“They burned the children alive,” – a witness to yesterday’s horrifying Islamist attack on a Nigerian school, killing up to 30 students, because Western education is “sacrilegious”. But to talk of Islamist terrorism is apparently Islamophobic. Yes, this group is extreme, even by Islamist standards. But its motivation is clear: to do God’s will, by murdering children en masse for the crime of seeking the truth.
Month: July 2013
The Word Made Fresh
Dave Brunn, who worked for twenty years translating the Bible for the Lamogai people of Papua New Guinea, describes what the process taught him about supposed “literal” renderings of scripture:
When I first went to Papua New Guinea, I was committed to translating God’s Word as faithfully and as accurately as possible. I thought I had a good idea of what that meant, but I quickly realized that I had oversimplified the actual task of Bible translation. I heard people articulate proposed standards for faithfulness and accuracy. But I found that many of those standards are based on English grammatical features that do not exist in Lamogai or many other languages. So, if those standards are really God’s universal standards, then Lamogai would automatically be disqualified from having a faithful and accurate translation.
A lot of people don’t realize that since English and Koine Greek are both Indo-European languages, the degree of accuracy that we have in our English New Testaments is largely due to the fact that the translators were working with languages that are part of the same family, albeit as distant cousins. Translation into English is not easy, but there are many more difficulties faced by those translating into unrelated languages—difficulties that those translating into English would never imagine.
Why every translation involves the interpretation of the translator:
As I approached a passage to translate into Lamogai, I looked at the original, and then I would compare as many English versions as I could. I thought I understood what “literal” translations were in English. But I found that every literal version frequently breaks its own rules of literalness and word-for-word translation—and not only when the grammar or other specific constraints force them to. Often it’s just a judgment call for the translators. It really surprised me to find out that the supposedly “literal” versions are often not literal in places where they could have been. There is also a surprising number of places where the intentionally nonliteral versions actually end up closer to a word-for word rendering.
A Downbeat Beatnik
For their “This Day in Lettres” feature, The American Reader highlights this tender, conflicted missive from the poet Allen Ginsberg to his sometime lover Neal Cassady, dated July 3, 1952:
I will stay on in N.Y. longer. When I begin wandering in space, and among the subterraneans, and into the hung-up literary corridors, I get hung up on everything but the real pressures—money, love. Anyway I want to set myself up independent again, with a small apartment, a steady secure job, start laying again. With Dusty I seldom lay and it is no good really, though I like her alright.
I still have love longings and yet have not in my lifetime founded a relationship with anyone which is satisfactory and never will unless I change and grow somehow out of this egoistic grayness and squalor. Drifting like I am or could would leave me with no hope but stolen fruits. I had begun to get hung up on the metaphysical image and the subterranean peyotelites here. Must stop playing with my life in a disappointed grey world. Maybe go back to analysis. I am miserable now—not feeling unhappiness, just lack of life coming to me and coming out of me—resignation to getting nothing and seeking nothing, staying behind shell. The glare of unknown love, human, unhad by me,—the tenderness I never had. I don’t want to be just a nothing, a sick blank, withdrawal into myself forever. I can’t turn to you for that any more, can’t come to Frisco for you, because how much you love me, it is still something wrong, not complete, not still enough, not—god knows what not—you know how I was before and what I am, my hang-ups. Do you think that is all I shall get ever, so that is why I should come out? Maybe that is not bad idea but I still want to seek more. I suppose maybe I’m looking too hung-up at a simple sociable proposition.
I guess that’s true, too—I haven’t reread this—but I started off trying to say what I’m feeling. I just want something, beside the emptiness I’ve carried around in me all my life. Bliss of tenderness I think of, but that’s too monomaniacal and soft-hearted—maybe I should go out of myself somehow here and keep trying to get back to life.
(Photo: Ginsberg as captured by William S. Burroughs, from the “Beat Memories” exhibit at the Grey Art Gallery, which the Dish featured here. © 2012 Allen Ginsberg LLC. All rights reserved)
“The Light Of Faith”
Friday marked the release of Pope Francis’s first encyclical, Lumen Fidei – “The Light of Faith.” Rocco Palmo provides context for the how the document came into being:
While the less than four month period between Francis’ election and the rollout of his first major document is a modern record, the pontiff let slip in mid-June that he was reworking a draft text given him by Pope-emeritus Benedict XVI, and that the finished product – ostensibly prepared to mark the ongoing Year of Faith – would be “the work of four hands” …
[W]hile Benedict’s first encyclical, Deus caritas est, was likewise rooted in a late effort of Blessed John Paul II, it emerged some nine months after Joseph Ratzinger’s 2005 election. Until now, the quickest time-lapse between a Pope’s ascent and first encyclical was held by John Paul, whose Redemptor hominis was given in March 1979, four and a half months into his pontificate, while Paul VI and Blessed John XXIIII respectively waited fourteen and eight months before publishing their first top-tier messages.
Elaborating on the theme, Samuel Gregg emphasizes the basic continuity between the two popes – and Francis’s humility:
No doubt some will claim (especially after they read Lumen Fidei) that, because Ratzinger penned the first draft, this encyclical “isn’t really Francis’s text.” But, actually, it is. Francis was under no obligation to use Benedict’s initial draft. Yet he did. Moreover, encyclicals are rarely composed in their entirety by a pope. Others, for a variety of reasons (such as expertise in the subject-matter), are normally asked to contribute to the drafting process. Naturally there’s always speculation about particular persons’ influence upon individual documents. In the end, however, final authorial responsibility for these texts belongs to the pope who signs them. They are truly his documents, for without his signature denoting his assent to every word of their content, they lack magisterial authority and are destined to be mere archival curiosities.
One of the many things I admire about Pope Francis is his genuine humility. And it’s a truly self-effacing pope who freely acknowledges his predecessor’s profound contribution to the first encyclical of a new pontificate.
Reading Lumen Fidei, David Cloutier reaches back to then Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger’s early theological work and the argument that faith includes more than mere belief in certain intellectual propositions:
[I]n Joseph Ratzinger’s 1968 Introduction to Christianity…faith is named as “taking up a position” and “to take one’s stand on something.” Ratzinger is trying to identify faith with a certain type of stance toward reality, rather than with any formulae, claiming that faith is the prerequisite of all real human understanding. Without faith, he suggests, all understanding eventually is reduced to “making” – that is, not to standing somewhere, but to remaking the world in one’s own image…
The overall outline of the [encyclical] suggests its central concern, set out in the initial paragraph, to counter the idea that religious faith is in fact a form of “darkness.” Rather, faith means standing somewhere, taking a stand, one that illuminates rather than darkens. In the first chapter, the existential or dynamic (rather than propositional or doctrinal) aspect of what faith means is vividly described, in particular using Abraham.
Kyle Cupp notes that the encyclical’s description of faith leaves room for life’s uncertainties:
We read that “faith opens the way before us and accompanies our steps through time,” summoning us to an unseen future, but then the encyclical says something striking: “the sight which faith would give to Abraham would always be linked to the need to take this step forward: faith ‘sees’ to the extent that it journeys, to the extent that it chooses to enter into the horizons opened up by God’s word.” In other words, to see by the light of faith, you first have to take a step in the darkness. Faith is a choice to move, to journey, and only on this journey is the path illuminated by faith. The light shines after the taking of each step, and as faith is a choice one must make at each moment of each day, the sight of faith is neither immediate nor constant. The light and the dark go together. In the words of the Lumen Fidei: “Faith by its very nature demands renouncing the immediate possession which sight would appear to offer; it is an invitation to turn to the source of the light, while respecting the mystery of a countenance which will unveil itself personally in its own good time.”
James Martin elaborates on how Francis connects faith to love, a move that he hopes will appeal to “the seeker, the doubter, the agnostic and even the atheist”:
[A]s the pope says, “Love is an experience of truth.” For those still searching for God, then, Francis encourages them to meditate on their experience of love, not simply as an ephemeral emotion, but as a way of tasting faith and experiencing truth, both of which can lead to faith. As we reflect on the love that God has shown us in our lives, as the People of Israel did over history, we slowly come to belief. And here is a beautiful line that will speak to many seekers: “To the extent that they are sincerely open to love and set out with whatever light they can find, they are already, even without knowing it, on the path leading to faith.”
To that end, faith is a journey. Lumen Fidei speaks of the “path” and “road which faith opens up before us.” In other words, don’t be afraid to keep looking. “Religious man is a wayfarer,” says Francis (and I would add religious woman, too), “he must be ready to be led, to come out of himself, and to find the God of perpetual surprises.”
So, to the seeker Francis says: don’t be afraid of using your intellect, see what love might teach you about faith, and stay on the path. Then one day, you may be surprised to discover that you are in a relationship with God and, more important, that God is in a relationship with you.
John Allen, Jr., reads the encyclical in much the same way:
[T]he new pope’s first encyclical insists that Christian faith “must be professed in all its purity and integrity,” but also strikes a pose of open arms to all the “seekers” of the post-modern world.
Anyone who is “open to love,” the document says, is “already, even without knowing it, on the path leading to faith.”
In a sense, the document amounts to a synthesis of the spirit of “affirmative orthodoxy” under Benedict, which is now seemingly being extended into the papacy of Francis: Tenacity in defending the content of orthodox belief, but a determination to phrase that content in the most positive and outward-reaching fashion possible.
For those not inclined to read the entire encyclical, you can read a helpful summary of it here.
(Photo: Pope Francis smiles after his weekly general audience in St Peter’s square at the Vatican on June 12, 2013. By Alberto Pizzoli/AFP/Getty Images)
“Doubt Is Essential To Faith”
When God Grew Up
Michael Tolkin spots this provocative passage from Walter Kirn’s My Mother’s Bible:
Why did God take so long to post the rules, allowing his children to blunder about in darkness between their expulsion from Eden and Moses’ time? It seems so cruel, this interlude of anarchy [creation, Babel, flood, slavery] that left human beings to their own devices and caused them to be cursed, cast out, and slaughtered when their trial-and-error search for answers went awry. Why not reveal the Ten Commandments to Adam, say, so he could teach them to his poor son, Cain? Why for so long did the Lord require his children to read his mind instead of his stone tablets? Maybe it took him a while to know his own mind. Maybe, that is, God’s will didn’t properly exist until human beings revealed it in the negative by confounding it in so many ways. By hovering over them while they lurched through history, God learned as much from his children, it seems possible, as they eventually learned from him. And the chief thing he learned was that he didn’t like it when they acted in ways that reminded him of himself.
Tolkin comments:
The God who surprises and fascinates Kirn is not the great and terrible Oz mocked by atheists; after creating the world, he can only affect it by suggestion, not by changing the rules that God himself put into motion. God’s miracles are limited in duration and scale, and nothing fundamental in creation is ever permanently reversed. God is everywhere at the beginning, and withdraws from conversation as the march across the wilderness comes to an end. Kirn isn’t surprised by the humanity of Adam and Eve or Abraham and Moses; it’s God’s humanity that fascinates him. When God speaks to Moses out of the burning bush and tells him to go back to Egypt and free the Hebrews, Kirn notes that Moses wants to tell the Hebrews who sent him, and therefore wants God to tell him his name, but God won’t do it; all he says is for Moses to tell them “I Am That I Am.” “Today it seems profound,” writes Kirn, “this answer, a great grammatical infinity loop… Considered in context, though, as a piece of dialogue, it strikes me as a joke. Before this, God either damned you or cursed you, but now he’s learned to pull your leg.” Kirn sees comedy in God’s game of inscrutability — “Maybe Jehovah’s crazy-making name is part of a longer ‘Who’s on first?’”
Let It Blow
Robert T. Gonzalez praises the above short film, Bert Haanstra’s 1959 Oscar-winning documentary Glas, as the “perfect little ten minute vacation”:
[W]hat caught my attention was how effectively it contrasts the meticulous, method-based craftsmanship of the glassblowers with the automated processes of the bottle-building machines. It’s an especially powerful comparison, considering that glass blowing remains widely practiced to this day, even after decades of global industrialization. I can think of few examples where an artisan’s virtuosity juxtaposes more compellingly with the raw generative capacity of a factory – this makes the film wonderful to think about, and practically impossible not to watch.
Notes On A Dirty Old Man
In an essay entitled “I Should Have Slept With Philip Roth” – an excerpt from her new memoir, On My Knees – Periel Aschenbrand describes an encounter with the famous author:
I was trying to make a good impression and sound mildly intelligent, so I started talking about French critical theory. This was definitely a gamble since I don’t actually know anything about French critical theory. Had I read “The Dying Animal” before I met Roth, I would have known this was a colossal waste of time. But I hadn’t read “The Dying Animal” before I met Roth because I hadn’t read anything by Roth before I met him. As it turned out, it didn’t really matter what I was talking about because Philip Roth spent the vast majority of the time I was with him alternately talking about his great love for cherries and staring at my tits.
While I was droning on about the great French feminist philosopher Monique Wittig, who is both famous and obscure enough that I thought I could get away with it, Philip Roth interrupted me, “I have a question for you.”
I was already formulating my answer. Yes, Mr. Roth, of course, I would be thrilled to have you write the foreword of my next book. I look at him expectantly, the way I imagine a dog would look at its owner right before the owner is about to fill its bowl with food. I was anticipating a very serious literary question.
Roth said, “Do you like cherries?”
Trying not to skip a beat, I licked my lips and batted my eyelashes. “Who doesn’t like cherries?” I asked as I smiled sweetly.
Roth got a devilish twinkle in his eye, “Would you like to taste one of my cherries?”
He pierced a cherry with his fork. I opened my mouth, and Philip Roth, one of the greatest writers maybe ever, popped a cherry into my mouth.
“Mmmmm,” I said, as I smiled at him, “Delicious!”
It was actually revolting. The cherries were preserved in some heavy, sugary red liquid. They tasted like cough syrup. But hey, who was I to ruin an old man’s good time?
Drinking Until You Divulge
While under the influence, Damian Sowers makes a connection between bad habits and good writing:
Writing is only interesting to other people if it is deeply revealing. Your brain has a self defense mechanism which prevents you from divulging too much of yourself to perfect strangers. Fortunately, this mechanism can be easily bypassed with chemicals.
If you’re not terrified to click the little green publish button, drink more and rewrite.
(Photo: Hemingway, third from the right, drinking in Havana in 1955, via Wikimedia Commons)
Love, Divided
In an interview, Christopher Bram, a novelist and author of Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America, describes the tension that animates much of his work:
One theme that appears again and again is the conflict between big love and little love. The phrase was coined by my friend Mary Gentile, who went to college with me and has been one of my best readers and toughest critics. Mary recognized early that my characters are often torn between their love for something personal and immediate and love for something larger and more difficult. In Surprising Myself, Joel finds himself divided between love of sex and self and his love of his partner, Corey. In Gossip, Ralph is torn between political loyalties and his affection for a closeted Republican. And so on. Sometimes the larger love is just plain wrong, as in Hold Tight, where Hank Fayette, a white sailor from Texas, has no trouble accepting his homosexuality but is angrily confused when he falls in love with a black man, the smart-mouthed Juke. He feels his very identity as a white man is being thrown into doubt.
I’m not sure where this pattern originated in my work. It might come from my experience as a gay person: all of us must learn to choose between what we were taught to feel and what we really feel. Or maybe I just read too much George Eliot in college.
How he writes about sex:
Sex is as important as laughter for me in storytelling. Well, it’s another part of my realism. Sex is not just a sensuous act, but an expressive act, a dramatic act. People reveal a lot about themselves in bed. Or they can anyway. When it’s just sex, I usually skip over the act and say something like, “Afterwards they smoked cigarettes.” But when something in addition to lust is being expressed or worked out, I write a scene. For example, the first real sex scene in Surprising Myself isn’t until fifty or so pages in, when Joel and Corey have been together for three years. They have all these other bonds and memories and emotions, which crowd into bed with them. And Joel finds himself fantasizing about all the guys he didn’t sleep with. He is both confused and excited.
You’re right; people rarely talk about the sex in my novels, but I suspect that’s because so much else is going on. The sex is blended with the rest of life. In novels by, say, Edmund White or Alan Hollinghurst, there’s often not much else going on except sex, so readers really notice it.
The Dish 
