The Bullshit Factor
The Song of Songs, which is Solomon’s. Song of Songs 1:1 NASB
Of – A friend of mine spent a lot of time working in Asia, particularly with Chinese people. Of course, communicating usually meant translating, especially when business contracts were involved. But translating wasn’t just a matter of finding a Mandarin word for an English word. What really mattered was communicating the meaning intended by the words, and this, it turns out, was very dependent on cultural perceptions. For example, cultural perceptions were important even in greetings. A Chinese businessman would present himself by offering his business card with both hands, held as one would hold a cup of tea with both hands to give to a guest. To use one hand, as Americans tended to do, was an insult, as was the oversight of not slightly bowing while making the presentation. You could ruin an entire negotiation before it even started by acting like an American at a “meet and greet” rather than like a Chinese man showing respect.
Words and meanings presented the same need for cultural sensitivity. And now the “bullshit” story. In American slang, “Bullshit” is a way of saying “This has no value. It’s worthless.” But bull shit in China is very important. It is a well-recognized fertilizer. It has value. So if I use the expression as an American, I mean something entirely different than what is heard by a man from China. Consequently, the translation must capture the meaning of the expression in Mandarin, not simply the word-for-word representation. What is bullshit in Mandarin? Dog fart.
You get the point. Wooden, literal translation fails completely to communicate the message. “Translation consists of two parts: decoding the original language . . . and finding a translation in a new language . . . that does the same thing as the original.”[1] Therefore, bullshit becomes dog fart. The same thing happens in translating Hebrew into English. The Hebrew of the first line of Song of Songs is:
shir hashirim asher li-shlomo
You can hear the alliteration in the original which the translators attempted to capture in English. But what you can’t see in the translation is the particular construction of possession (the “of”). In Hebrew, possession comes from placing two words next to each other. There is no “of” in Hebrew. There is only shir hashirim (“song the songs”). This does produce “of” in English, but this construction was widely used not to announce mere possession but to indicate “best.” So the translation that communicates the meaning of the phrase is not “The Song of Songs” but rather “The best song of all songs.” In other words, this is Solomon’s greatest hit.
Decoding isn’t the same as translation. Bullshit isn’t bull. It’s dog flatulence. And this poem, even if it wasn’t written by Solomon, is Number One on the all-time greatest hits chart.
Topical Index: bullshit, translation, meaning, song, best, Song of Songs 1:1
[1] Joel Hoffman, And God Said: How Translations Conceal the Bible’s Original Meaning, p. 54.
