensation when they appeared at the University of Paris and in other Western centers of learning in the 12th century, coming from the great school of translation in Muslim-controlled Toledo, Spain.

I suppose that this is as good a time as any to point out that, apparently contrary to widespread beliefs, most of the Latin translations of Aristotle and other Greeks which appeared in 12th-century Europe were not, in fact, first translated from Greek into Arabic, and then from Arabic into Greek. Most have survived in Greek, and in the 12th century in Toledo, most of the Latin translations which were to be so popular among Western scholars were made directly from Greek. Even in the 12th century, people knew the hazards of what we now call the game of Telephone. There have been a few cases in which the original versions of Greek Classics have vanished, and an Arabic or Hebrew version has survived, so that all further translation must come from them, and these few cases make for interesting stories. But they are atypical stories.

In the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries, as the Eastern Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, declined and finally fell, many Greek scholars who fled from that decline and fall chose to migrate to Italy, and they taught Greek to those scholars who re-introduced Greek literature to the West in the Italian Renaissance. Numerous full-length Latin translations of both the Iliad and the Odyssey began to circulate in the West, replacing Professor Marshall's "unattractive compendium," along with Latin translations of many other Greek works, as the scholarly Western world, or at least wide swaths of it, became bilingual again, mastering both Latin and Greek, as it had done 1000 years before.

Jordan Peterson Accidentally Helped Me Realize I'm a Post-Modernist

Can it really be less than 24 hours since I began to read Derrida? Yes. It be.

About a week and a half ago, I first started to notice the existence of Jordan Peterson, in the remarks of otherwise seemingly sedate and reasonable people expressing extreme distaste for him. I soon heard Peterson, on YouTube, describing what he asserted was postmodernism. I was hazy about what exactly postmodernism was, but not so hazy that I couldn't see that what Peterson was saying had to be inaccurate.

More precisely: Peterson is warning us all about neo-Marxist postmodernists. He claims neo-Marxist postmodernists want to destroy Western civilization. That they say people belong in groups determined by their ethnicity and gender, and that all these groups are condemned to war against each other forever.

So I did what I could have done decades ago: I turned to actual Marxists and postmodernists for their definitions of Marxism and postmodernism, and learned that, outside of the imaginations of people like Peterson and his fans, neo-Marxist postmodernists don't exist: a defining characteristic of postmodernism is a skepticism toward all meta-narratives, and Marxism IS one of those very meta-narratives.

Now: Marxists and postmodernists will agree about SOME things. Such as that Jordan Peterson is constantly making stuff up and selling it at high prices as invaluable truth. But any reasonable person of any political or philosophical tendency will see that, if he or she takes a little time and effort to examine the matter.

A huge bell went off in my head, because, for decades, I had been skeptical toward all meta-narratives. I'm always insisting that things are more complicated than that. You know that episode of "The Simpsons" where Lisa is reading some Buddhist literature, and has a sudden epiphany and yells, "I'M A BUDDHIST!" Same thing happened to me, except I didn't yell, and I realized I'm a postmodernist, not a Buddhist.

Yesterday, I began reading the 40th anniversary revised edition of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's English translation of Derrida's On Grammatology, with an introduction by Judith Butler and a new Afterword by Spivak, and, people: these are my peeps.

And we don't want to destroy Western civilization or war against all other groups. Derrida is a total Western-civilization-phile from Homer to Heidegger.

My advice, besides checking out Derrida and Spivak and Butler, is to not believe anything Peterson says. About anything. At all. Ever. When Peterson disses a dead writer like Derrida or a living one like Butler, READ THAT WRITER.

Man, wouldn't it be a huge irony if Jordan Peterson, of all people, unintentionally caused people to read more good books?

It was with some reluctance that I sought out an English translation of a book by Derrida, rather than the French original, but undergraduate French classes were a long, long time ago. In the case of Of Grammatology, I was fortunate -- we all are fortunate -- because Spivak, the translator of Of Grammatology, is a tremendous writer in her own right. I have no idea, yet, what the quality of other English translations of Derrida or other French postmodernists might be.

Dream Log: Publicizing Translations of a Book

I dreamed I had been hired for a job for which I was spectacularly unqualified: overseeing the recording of the audio portions of the advertisements of translations of a book written in a language with which I was unfamiliar, into other languages with which I was unfamiliar.

The book had been written by a politician from Georgia, the Eurasian country, not the southern US state, in Georgian. The Georgian politician bore a physical resemblance to the actor Brian Cox:

The book had been translated into several other languages of the Caucasus region:

Linguists from other parts of the world had once thought that all of the languages of this region belonged to the same language family, but now they realize that they belong to several different language families which have little or no discernible relation to each other.

That's literally almost all I know about these languages.

For each recording, the video for the commercial played. It consisted of various shots of the book, with the same photo of the author's face on the cover regardless of whether it was the original Georgian version or one of the translations, with the title and authors name and other information written on the cover in the language in which the audio was to be recorded, and shots of stacks of the book, and superimposed graphics in the same language. The audio artist reading the text in each language referred to the video as he or she read.

First, we recorded the audio for the Georgian commercial -- or, more precisely, someone, who absurdly was working under me, told me that the writing on the book in the video, and the graphics in the video, and the language the audio artist was speaking, were all Georgian.

We played the video, the audio artist spoke while it ran, and when that was done everybody looked at me. I asked the audio engineer to play back the recording. I asked the audio engineer whether she was satisfied with the recording quality. She said yes. I asked the audio artist how he felt about his reading. He nodded to indicate he was satisfied. So I said, okay, we're done, let's do the next language.

I was told that the next language was Avar, and the process was repeated with a new video and a new audio artist. At this point I was feeling that I should just quit, and say that I was unqualified, because that would be the honest thing to do. Then I woke up.

Yes, That is a Very Great Amount of Aristotelian Manuscripts [PS: No, actually, it is not.]

Someone who struck me as authoritative -- I do not remember who -- wrote -- I do not remember where. I should write these sorts of things down more often. It may have been in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review, which I read often and recommend heartily -- that the manuscripts of Aristotle are literally myriad. I then consulted the Oxford English Dictionary, and saw that "myriad" literally means "10,000."

[PS, 19 February 2018: My memory was faulty here. I finally tracked down the mention of literally myriad manuscripts. It was a reference to manuscripts, not of Aristotle, but of Augustine. Nevermind.]

Attempting to verify that there really are as many as 10,000 manuscripts of the works of Aristotle, I found that, as of the writing of the article on Aristotle in the 1972 Encyclopaedia Britannica, there were 47 surviving philosophical works attributed to Aristotle, and that he actually wrote many more. Not from the encyclopaedia, I learned that these 47 works were often copied individually, as opposed to huge volumes each containing many of the works. I learned that several of these works survive in Latin translations in several hundred manuscripts each (Aristotle wrote in Greek, and was very popular among Medieval scholars of Western Europe who could read Latin but not Greek.). If several hundred Latin copies is typical for each of those 47 works, then perhaps there really are over 10,000 manuscripts of Aristotle surviving in our time, and the vast majority of them are Latin translations. (Several hundred X 47 = more than 10,000.) I'm assuming that untranslated Greek manuscripts of Aristotle are not nearly so numerous, but perhaps I'm wrong about that.

I have absolutely no ideas how many manuscripts of Aristotle in Arabic translation have survived to our day, or in other languages, for that matter.

Some time ago, I read in Rackham's Loeb edition and translation of Aristotle's Politics



that the manuscripts of that work "are not very good nor very old. The oldest evidence for the text is a translation in barbarous Latin by a Dominican monk of the thirteenth century, William of Moerbeke[...]The five best extant Greek copies are of the fifteenth century[...]" That was the first time that I had read anything about the transmission of Aristotle's texts. And so I mistakenly assumed that there were not many manuscripts of anything written by Aristotle. It turns out that Moerbeke is one of the Latin translators of Aristotle who has been copied into hundreds of surviving manuscripts, per work, having translated other works by Aristorle besides the Politics, and that not everyone has shared Rackham's low opinion of his Latin prose.

So, is Aristotle in 2nd place among ancient authors, behind only the Bible, in terms of numbers of surviving manuscripts? I don't know. One reason I don't know is because the experts on ancient Greek and Latin literature themselves don't know how many surviving manuscripts there are of the authors in which they specialize. And the reason they often don't know is because they don't much care. How can this be? Well, you see, the most important aspect of their jobs is get a version of those ancient texts as close as possible to what the ancient authors originally wrote. And for the purpose of determining those texts, the great majority of the manuscripts can be dismissed, if it has been determined that they are all copies, or copies of copies, or copies of copies of copies, etc, of some other surviving manuscripts. There is often a very great difference between the number of manuscripts which scholars use to determine the text, and all of the surviving manuscripts of that text. Oh, so there are X number of manuscript copies of Moerbeke's translation of the Politics? Hey, that's great. But because I have the actual copy which Moerbeke made (or high-res photos of that copy), I don't need all those hundreds of others. Is how those scholars will often react, if they see their job as editing the text.

There are other reasons for looking at all of the other copies. For example, someone has to determine where they came from, whether manuscript J was a copy of a copy of manuscript R, or what exactly. Or maybe Professor Y thinks that Professor X made a mistake when he or she said that J was a copy of a copy of manuscript R, and wants to check for him- or herself.

Another reason is if we want to get a general idea of how popular that ancient author was in a certain time and place. We can only get a very general idea of this, because we know that a lot of manuscripts have disappeared, and we don't know how many. Just because there are hundreds of manuscripts today of Ovid, and none at all of Pompeius Trogus, doesn't mean that Ovid was read by more people in the 2nd century AD than Trogus. But the great number of 12th-century manuscripts of Ovid (compared to surviving 12th-century manuscripts in general), combined with other things such as frequent mentions of him by 12th-century writers, mean that we're probably pretty safe in saying that Ovid was widely-read in the 12th century. Probably.

It seems to me that typically, there are more 15th-century manuscripts of a given Classical Latin author than manuscripts of any other one century, and sometimes more than all the other centuries put together. It seems that way. But I don't know for sure, because I only have those century-by-century numbers in the case of a few Classical Latin authors. Maybe they're pretty typical of the rest, maybe they're not. After the 15th century, the numbers of manuscripts of Classical Latin authors drops away to almost nothing, because of the invention of the printing press. One notable exception to that is the text of the 1st-century novel Satyricon by Petronius,



the inspiration for Fellini's film of the same name, liked by Fellini fans, less well-liked by Classicists who feel that Fellini missed much of Petronius' message. The text of Satyricon has been patched together like Frankenstein's monster from various manuscripts each containing just a part of the whole. 4 of those manuscripts were written in the late 16th century, and just recently, Maria Salanitro has found what she believes are still more parts of the novel, contained in a 17th-century manuscript.

How much of the preponderance of 15th-century manuscripts -- assuming I'm correct in assuming it exists -- is due to an actual rise in the reading of ancient Latin Classics in the 15th-century, and how much is due to people being suddently much more careful to preserve manuscripts? I have no idea.

It was nice of Martin Wohlrab to list and comment on all 147 of the manuscripts of Plato which he could find, late in the 19th century, and it was also nice of the University of California to re-print his list



in the 21st century. Did Wohlrab include manuscripts of Latin translations of Plato (or translations into still other languages) in his list? I'm going to have to examine this list a little more closely and get back to you on that one. Were there ever very many manuscripts of Latin translations of Plato? Hey, that's another really swell question. I know that Latin translations of Plato were made after the invention of printing.

Are the numbers of manuscripts of Cicero or Vergil comparable to those of Aristotle? Another thing I really wish I knew.

Why do I care so much about it? Am I about to help these professors in their task of sorting out which manuscripts derive from which, by the process they call collation? No. Am I interested in the numbers of readers these authors have had? To be honest: only slightly. I think I care about these numbers of manuscripts because autism. (It would also be great if I could demonstrate that there are more manuscripts of one Classical author or another than of the Bible, but I suspect that the Bible-thumpers out there who're saying that there are only 20 manuscripts of Livy [There are hundreds. How many hundreds? I wish I knew. Hey, there might be thousands for all I know.], and so forth, have also drastically under-counted the total number of Biblical manuscripts.)

Empty Attacks On The King James Bible

A lot of people I know are disparaging the King James Bible, calling it a huge distortion of the texts it purportedly translates, and a cynical political project designed to support King James and monarchy in general. So? So for all I know both of the points might be valid, but I don't think that most of the people repeating those points can back them up. At all.

I don't mind you criticizing something -- if you know what you're talking about. If you don't, you're not really criticizing, you're just parroting talking points.

They say that the KJV was deliberately altered in thousands of places --

and they don't name any of those places.

Let's say for the sake of argument that they're absolutely right. Imagine that one of the most ardent and cynical of the supporters of James was also a Biblical scholar, and one of the creators of the King James Version of the Bible, and that he positively cackled with evil glee as he distorted the Bible into a piece of royal propaganda. Say that he was a relatively young man when the King James Bible was completed in 1611, and was still in England in 1649.

Imagine how he must have felt, seeing all of those Puritans led by Cromwell, thumping and quoting the King James Bible as they deposed, arrested, tried, convicted and executed James' son, King Charles. If the KJV was designed as a tool of royal propaganda -- and I'm not saying it wasn't, I'm just admitting that I don't know -- then at the moment of Charles' beheading it must have seemed a particularly ineffective tool.

Or when all those American readers of the KJV revolted in 1776 and in the next few years threw off royal control altogether.

Now at this point, some of the people I'm complaining about here, who call the KJV a gross mistranslation and a cynical tool of royal propaganda, will do something else which particularly irks me: they'll insist that the leaders of the American Revolution were hardly Christian at all, and/or that they objected to the KJV because it distorted the original texts in a pro-monarchial manner. And I KNOW that's bullshit. Anyway, back here on Earth, the supposedly extremely pro-royal King James Bible was, in fact, read by just about everyone in the British colonies who could read English, and it doesn't seem to have been pro-royal enough to have stopped the Revolution. Was the difference between Tory and Patriot a greater love for the King James Bible? Well -- no.

There are lots and lots of nuts today in the US who insist that the King James Version is the only valid version of the Bible -- I can't imagine what these people think when they think about the parts of the world where people's native language isn't English. Like the tens of millions of people in the US whose native languages is Spanish. Material for another blog post, perhaps -- but these fanatical supporters of the KJV don't seem to be calling for a monarchy in the US, other than that of the King of Kings, of course.

Now of course the ineffectiveness of a strategy does not prove that that strategy doesn't exist, and I haven't proven that the KJV wasn't designed as royal propaganda. As I said: maybe it was. But all of these people I know haven't proven to me that it was. And I think that the great majority of them are a few years' worth of intensive study of Hebrew and Greek away from beginning to be able to prove it to me.

In the meantime, if they could make this case by quoting some arguments culled from the works of some Biblical scholars -- scholars whom they name, and quote verbatim, naming the books or articles and the pages which contain those quotes -- well, that would be a huge improvement over what they're doing now. That might even be enough to start a discussion in which I'd like to take part.

Translation

So the other day I began to read a piece by Sartre, "Les maos en France," which begins:

"Je ne suis pas mao. C'est pour cette raison, je pense, qu'on m'a demandé de présenter ces enquêtes."

For a moment I was confused, and thought that Sarte was saying that he had been asked to write about Maoism in France because he wasn't Mao. Then of course I realized that he was saying that he had been asked to write it because he was not a Maoist, and that "mao" is French for "Maoist."

I think that for many people whose native language is English, not just me, saying "mao" instead of "Maoist" will sound very strange and wrong. Perhaps more so the weaker our French is, and mine is not Proustian. Even before we begin to wonder just exactly how "mao" is pronounced in French.

But of course, unless we have some familiarity with Chinese -- and I don't -- we can't judge which is the more quaint transliteration, "Maoist" or "mao."

I envy people whose guardians educated them well and took them on international tours while they were still small children, they must have a much better instinctive grasp of the size and diversity of humanity. It was not until my late 20's that I first traveled to a non-English-speaking part of the world and saw bookstores with familiar worldwide bestsellers on their shelves with titles which looked bizarre to me, and had to grasp, not just know, but also feel and see, that Hundert Jahre Einsamkeit was no more bizarre and wrong a title for Gabriel García Márquez' masterpiece than One Hundred Years of Solitude. And then on semester break I went to Paris and was confronted with Cent ans de solitude. And, for example, La guerre et la paix, when I was still just getting used to Krieg und Frieden, and still having a hard time accepting that Krieg und Frieden was every much as legitimate a falsification of Tolstoy's novel -- because to translate a text means to fuck it up unless the translator is as great a writer or better the original, and often even then -- as the War and Peace I'd read for the 1st time before I was full-grown.

Of course, no one had to explain to me that things are translated into many different languages, especially things like great works of literature. But I had to actually be in those bookstores in order to really feel it, in order for a sense of what world literature is to begin to sink in to my consciousness.

I happened to be reading some French newspapers in 1998 when Joschka Fischer was the brand-new Foreign Minister of Germany, and was confused at first by the frequent occurrence of the word "baskets" in the headlines. Until it clicked: sneakers. Fischer had caused a bit of an uproar when he first rose to national prominence as a legislator in Germany and came to work wearing blue jeans and sneakers. Fischer was the first Green politician to appear in legislatures. Greens in the 1980's didn't wear suits. Occasionally tweedy jackets and-or loosely-knit ties with their uniform jeans. Looking at the chronology, it seems to me that the Greens may have been a major international force behind the creation of casual Fridays.

Anyway: sneakers. Basketball shoes. That's how and when I learned that "baskets" is French for "sneakers." "Baskets" sounds silly to you? (It surely did to me at first.) Stop for a moment and meditate on how "sneakers" sounds. It has been speculated that the majority of the universe, the greatly prevalent element, is stupidity. That may be. Or maybe it's just silliness. Compared to stupidity, a universe made of silliness wouldn't necessarily be so bad. Think of how Kevin Smith, who I gather believes God exists, portrayed God in his movie Dogma: a smiling, mute, very sweetly silly and childlike Alanis Morissette. Where was I?



PS: Susan Sontag SUCKS!!!

Don't Be Afraid Of Foreign Languages

I know that fear of the unknown is one of the most basic and primal human fears. And I also know that horrible things can be said in any language. But I also know that paranoia usually doesn't make sense, because most people have other things on their minds most of the time, than you. And whether they speak a language you don't understand or not, if you're nice, you greatly reduce the chances that they'll say nasty things about you. Does it really make much difference if they say something to your face in a language they assume you don't understand, or in your native language when you're out of earshot?

There are many, many perfectly good reasons to study languages, plural. One is that the beauty of the finest language, that of the most skilled writers, is untranslatable. Ovid's verse is so beautiful, line after line, that it gives me goosebumps, the same way that beautiful music does. I wonder, do you really have to understand Latin at all in order to hear and feel a great deal of the sheer beauty in lines like these?

Quae gemitus truncaeque deo Neptunius heros
causa rogat frontis; cui sic Calydonius amnis
coepit inornatos redimitus harundine crines:
"Triste petis munus. quis enim sua proelia victus
commemorare velit? referam tamen ordine, nec tam
turpe fuit vinci, quam contendisse decorum est,
magnaque dat nobis tantus solacia victor."

Those are the first 7 lines of book 9 of Ovid's Metamorphoses.



I realize that I'm undercutting my own point here by choosing the Metamorphoses to illustrate it. I chose Ovid because I've been reading him lately and I really love his work. In fact, right at the moment, Ovid is my very favorite poet in any language. He's just the best. however, the beautifully-written Metamorphoses is chock full of the most hair-raising content. Ovid's masterful verses describe many weird and shocking things. I had to search for a while to come across a handful of verses in a row with such relatively tame and unexotic content as those I quoted. This book does not spend a lot of time on the "then they came into a beautiful town, and the fields were lush, and they were welcomed with great hospitality and dined and drank in comfort as the sun sank peacefully into evening" -- sort of deal. It has much more to do with loving and fighting and deception and revenge and plots and wars and so forth, and, as the title indicates, with magic and transformations. Action-adventure Hollywood doesn't have a lot on Ovid. His beautiful lines deliver a lot of "adult-oriented" material, as it's sometimes called. Don't worry, though, the 6 lines I quoted above could be rated G. Very, very soft PG at most:

The hero who called himself the son of Neptune asked the Calydonian river-god why he sighed and how his forehead had been wounded. The god replied as he bound his unruly hair with reeds: "You ask something painful of me -- who wants to talk about his own defeats? But I'll tell you all about it, because the shame of defeat is mitigated by having fought such a mighty opponent at all."

But my translation of those 6 lines, and, frankly, every single other translation of those lines I've seen, squeeze all of the beauty of the original right out. The original 6 lines, like Ovid's work in general, are exquisitely constructed and balanced and polished like JS Bach's music. Translating Ovid is sort of like describing Bach's music in words instead of playing it or listening to someone play it: it sort of misses the whole point.

People Who Doubt The Authenticity Of The Gospel Of Jesus' Wife Seem To Be Grasping At Straws

(Before I begin here, let me try to be as clear as possible: "authenticity" means that the famous postcard-sized piece of papyrus containing the so-called Gospel of Jesus' Wife is ancient, that is: more than 1000 years old, and perhaps over 1600 years old, and not a 19th-or 20th-century forgery. No serious academics are saying that this text records the actual words of Jesus, talking about his wife. None of them are saying this proves that Jesus was married. What Prof King has said all along, consistently, is that this document may perhaps show that one group of early Christians thought of Jesus as having been married. It's a real shame that so many people are somehow managing not to hear her.)

Professor Karen L King, who came under heavy criticism in 2012 when she presented the so-called Gospel of Jesus' Wife to the public in 2012, when critics said it was a modern forgery, and not a 4th-century Coptic translation of a 2nd-century Greek text, seems to have been at least partially vindicated.

But some experts are still skeptical:

"Brown University Egyptology professor Leo Depuydt [...] points to grammatical mistakes that he says a native Coptic writer would not make"

If Depuydt is right about that: so what? King says this is a 4th-century translation of a 2nd-century Greek text. There's no reason why a native speaker of Greek in the 4th century couldn't have translated something into Coptic, making mistakes no native Coptic speaker would have made. Ideally translations are made by native speakers of the language being translated into. Ideally, but certainly not always, as countless people of many different natives languages have discovered when they've had great difficulty trying to decipher texts in their own native languages in owner's manuals for appliances.

Depuydt says, "the text … is a patchwork of words and phrases from the [...] Coptic Gospel of Thomas."

And again I say: if Depuydt is right, so what? A 4th-century translator could've been familiar with the Gospel of Thomas, which was not officially condemned by the Orthodox authorities until the 4th century. If his or her native language was Greek, it would be only natural for him or her to depend on words and phrases which he or she knew from a Coptic text, such as, for example, the Gospel of Thomas.

Depuydt is not convincing me at all that the Gospel of Jesus' Wife is a modern forgery. If this is the best that the skeptics have, then I say, forget 'em, and consider the artifact to be authentic. (And forgive me for being a broken record, but please be sure you understand what is meant here by "authentic," as explained in italics and bold print at the beginning of this blog post.)

Jesus' Name

This controversy is so cringe-inducingly stupid that I might never have thought of blogging about it, except that it seems to be rather widespread. This post is not so much about the name of the the possibly nonfictional Jesus of Nazareth as about many people's ignorance about some very basic aspects of language.

So. Some people -- a lot of people, apparently -- insist that it is wrong to refer to Jesus as Jesus, that his real name is Yeshua. Or sometimes they insist that his real name is Yahushua. And already the discrepancy between Yeshua and Yahushua tells us something, something shockingly obvious many others of us have already known for a while: that translation is never perfect. Because both Yeshua and Yahushua -- along with Yashua, and (surprise!) Joshua, and no doubt some other variations still, each one of which has its adherents who insist that it and it alone is the "true" name -- all of those are translations, into English, of ישוע‎. Jesus comes from the Greek Ἰησοῦς -- because the New Testamentis written in Greek -- which comes from יְהוֹשֻׁעַ.

Now, if these maniacs want to learn Greek and Hebrew, more power to them. Being a polyglot is a good thing. But obviously they don't. They're not even particularly interested in attaining a good command of English, because no one language can be at all well understood without knowing a lot more about the relationships between different languages than these people seem to want to know. With some of them the difficulty is not merely linguistic, it's theological: they insist that there is some magical power in saying -- take your pick, Yeshua, Yashua, Yahushua, whatever -- and claim that all those who do not speak the true name are not leading truly Christian lives. These people need a really good psychiatrist. I'm merely someone who knows a few things about language. One of those things, it seems to me, ought to be really obvious to almost everyone without my having to point it out: that people who insist that Jesus is not the correct name of Jesus are treating the word Jesus differently than every other word in the Bible, unless they're also odd when it comes to Jehovah. (Yahweh. What-EVER.) It's hard for me to imagine that these people are anything other than severely monolingual. You would think that living in the US would have accustomed them to the phenomenon of names changing from one language to another, because Los Angeles means The Angels, San Francisco means St Francis, El Paso means The Pass and so forth. San Jose is St Joseph, San Antonio is St Anthony. The other day I heard someone accuse the Turks of having changed the named of Constantinople after having conquered it in 1453. Apparently it eluded him that Istanbul is Turkish for Constantinople. Or should I say, for Κωνσταντινούπολις. I probably shouldn't, because for all I know Κωνσταντινούπολις takes another ending in the accusative. (Don't worry if you didn't get that, that was for people on Level 2.) My name is Steven. (How do you you do.) Steven, Stephen, Esteban, Stefan, Stephan, Στέφανος, Étienne, István, Kepano, סטיבן and many other variations are all the same name. I may look down in discouragement in situations like this, dealing with people talking about Jesus' "true" name, and massage the bridge of my nose in an attempt to ward off a migraine while muttering something like "Jesus, Mary and Joseph!" A person whose native language is Spanish might mutter "iJesus, Maria y Jose!" while massaging the bridge of his or her nose in exactly the same sort of situation, while a person whose native language is German might well mutter "Jesus, Maria und Joseph!" All three time Jesus is spelled the same, but it's pronounced three different ways. Joseph is written the same in English and German but pronounced differently.

There has been a growing effort among the speakers of many different languages, over the past century or so, to write and pronounce words from other languages more in the idiom of those languages. I have nothing at all against this effort, it's just that I think we should keep in mind how half-assed it is. Let's look at the German Kaisers, for example, Wilhelm I and Wilhelm II. Wilhelm means William. Germans tend to refer to the present-day English Prince William as William, but they call the 17th-century King William III of England Wilhelm, just as we call many past Germans William even though they called themselves Wilhelm. We say William the Conqueror, they say Wilhelm der Eroberer, and William the Conqueror called himself, I'm guessing, Guillaume or Willelmus, depending upon whether he was using French or Latin. Actually, in Latin he might have said or written Willelmus or Gulielmus. But that still isn't unclear enough, because 1000 ago people weren't nearly as concerned about standard spelling as we are today. And let's regard the German word Kaiser. We call Wilhelm I and Wilhelm II of Germany Kaiser, but we call the Holy Roman Emperors Emperors, while the Germans call them Kaiser. They also call the ancient Roman Emperors Kaiser, and ya know what? Kaiser is exactly the correct Latin pronunciation of Caesar. (All c's in Latin are hard c's.) That's where the Garmans got the word Kaiser. We pronounce Caesar incorrectly. And Tsar means Caesar too, except of course that the Russian write царь.

So when you're talking about something or someone -- Jesus, for example -- and you're wondering whether you should say Jesus or Yeshua or something else, keep in mind that the very idea of there being one and only correct name for anyone or anything is pretty ridiculous. If the person you're talking to knows whom or what you're talking about, you're doin it right.

I'm sure that many of you already knew every bit of all of that, I hope I didn't bore you unduly. But keep the catastrophic linguistic implications in mind whenever someone insists that Jesus wasn't named Jesus. And the others of you, I hope you learned something. (I hope you want to learn. Just like the one child in "Family Affair.")

Oh, and lest I forget: those people who claim that there never was such a Hebrew name as Jesus, that the name Jesus never existed before the Greek New Testament, and that only after the New Testament existed was the name translated from Greek into Hebrew (and that therefore, for example, we don't not know what His name really was) -- they are wrong. Jewish Jesuses existed for centuries before Jesus of Nazareth. For example, there is Jesus ben Shirach, the author of a book named after him which is included in some versions of the Old Testament and is relegated by some to the status of apocrypha.

A Beautiful Misunderstanding

Today I got a four-volume edition of "the philosophical-theological works," "die philosophisch-theologischen Werke" of Nicholas of Cusa, off of the shelf and began browsing around in it for the first time in a while, a bilingual edition, the original Latin on the left and a German translation on the facing page. It's a Sonderausgabe, a special edition. German publishers seem to offer great deals very often through these Sonderausgaben, high-quality editions offered at a small fraction of the usual prices. In this case the four fat volumes of my Sonderausgabe of Nicholas of Cusa contain eleven works which the same publisher originally published in eleven separate volumes, which together cost several times as much as the Sonderausgabe. It's a set-up similar to one sometimes offered in compilation volumes by the Quality Paperback Book Club in the US: the texts are copied directly from the individual works, so that the page numbers start over from from scratch with each new work within the volume, and the type is recognizably different in each work as well.

Maybe US publishers offer such bargains as often as the Germans. I wouldn't know: it's been a while since I did a lot of shopping for new books in English. In the 1980's my primary reading interest shifted from English to German, and since then it has shifted again from German to Latin.

I have complained often about bilingual editions such as my Sonderausgabe of Nicholas, saying that for one thing half of the paper and shelf space is wasted by translating everything, and that for another, instead of encouraging people to learn the untranslated language, it will actually hinder them from doing so: the temptation to read the translation and simply skip the original will be too great. (I didn't get this edition for the German translation, but simply because it was by far the least expensive way I knew of to get my hands on a large amount of Nicholas' writings in the original Latin.) I have never taken any classes in Latin and only met a few people who are fluent in the language. One of these people sharply disagreed with me about the bilingual editions and said that they were a great help to her students in learning Latin or Greek. Maybe she's right. I think of our disagreement often. I thought of her today as I decided to dust off the Latin-German edition of Nikolaus von Kusens philosophische-theologische Werken. In any case, I felt I could use some help with my Latin today. Comparing the German translation with the original encourages me that I am making progress, getting closer to fluent in Latin.

It's a subjective question, in my opinion, at what point one is a fluent in a language. Even the most fluent native speaker still has room for improvement.

It was Peter Sloterdijk, a contemporary German philosopher, who first led me to Nicholas of Cusa, a fifteenth-century Catholic cardinal and philosopher. In the second volume, Globen (Globes), of his three-volume work on spheres, Sloterdijk refers often to Nicholas.

I like Sloterdijk quite a lot. I wonder whether I understand him better or less well than the many German intellectuals who dislike him so intensely, a few of whom have tried quite hard to explain to me personally just why I am wrong to value his work so highly. It seems to me that he irritates other Germans in part by cheerfully disregarding, and occasionally even mocking, certain preconceived notions in German culture which are so ingrained in most German intellectual heads that it is much harder for them to perceive them and their arbitrary, senselessly limiting nature, than it is for an outsider such as myself.

On the other hand, perhaps those Germans have perfectly valid reasons for disliking Sloterdijk so much, reasons which are lost in translation by an outsider such as myself, even though I read Sloterdijk's books untranslated. I often notice how nuances of English are lost or changed in people for whom English is their second language, or their third or fourth or... and of course I have to wonder how much I and other native speakers of English routinely miss in other languages.

A non-native speaker of English might just occasionally get some things right in English that I miss, just as I might be right about Sloterdijk when so many German intellectuals are wrong.

Or maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I see all sorts of things in Sloterdijk, by way of imperfect fluency in German, which simply aren't there, the way that so many English-speaking people see meanings of melancholy and grim internal strife in the word "angst" which simply aren't there in the German original. In German "Angst" means "fear." That's all. All the other associations to the word which are common in English-speaking lands, English-speaking people made up all by themselves. I don't know how "angst" in English has come to mean something for which the Germans have a perfectly good word -- "Weltschmerz" -- and English didn't, but there ya go. A new word was born in English by means of misunderstanding a German word. This sort of thing seems to happen all the time when languages intermingle

Björk once described her reaction to English-language pop music as "a beautiful misunderstanding." I heard her say this, on a talk show, years before I began to relax about things like the English meaning of "angst," and Germans saying things in English which English-speaking people would never say, but which rhyme. (Germans love to rhyme almost as much as they love David Hasselhoff.) I remembered what she said, but I think that it took me years before I started to understand the implications. Language lives and grows, it will not be bound by rules, and this is particularly true when different languages interact. And it is beautiful.

Translation of A Passage From Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche, Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, Chapter I, "Von den ersten und letzten Dingen," aphorism 31, the original and then my translation:

"Das Unlogische notwendig. — Zu den Dingen, welche einen Denker in Verzweifelung bringen können, gehört die Erkenntnis, dass das Unlogische für den Menschen nötig ist, und dass aus dem Unlogischen vieles Gute entsteht. Es steckt so fest in den Leidenschaften, in der Sprache, in der Kunst, in der Religion und überhaupt in Allem, was dem Leben Wert verleiht, dass man es nicht herausziehen kann, ohne damit diese schönen Dinge heillos zu beschädigen. Es sind nur die allzu naiven Menschen, welche glauben können, dass die Natur des Menschen in eine rein logische verwandelt werden könne; wenn es aber Grade der Annäherung an dieses Ziel geben sollte, was würde da nicht Alles auf diesem Wege verloren gehen müssen! Auch der vernünftigste Mensch bedarf von Zeit zu Zeit wieder der Natur, das heißt seiner unlogischen Grundstellung zu allen Dingen."

"The Illogical is Necessary. - Among the things which can bring a thinker to despair is the realization that the illogical is necessary for people, and that much which is good comes from the illogical. It is so deeply embedded in the passions, in language, art, religion and in everything that gives value to life that one cannot remove it without doing irreparable harm to these beautiful things. Only very naive people can believe that the nature of people can be transformed into a purely logical nature; if this goal were even nearly approached by degrees, what all would not be lost along the way! Even the most logical person has the need from time to time for nature, that is to say, for his fundamentally illogical relationship to all things."

As translations go, I think that one wasn't bad. I'm sure some people would strongly disagree, in large part because translation is a subjective thing, and if they had translated the passage themselves they would've done it differently. You might've noticed how many more commas there are in the original German aphorism than in my translation. I hate to say, but I suspect some translators would take me to task for that. What would I answer to them?

Well, the thing is, I would try to avoid the conversation to begin with. I can't imagine many more dreary debates. "To write is to fail," said Samuel Beckett. I think that what he meant is that even the very best writing will by its nature leave much to be desired -- by its creator, if by no one else. They say that something is always lost in translation, and I believe they're right about that. And so to translate is to doubly fail, to compound imperfection. I can't do justice to that passage by Nietzsche as a translator. It's hard enough for a reader fluent in German to do justice to the original. Translation is a poor substitute for learning the original language. It always is. I believe that firmly.