Translation Challenge: Isaiah 28:16
My last post was in response to a question about the final verb in Isaiah 18:26. In my opinion, the really beautiful poetry in that verse lies in the verbal repetition in the middle.
Here’s a guide to the Hebrew:
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We have a phrase of introduction (“therefore thus says the Lord GOD”, NRSV) and one of conclusion (“One who trusts will not panic,” NRSV).
In the middle we have the word “stone” repeated, appearing first at the end of a phrase, then again to start the next one. The effect is like, “…I put stones, stones that will….” It reminds me of great oratory, with each phrase building on the previous one. But it’s hard to do in English.
The NRSV, for example, destroys the pattern by using “a foundation stone” to end the first phrase, and then “a tested stone” to start the next. The ESV seems to be trying to mimic the effect with its stilted, “I am the one who has laid as a foundation in Zion, a stone,” for the first part, but then it, too, opts for “a tested stone…” for the next part, missing the repetition. Most other translations are similar. (JPS’s “stone by stone” seems neither here nor there to me. It doesn’t preserve the poetry or the original meaning.)
The LXX also misses the wordplay — though it should be easier in Greek than in English because of the freer word order allowed in that language — but the Vulgate gets it: ego mittam in fundamentis Sion lapidem, lapidem probatum…. (“I put in the foundation of Zion a stone, a stone of testing….”)
Then we have another repetition, this time of the sounds musad, first as a noun, then as a verb. In English, “foundation” can’t be verbal, so the closest we can come is “founding the foundation,” but “found” doesn’t mean what we need it to. A clearer English example would be “established the establishment,” but this time “establishment” doesn’t mean what we need it to.
Again the Vulgate comes pretty close, with …in fundamento fundatum…. Again the LXX misses the wordplay.
Incidentally, it is not at all clear what the phrase means, partly because the masculine musad (“founded”) doesn’t seem to have a masculine antecedent. (With a tiny change, we can move the second musad into the final phrase, duplicating the trick of starting a phrase with the word that ended in the previous one. In that case, we would have “…a foundation. The foundation of the believer will not hurry.” But for now let’s stick with the text we have.)
So here’s the challenge: Who can find a translation that contains two pairs of repeated words, like the original?
Q&A: Isaiah 28:16 and What Happens to Believers
From the About page comes a question about the last verb in Isaiah 28:16:
His [Dietrich Boenhoffer's] reading said that “he that believes does not flee”. Is that what this says?
No.
The Hebrew verb at the end (yachish) clearly means “hurry,” — compare Isaiah 5:19 and Psalm 119:60 — so the phrase should mean: “believers will not hurry.” The problem is that that doesn’t seem to make any sense.
This particularly poetic line is important in its own context. Isaiah uses it to interrupt his prophecy of doom with a line of consolation.
The verse is even more important in the context of the NT, becuase it’s quoted (inexactly) in Romans 9:33 and I Peter 2:6. However, the NT quotes the LXX, which has “be shamed” (kataisxunthi) instead of “hurry.”
The Hebrew for “be shamed” would be Y.B.W.Sh, while “hurry” is Y.Ch.Y.Sh. Differences between the LXX and the Hebrew frequently come down to confusion between letters. It’s easy to see how a vav and yud could be confused — it’s one of the most common mistakes — but it’s harder to understand how a bet and a chet could be. They look nothing alike and do not sound at all the same.
If the LXX is right, the passage means: “I [the Lord God] have established a stone in Zion … believers will not be ashamed.” At least the meaning is clear.
If the Hebrew is right, the only thing I can think of is that the point is that God will build Zion, so believers should be patient and not hurry to do it themselves. It’s coherent, I suppose, but I’ve yet to see that interpretation in any translation, and it doesn’t sound right to me.
I feel like we’re missing something here. Any ideas?
Israel, Modern Hebrew, and Bible Translation
As always, I’ve returned from my week in Israel recharged and renewed. Also, as always, my visit has given me a lot to think about regarding translation.
Modern Languages
I believe that looking at modern languages can help us understand the nature of translation because it’s easier to know what modern languages mean, so it’s easier to know if we’ve got the right translation. So even though Modern Hebrew doesn’t directly help us understand Biblical Hebrew (or, obviously, Greek), understanding how to translate Modern Hebrew may help us figure out how to translate ancient languages better.
In this regard I’m lucky. My parents took me to Israel early enough in my life that I speak Israeli Hebrew fluently, so I generally know not just the meaning but also the exact nuance of a Hebrew phrase, and I can conduct field work just by listening.
Here, then, in no particular order, are some observations and questions.
Questions
1. There are two phrases in Hebrew, s’de t’ufa and n’mal t’ufa, and they mean roughly “air field” and “air port,” respectively. But it’s the former term that is in general use in spoken Hebrew, while the latter carries a flavor of formality. Should s’de t’ufa be translated into English as “airfield” or “airport”?
2. There’s a phrase in Hebrew pachot o yoter, literally, “less or more.” As nearly as I can tell, it’s exactly the same as the English “more or less.’ Does the reversed word order affect translation?
3. There’s a device in Israel called a “disk on key,” which Israelis pronounce DEESkonki, thinking they are speaking English. Is “disk on key” the right translation? (We call it a “flash drive” here in the U.S.)
4. I have a friend who lectures at Haifa University. As is common in Israel, the undergraduates call him by his first name. Should a translation of the class similarly use his first name in English? Will that give the wrong impression that the students are behaving rudely or not showing proper respect?
5. If you don’t know someone’s name in Israel, you can address them with the role they play: nahag, (“driver”), for example, to talk to the bus driver (we do this in English, too), but also yeled (“boy”) to talk to a boy. Should yeled be translated as the English “boy,” or do other connotations of the word make that impossible? (Russian works the same way in this regard. I have a vivid memory of sitting in a club in Kiev. An eleven-year-old girl was helping serve from behind the bar. A nine-year old came up to order a soda, and addressed the older child as “little girl.”)
6. The weather while I was in Israel ranged from the 50′s to the 70′s (that’s about 10 to 25 Celsius). A day in the low 60′s was called kar, literally “cold.” To me it was “warm.” Should the cultural differences regarding winter temperatures come into play when translating kar?
7. Similar to (4), Haifa was about an hour from where I was staying in Israel. People there called that rachok, literally “far.” To me it was close. Again, should translation reflect cultural differences?
8. The official Israeli news broadcasts are in a markedly different dialect of Hebrew than almost anything else in the country, adhering to rules of Biblical Hebrew (really Tiberian Masoretic Hebrew) that are otherwise all but dead in the modern language. Should the drastic differences in dialect be conveyed in translation? How might that be accomplished?
9. Quoting the Hebrew of the Bible has a certain elegance in Israel. Should those quotations be translated into English as quotations of an English translation of the Bible? If so, which translation? If not, perhaps something analogous, like Shakespeare?
10. Some English expletives have been borrowed into Hebrew, along the way losing much of their force. For example, two words that I’ll transliterate as sheet and fuk are acceptable in most social settings; they even appear in widespread print advertisements. Should those English-words-in-Hebrew be translated back into English as what they started off as, or as something more moderate, like “darn”?
Meta Questions
A. How should a translator study Modern Hebrew to make informed translation choices in these cases?
B. What non-linguistic issues (culture? sociology?) are important for the translator to appreciate?
C. How would various Bible translation strategies (e.g., those of, say, the NIV, ESV, and The Message) address these questions?
D. What other implications do these differences between English and Hebrew (and between the U.S. and Israel) have for Bible translation?
Q&A: How do you work, O vocative?
From the About page:
As a grammar lesson, I tried parsing Psalm 117. There is a possible usage of a ‘he’ marking the use of the vocative (BDB 1.i) but the article is missing on the first colon kol goyim and present on the second shavxuhu col ha’umim. It seems to me that ‘praise the Lord all ye nations’ is different from ‘praise the Lord, all nations’. While both may be vocative, English vocative would be ‘praise the Lord O nations all’, and English suggests preaching rather than invitation if the you or ye is added. What do you think about the use of ‘he’ as signaling the vocative and then the problem of expressing this in English?
As you identify with your two-part question at the end, there are two parts to translating the vocative (as there are with most matters of translation): (1) understanding how it works in Hebrew; and (2) figuring out how to do the same thing in English.
Part 1 is comparatively easy. Part 2 is harder.
First, for those who don’t know, “vocative” technically refers to a specific noun form that is used in addressing someone (or something). For example, in Russian, bog means “God,” but if you’re talking to God, you use the word boge instead. That’s the vocative. We don’t have a true vocative in English, but when we really need it, we can use the prefix “O,” as in, “O God….” (The Russian case is complicated. Poke around in various grammars and you’ll learn two things: Russian has a vocative case and Russian doesn’t have a vocative case. But it does. Really.)
To the best of my knowlege, Hebrew also doesn’t have a vocative. And the heh does not serve this fucntion.
Rather, nominative nouns in Hebrew are used for address. So elohim is “God” both as a form of reference and as a form of address. Conveniently, the verb form in Hebrew (usually) makes it clear when someone is being addressed rather than talked about. In Psalm 117, the verbs hal’lu and shabchuhu are both plural imperative, indicating that a group is being addressed. In other languages, the addressees might be in the vocative case.
In addition, both definite and indefinite nouns can be addressed. We see both in Psalm 117. First “all nations” are addressed, then “all the peoples.” It’s not clear why one should be definite and the other not, but this doesn’t affect the vocative nature of the phrases. (As a guess, the heh was omitted from the first half of the line to make it sound better in ways that we no longer understand.)
Expressing the vocative is tricky in English. Sometimes we can make do without any marking. For example, “God, save me!” is clear and grammatical in English.
Other times — for reasons that are not clear — the vocative interpretation is unavailable in English. For example, Psalm 103 begins with a command to “my soul” to praise the Lord. But “Praise the Lord, my soul” doesn’t quite sound right. It’s unclear. (Also, nefesh doesn’t mean “soul,” but that’s for another time.)
Two partial solutions present themselves in English.
The first is the archaic “O.” For example, “Praise the Lord, O my soul” for Psalm 103 is clearer. But it sounds archaic, because we don’t use “O” in normal speech in English. (“O police officer, please don’t give me a ticket…”)
The other solution in English is to use the pronoun “you.” This, too, is stilted, and only works sometimes. “Praise the Lord, you my soul” sounds ridiculous in English.
On the other hand, this second solution works marginally well in Psalm 117. “Praise the Lord, all you nations” is a little bit clearer (to my ear) than “Praise the Lord, all nations.”
Still, both “O” and “you” turn what should be a simple sentence into an overly formal or archaic one. But to leave them both out sometimes leaves an unclear sentence.
The problem isn’t just the lack of a vocative in English, by the way. It’s the combined lack of a vocative and clear imperative.
So Psalm 103, Psalm 117, and many of the other imperatives cause problems for the translator.
I think that these vocatives/imperatives — so simple in Hebrew and so convoluted in English — also serve to remind us how complex translation can be.
Allah and the Type-Token Distinction
As has been widely reported recently, Malaysians are grappling with how to say “god.”
The issue is that the word most Malay speakers use, allah, refers not only to “god” in general but in particular to what we call “Allah” in English, that is, the Muslim god of that name. (For the blow-by-blow, start here for background, then see here for a recent court ruling reversing an original decision and allowing anyone to use the word allah. And see here for a report of massive violence against churches for using the word allah in Christian contexts. See also here for the court’s suspension of its reversal of its original ban.)
The problem essentially stems from type-token conflation, and not for the first time.
Essentially, there is a category (“type”) that in English we usually spell with the lower-case-g word “god,” and for which we can equally use the word “deity.”
In addition to the category, there is what the category contains (“tokens”). One example of such a token is what we usually write with the upper-case-G word “God” in English.
The distinction is usually pretty clear. For example, the type “Greek god” contains the tokens “Zeus” and “Athena,” among others.
But monotheism involves a type that has exactly one token, so it’s pretty easy to use the type and token interchangeably. We do this in English when we talk about “praying to God.” Translations even stumble sometimes, prefering the upper-case-G “God” where the lower-case version makes more sense, as in “our God” for “our god.”
We see the same interchangeability in the Hebrew of the Old Testament. The word elohim is used both for the God of the Hebrews and for any other god. And the Greek theos, represents variously “God” or “god” (or “goddess”).
Similarly, the word allah (before Islam merely one Arabian god of many) is now the Muslim name for “God” as well as the type “god.”
If nothing else, I think we see here that a solid theoretical framework, while essential for translation, is only part of the story. (I don’t think the end to the crisis in Malaysia is a campaign explaining the nature of type-token conflation.)
And I wonder if the authors of the Bible similarly debated the words elohim and theos.
Q&A: Morphology in Ruth 2:10
From the About page:
Still working on he and vav and I came across this pair of words in Ruth vatishtachu artza.
Two questions — why the vav at the end of the first word? And why the he at the end of the second? KJV translates it as if it were hithpael — she bowed herself to the ground.
I’m playing catch-up after a wonderful visit to Israel, so I thought I’d start with a grammar question. (After all, nothing says “fun” like a little morphology.)
The first word is a wonderful combination of all sorts of grammatical processes. It’s the apocopated hitpa’el, future feminine third person singular. The root is Sh.Ch.H, and the shin and the tav metathesize (“switch places”) as expected with sibilants in hitpa’el.
By apocopated (“short”) I mean that the the final heh from the root Sh.Ch.H has dropped off, as final hehs frequently do in the future third-person singular. (Another example is vayavk instead of vayivkeh for “he wept.”)
So we would expect the form to be vatishtachv instead of vatishtachaveh. The extra vowel in the longer form under the chet — the “a” after the “ch” in transliteration — comes to prevent the frequently undesirable condition of a syllable ending with a chet. In the shorter form, however, another stratagy prevents a chet-final syllable. The consonantal vav becomes vocalic. This, too, is a regular part of Hebrew grammar — consider the prefix “and” which can be v’- or u- (among other possibilities) — but grammar books don’t often emphasize the general nature of this process.
So the first word is just “she bowed.” (Perhaps “bowed herself” was English when the KJV was composed, but now that translation is just wrong.)
As for artza, the final heh is directional. The word means “toward the ground.”
So we have metathesis, apocopation, and resyllabification in the first word. And — perhaps refusing to disappear completely — the missing heh from the first word shows up on the second.
Leaving Jerusalem is Always Hard
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I’ve just returned from Israel. My short trip afforded me two visits to Jerusalem, and on both occasions I was reminded anew how hard it is to leave that holy city.
Even getting in isn’t easy. I approached by car, through the foothills that King David may have surveyed as he wondered where to build his city. Dotted with white houses among pine trees, the view seems timeless and eternal. But a slew of bus stops in the right-hand lane of the main artery into the city creates a permanent condition of snarled traffic that reminds drivers that this is a modern city, too. And as cities go, it’s not a particularly easy one to navigate. Literally built in non-Euclidean space, the network of roads winds around through hills and valleys seemingly at random, and the signs — in English, Hebrew, and Arabic — seem to be strategically placed so that you can only see them once you’ve driven by, as if to announce, “yes, you missed your turn.” Don’t bother with a GPS, either. One-way streets change direction and roads are opened or closed seemingly every month. The roads come in all varieties and sizes, mirroring the history they represent. Some are named after people: Saul Tchernichovski and Shai Agnon, both famous poets; King George, of England; Nahmanides, the famous 13th century commentator; Salah ad-Din (“Saladin”), who took Jerusalem from the Crusaders in the 12th century; Bar Kokhba, who led an unsuccessful revolt against the Romans in the second century AD; and of course King David, who founded the city over 3,000 years ago. Some roads recall ancient routes to even more ancient cities: Bethlehem Way, Jaffa Way, and Jericho Way. And some highlight the polyglot population. There’s even a “French Hill,” which may or may not be named for the French. (Some people think it recalls the British General John French.) Yet the magic of New Jerusalem is dwarfed by the grandeur and splendor of the Old City. I entered, as I usually do, through the 500-year-old Jaffa Gate. Originally designed with sharp angles to keep out invading forces, a wider, straight, duplicate gate was appended next to the older one by Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany so he could enter the city by carriage in 1898. Nearly 2,000 years earlier, in 135 AD, the Roman Emperor Hadrian built what he called Aelia Capitolina on top of Herod’s Jerusalem. Hadrian’s typically Roman planning used thoroughfares that ran east-west and north-south to section the city into quarters. Those ancient roads, though now buried, provide the boundaries for the Jewish, Muslim, Christian, and Armenian quarters that survive to this day. The Jaffa Gate took me into the Muslim quarter. The descending stone paths led variously to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Western Wall, the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and the Armenian compound. Remnants of a Herodian arch at the Temple Mount remind visitors of the Roman siege on Jerusalem; the destroyed stone is still in a pile of rubble 2,000 years later. To the north, in tunnels beyond the Western Wall, a plexiglass floor offers a glimpse into the past. The current ground level is several stories higher than the original was. The bottom part of the Western Wall is hidden by centuries of detritus. But even with so much history in one place, it’s the people that make Old Jerusalem. Immediately inside the Old City, I bought a few postcards from a shop to my left. Anywhere else in the world my experience would have been unremarkable. But here, the exchange included history and politics. I asked the merchant if he lived in Jerusalem. He did. “For how long has your family been here?” I asked. “Since Salah a-Din,” he told me. His family had come to Jerusalem as the Kurdish Muslim leader we call Saladin retook Jerusalem some 800 years ago. Further down the road, in the covered market known as the shuk, 6-year-old children speak three languages or more, the better to facilitate commerce. On one of the paths, three school girls link arms, running carefree through the world’s most contested real estate. Driving back to Tel Aviv requires skill and luck, because of the signage. I have one example of many immediately below. You can see a green sign indicating that only the right lane can turn right. Hidden off in the distance, barely visible at the point you have to choose a lane, is the sign that tells you where the lanes go. Guess right — here and elsewhere — and you’re on your way. Guess wrong, and you’re stuck again in the beautiful ancient paradox that is Jerusalem. It’s almost as though the city doesn’t want you to leave. Road Signs out of Jerusalem. (Can you spot the tiny sign in the distance that indicates where the roads go?) |
 Man Walking in Old Jerusalem  Man Pushing a Cart Through Old Jerusalem  Woman Walking in Old Jerusalem  Schoolgirls Walking Home in Old Jerusalem  Two Men in Old Jerusalem  Strolling Through Old Jerusalem  Playing Cards in Old Jerusalem  Church of the Holy Sepulchre  Woman in Old Jerusalem |
[I didn't have time to update this blog while I was away. Regularly scheduled programming will return shortly.]
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