conversio ut orator

The past few weeks the impetus of the blog seems to have failed for one reason or another. One such reason (not a large one, it must be said) is the fun and distraction of teaching a course on the historical and cultural context of English literature, 600-1660. Last week's class was about Bede (and "The Ruin", Caedmon's Hymn, and "The Dream of the Rood"); a lot for just two hours of class time.

Tomorrow's class is on just one work: Beowulf. I'm very excited to be able (at last!) to teach about Beowulf. Perhaps more excited than will be good for the class. If anybody's interested, I'll be sure to let you know how it went.

But tonight is the Vespers of the Feast of St Jerome, translator of the Bible from Hebrew and Greek into Latin. He defended his translation method as "translating not like an interpreter but like an orator": making an attempt to convey the beauty of the original, rather than (woodenly) its meaning. As this is the blog of a historian and translator, the occasion can hardly be allowed to pass uncelebrated. So today's collect:

O God, Who for the expounding of the Holy Scriptures didst raise up in Thy Church the great and holy Doctor Jerome; we beseech Thee, grant that by his intercession and merits we may, by Thy help, be enabled to practice what he taught us both by word and by work.

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Baby Jesus at the breast

For the past week or so I've been busy, in an inefficient and mentally diffuse manner, with translations for the catalogue of a major exhibition about Rogier van der Weyden, kicking off in September.

Van der Weyden was Philip II's favourite old master; well, he was a lot of people's favourite old master. He conveyed the emotions of biblical episodes with a vividness that helped people imagine what it must have been like to be there - a big part of late medieval and early modern devotional practice.

In the course of background work for the translating (that is, actually trying to find the pictures being described) I came across the above picture on wikipedia, which assures me it's out of copyright (and since the original is in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, I imagine they're right - it's not one of the thousands of images that somebody "liberated" from behind the National Portrait Gallery's firewall)

The user statistics for this blog show that a fair number of the people who stumble across it do so by googling for pictures of Our Lady either pregnant or breastfeeding - something I blogged about in Advent last year. So I thought I'd add this one, for their benefit.
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Translation frolics

It's been a while since I last posted a story of translation-related hilarity; so here's a new one. Dictionaries: never leave home (or the police station) without one!
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Lost in translation

This is almost too hilarious to be true.

It's good to see people trying to translate but they should really ask for expert help.

I coudn't have put it better myself.
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Lunchtime in Brussels

For the past weeks, indeed pretty much full-time since the end of February (except when preparing and travelling for conferences, or to family functions, or on holiday for two weeks in July), I've been working day and night to translate a book about the sixteenth-century translator Dirck Coornhert. I might say more about Coornhert another time, as he's a fascinating character. The book, alas, is about his religious disputations rather than his translations, so it meant getting to grips with imputed righteousness and forensic justification (he wasn't a fan of either), not to mention the formal technicalities of 16th-century debate ("After your opponent's counter-statement you will have a limit of two days for rebuttal.").

The translation itself was pretty much finished at 3 a.m. yesterday (Thursday) morning. There is still revision, some tinkering with footnotes, and other minor inconveniences to be seen to, but the laborious work of breaking in the language in is finally done. The rest is grooming.

So today I took the day off. This morning I met a former colleague for coffee, in a beautiful, art nouveau café by the name of A La Mort Subite ("sudden death" being the name of a once-popular card game, and only derivatively from that a macabre name for a café), and we chatted until it was time for him to get to a lunch appointment.

He asked me along, as an unscheduled addition to the lunch party: himself, his wife, and two of his wife's colleagues. He and I are English, his wife is Czech, and her colleagues are both French-speaking Belgians. There was no single language all of us spoke well enough to converse in freely, but between English and French we managed. Of the five of us, four spoke English to a conversational level, three French, two Czech, and two Dutch (to list only those that I am aware of), so there were several overlapping languages, even though we only needed two of them. This is the sort of thing that has happened to me again and again here, and never anywhere else. It's one of the reasons I like Brussels so much. It's not much of a place to visit, but it's a fascinating place to live.

A few years ago we were at a Chinese New Year function where my oldest son, who speaks English and Dutch, was playing with two boys of about the same age: one spoke Chinese and Dutch, the other Chinese and English; so all three could converse, but never all three together.
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Post-liberal theology

It's only in the last few days that I've heard of such a thing (even though it goes back 20 years). Last week I corrected the English of an article about the Tower of Babel for somebody in the Theology Faculty. I don't think I'm breaching translator confidentiality by saying that it presents a reading of Genesis 11 that makes Babel not the curse of confusion but the blessing of diversity.

Reading this article introduced me to George Lindbeck, a name I am now surprised not to have known earlier. Lindbeck, it seems, is a Lutheran who is very heavily invested in ecumenism (and was one of the observers at the most recent Ecumenical Council), but thinks that what works for ecumenists can’t work in interreligious dialogue. His reason is that all Christians can speak to one another in a biblical and Christ-oriented idiom, but adherents of different religions "speak different languages" (as it were), so when they say "God", or "good", or "sacred", they have different things in mind, and people end up assuming more common understanding than there really is. Well, I'm a translator -- and even if I weren't, I've had enough experience of being among people whose language was foreign to me that I'm simply not convinced that communication between people who "speak different languages" is so near-to-impossible (it has pitfalls, of course, but if it was impossible I'd be out of a job). Perhaps this is pressing the language analogy too hard, but are religious ideas really so incommensurable? Surely conversion itself would be impossible, if adherents of one religion were unable to communicate with or understand adherents of another?

I've not read much of Lindbeck's work, just a couple of his articles to see that there weren't specific terminological preferences I should leave untouched. It was enough to give me a very strong impression (open to being corrected) that this is just a postmodern, "linguistic turn" attempt to recuperate sola scriptura, and perhaps also sola fide: those who haven’t already accepted the Bible as authoritative and Christ as Saviour, simply won’t be able to understand what Christians are on about. This is so utterly foreign to any Catholic understanding of human reason and human virtue that it makes me wonder why Lindbeck doesn't extend his scepticism to ecumenism as well. How much attention was he paying at Vatican II?

One of his articles contains the phrase "The Reformers were, on the whole, right in their polemic against the establishment theology of their day -- Roman Catholics also now recognize that -- but they were clearly wrong in rejecting the radical left" . Roman Catholics recognize no such thing, and since the "radical left" presumably means Thomas Müntzer and John of Leyden I can't quite see why it's "clear" that Lutherans should have embraced them. Still, I want to read more of Lindbeck; but I also want to reread Christopher Derrick's introduction to Light of Revelation and Non-Christians, published in 1965 (presumably, and bizarrely, Derrick must be one of the "liberals" that Lindbeck is "post").
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Freud

I spent the afternoon revising a translation of an article about the concept of "pleasure", according to Plato, Aristotle, Freud and Lacan. This puts me somewhat out of my depth, but of course all I have to do is make sure that the sentences aren't in translationese (which in Lacan's case is a bit of a tall order, but who said being a translator was going to be easy?). I understood enough to be surprised to learn that Freud wasn't quite as sex mad as he's made out in popular culture: he regarded the sex drive as a way of getting rid of urges that prevented people from having a quiet lie down. The quiet lie down is what really matters.
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