Translations
The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God stands forever. Isaiah 40:8 NASB
Stands forever – If Isaiah is right, then one of the really important questions is, “What does God’s word say?” What are these words that will stand forever? For the answer we turn to the Bible. Well, actually, we don’t turn to the Bible. We turn to a translation of the Bible. We call it the Bible by convention, but the truth is that the real Bible is a collection of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek texts that are accepted by the believing community as God’s words for us. Of course, we rely on the translations because 1) we can’t read the originals and 2) we trust that the translators have done a faithful job of communicating those original words into our language. But we should be reminded of the following: “A translator of the Iliad into German once remarked, ‘Dear reader, study Greek and throw my translation into the fire.’ The same applies to the holy: explanations are not substitutes.”[1]
If you thought we only have problems with Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, then you must also pay attention to John Ciardi’s introduction to the translation of the Italian original of Dante’s The Inferno:
When the violin repeats what the piano has just played, it cannot make the same sounds and it can only approximate the same chords. It can, however, make recognizably the same “music,” the same air. But it can do so only when it is as faithful to the self-logic of the violin as it is to the self-logic of the piano. Language too is an instrument, and each language has its own logic. I believe that the process of rendering from language to language is better conceived as a “transposition” than as a “translation,” for “translation” implies a series of word-for-word equivalences that do not exist across language boundaries any more than piano sounds exist in the violin. The notion of word-for-word equivalents also strikes me as false to the nature of poetry. Poetry is not made of words but of word-complexes, elaborate structures involving, among other things, denotations, connotations, rhythms, puns, juxtapositions, and echoes of the tradition in which the poet is writing. It is difficult in prose and impossible in poetry to juggle such a complex intact across the barrier of language.[2]
It’s not just the words of God that stand forever. It’s the poetry of those words, the ethos that surrounds them, the playfulness of those words within the larger framework of the linguistic culture. A “literal” translation might as well be a mechanical one (and sometimes is), but it won’t come close to the buried meanings and feelings in the words-in-culture in the Bible. At best, translations are attempts to understand someone else’s thinking as if it were our own, and of course, our own thinking gets in the way of reading someone else’s mind.
One of the perennial questions I am asked is, “What is the best translation for me to read?” The answer is, “Good luck with that.” Go start a fire.
Topical Index: Bible, God’s word, translation, Isaiah 40:8
[1] Abraham Heschel, Between God and Man: An Interpretation of Judaism (Free Press Paperbacks, 1959), p. 183.
[2] Dante Alighieri , The Inferno, translated by John Ciardi (Signet Classics, 2001), p. ix.
