The N factor

Recently I reread the introduction to Everett Fox's book Genesis and Exodus: A new English rendition with commentary and notes (Schocken Books, 1983/1990), i.e. the "Preface to the paperback edition", pp. xiii-xxx. As will sometimes happen with good books, what I recall from my first reading over twenty years ago was the sensation that this is good stuff but it doesn't tell me much I hadn't already figured out. By saying that I don't mean to ask to be given any special credit, just to say that, to quote one of my mother's favourite sayings, "all great thinkers think alike".


What Fox was saying that I agreed with is really quite simple: Genesis should be translated differently from the way it usually is to get across better what the original Genesis is like.

Unfortunately, if I have to be very honest, I don't think much of Fox's attempt at a translation. I understand (I think) what he tried to do; I appreciate why and how he came to do it; but looking at the result, I just don't think it works well. It's the same sort of disappointment I sometimes feel when I have an idea myself, try to implement it and am critical of the result. Believe me, it happens often. It's called trial and error. It could happen with one of my blog posts, for example: maybe even this one. But if you're reading this, I couldn't have been so disappointed that I decided to scrap it. If I were Fox and that was what came out, I would be disappointed, is what I'm saying. I might even try a different tack. And I say this as empathically as I can towards Everett Fox (whom I don't know personally but to whom I talk on a daily basis in the person of his book which, whatever I may say here, I use every day, and because my desk is a bit of a mess I can often be heard calling out: Everett, where are you?).

And of course this is precisely how progress is achieved. I could easily see myself in E.F.'s shoes trying out exactly what he tried out, if I had come to the task before him, but thanks to the fact that he got there first I won't bother because I can see the result so now I can skip that, and go to the next step which is to analyse what it is about it that I am not satisfied with and how (if at all) I am going to work on getting something to satisfy me more. I am not calling myself clever, I am acknowledging the benefit of hindsight, and its source. Someone will hopefully thank me the same way some day for the mistakes they consider that I have made.

The whole point is, I understand where Fox is coming from. I get it. I agree with most of what he says in the preface. I have said most of the same things myself in this blog. That may be because his work has contributed significantly to my thinking and maybe even the way I formulate some points.

He acknowledges that to an important extent he has followed in the footsteps of Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig who published a German translation of the Bible (1925-1962) which Fox describes as "monumental". According to Fox's discussion one gets the idea that he considered the Buber-Rosenzweig translation (which I am afraid I have not seen) somewhat more radical in approach than his own, but that it was his main inspiration and heading in the same direction (he even describes his own Genesis and Exodus as an "offshoot" of Buber and Rosenzweig's work).

They are both approaches to the Hebrew Bible that see it, first of all, as literature and propose to translate it as literature (and I agree). Secondly, it was oral literature and should be treated and translated as such too (tick). Therefore there is emphasis on explorations of the text in terms of its literary characteristics and qualities and in terms of its orality and the textual features that are consequent upon that orality (tick). All this affects in important ways how we understand the Hebrew Bible (agree), and the important point is often made that there are a lot of things about the text that are not conveyed or reflected adequately in conventional translations (definitely agree). There is the sound play, the word play, the choice of particular words and the effects of deliberate repetition of words, phrases, images and names, the patterning of rhythms and images, the rhetoric of the text and the powerful use of language. I agree a hundred and ten percent with all of this and also agree that any undertaking to translate the Biblical text in a way that reflects all these qualities adequately is an enormously daunting challenge.

Now, translation is a sort of dialogue between the source language and the target language. Or perhaps what I mean to say is that translation is an attempt to introduce speakers of the source and target languages into the same conversation. Since the readers (or listeners) of the translation are going to be speakers of the target language, the purpose is thus to get the "message" that speakers of the source language (including the writers/reciters and the readers/listeners of the original text) understood the original text to convey across to speakers of the target language (as readers or listeners of the translated text).

So the big question is: What do we mean by "the message"?

You probably know by now that I consider the message of the text to be more than just its "literal meaning" or, if you prefer, "informational content". The text, as literature, is more than just a set of logical propositions. The message includes everything about how the message is delivered as well as what the propositional-informative content of the message is. It has to do with the packaging as well as the ingredients, the visual presentation of the dish as well as what it tastes like, the text is not just a "truth" but an aesthetic experience (which may or may not purport to convey a truth, or truths). This is the case with all literature, perhaps all art, and also with the text of Genesis.

The crucial test of this is in the reaction the text produces in its readers or listeners. The original hearer of the original text perceives everything about the message (the packaging and the content) and obtains from this something we may call a "meaning". The hearer of the translation will also perceive the content of the translation and the packaging of the translation, and will obtain from it all a meaning of the translation. How much resemblance is there between those two "meanings"? That is the test of a translation.

The issue I have with the Everett Fox translation (and I would assume, from what he says, that I would have with the Buber-Rosenzweig one) is summed up as follows: what is the difference between telling a joke and explaining a joke? The answer is: one makes you laugh, the other doesn't. The explainer of the joke understands the joke. When the explainer has finished, the hearer also understands the joke. But the original joke was funny, the explained joke isn't.

Fox suggests in his introduction that the only way to convey everything in the Hebrew text through an English translation is "to force the language of the translation to become the instrument through which the Hebraic voice of the text speaks" (p. xxiv):

I have several issues, both theoretical and extremely practical, with this strategy of "forcing the language", especially in a translation where we're trying to make a big point about treating it as a literary translation. But in fact in any kind of translation that is worth its salt, surely the whole point is for the translator to try to carry it out without forcing the target language if it can possibly be avoided. As a translator, the only justified reason for deliberately forcing the language that I can think of would be if the language of the original text were strikingly "forced" and we wished to artfully convey that "forcedness" to the target audience of the translation! So my question is then: Is the language of the original forced? If the answer is no, then I do not want the language of the translation to sound forced because this will produce a different kind of aesthetic experience from that produced (and intended to be produced) by the original text!

So basically my line is that if the original audience didn't react by thinking Huh?, then ideally the audience of the translation shouldn't be going Huh? either, because that has nothing to do with the aesthetic intention of the original author, nor with the effect of the original text on the original listener. In a sense, this mistake could be regarded as another kind of "taking being literal too far".

However, I am not arguing against "being literal" (both propositionally and aesthetically); rather, I am raising the challenge to do better, to try to be fully faithful to the original without sacrificing naturalness in the target language. The translation is supposed to reflect and convey the qualities of the original; those qualities include its beauty. As literature, beauty cannot survive if isolated from the beautiful language through which it is expressed. I once "translated" a Shakespeare sonnet into the careless style of English I was reading in Facebook comments posted by young people. I thought I had been rather clever, but I was told by several people that they "prefer the original". Not sure if they were being tongue in cheek or not, but you know what? The original was better. Take a beautiful gift and wrap it in an old plastic bag, and see what happens. The packaging is part of the package.

Now I may be being a little too harsh. I understand Buber and Rosenzweig's reasons, and Fox's. The problem is that we want to convey things that are in the Hebrew text that do not easily come through in an English text worded idiomatically. Fox criticises or at least distances himself from Bible translations of recent years which might be accused (again, maybe a bit harshly in some instances) of not just aiming to sound like smooth English, but doing so at the expense of everything else (including faithfulness to the original text, on more levels than one, Fox would surely argue). Now that is certainly not the proper objective for a good quality translation either. Content matters, form matters, and then, finally, naturalness of the target text in the target language matters too. Those are the goals. Nobody ever said translating is easy!

Some translations are more challenging than others, and one factor affecting their difficulty is the language pair, i.e. from which language to which language one is translating. Fox does comment a little bit on certain characteristics of English, his target language, particularly in comparison to German, the target language of Buber and Rosenzweig. Now of course English and German are different, although from where I'm looking they are not all that different from each other in comparison to, say, English and Nawat! Indeed, to some extent, when translating from Biblical Hebrew, I'd venture to say that all modern European languages are pretty much variations on a theme, presenting quite similar issues. In any case, and more to the point, I absolutely recognise that translating Hebrew Biblical texts, with respect for the criteria that both Fox and I have in common, into either English or German in a way which "leaves nothing out" and achieves naturalness in the target language is a very tall order. This is true, and it has a lot to do with the particular points in which English and German both contrast with Biblical Hebrew, typologically (as languages), as literary media and in terms of culture, background assumptions etc. etc.

We might say there are three possible ways to resolve this if the order cannot be fully met: give up altogether, sacrifice some of the aspects of the original text you wanted your translation to convey, or try to keep it all but "force the language". The choice will depend on what the translation is for. I could not possibly decide to deliberately force the language in my Nawat Bible translation. Whatever the hypothetical pros and cons of doing so in terms of not leaving anything out of the message, it would not do for Nawat if I did that. I am of course in a different situation from Everett Fox regarding the motivations for this translation. Not only is Nawat a language without any previous Bible translation, it is furthermore a language with very, very little literature of any kind.

Now in reality, whenever we translate an important work like the Bible (or the works of Shakespeare, for example) into a language we are, among other things, contributing to that language's literature; when it is a language with little previous literature, the contribution is proportionally of staggering importance. The translation is virtually an act of creation - not just of a text but of the literary language itself in which it is to be written. Now clearly this is important and it carries responsibilities. The idea is to "help" the language: we don't propose to "do violence to the language" as a way of helping it.

But we are not just talking about some abstract concept of "respecting the language". For one thing, the point of translating the text is so that Nawat speakers will read it, as in this way the benefits mentioned will be reaped, while at the same time the speakers will have access, through their own language, to this wonderful literature. Now, in order for it to be read, it must be well written. This is not true just in this case but is applicable to any literature written in Nawat, or any other language: better writing will lead to better reading, and probably more reading. I am not talking of the Nawat Bible now as just a translation, I am speaking of it as Nawat literature, because that is what it will be, just as much as the famous English Bible translations are a part of English literature or the Vulgate Bible is a part of Late Latin literature, and so on.

So the purpose of my translation of Genesis will not be to tell readers what the original Hebrew Genesis sounds like in Hebrew, through Nawat, but to try to offer readers, through Nawat, a taste of the actual "Genesis experience" (as we understand that this experience is offered, through Hebrew, to those who can read it and who do read it in an appropriate way). When we know how to read it, the Hebrew Genesis is a text of the highest literary quality, and often very beautiful. A linguistically awkward Nawat Genesis would do justice neither to the original literature it purports to represent, nor to the language community whose language it aims to enrich.

To be dreadfully honest, if something has to give within this triangle of information content, literary features and naturalness of language, I very much fear it would only be reasonable for the heaviest sacrifice to fall on the literary features, since we can't make the text say what it doesn't say and we can't make it do violence to Nawat to say what it does.

So it is that, as I was reading Everett Fox's introduction a few days ago, agreeing with all his points yet unhappy with his results, and wondering what it was that underpinned the difference I perceive between what he produced and what I see as my goal - and, I might add, not willing to sacrifice any of my criteria if it can be helped - it hit me that what Fox wasn't factoring in and I was is "the N factor". When I first thought this up, N stood for Nawat. Of course, other people will be thinking about translations to other languages (some of which don't begin with an N), but you will understand that by this what I mean is, the factor of the target language. It is all about what Genesis means, how Genesis should be read, what features of the Hebrew Genesis need to be retained in a translation: yes yes yes, but if it's going to be translation, there is always another variable in the equation: the language you're translating into. So now we know what we have to do, but how are we going to do it? Perhaps for some, "forcing" and "doing violence to" the target language is just a price to be paid, but in many (may I venture to say most?) contexts it is not a price we should be prepared to pay at all, on the contrary, a beautiful Bible translation should be in beautiful Nawat, or beautiful Zulu, or beautiful English. It is not a question of abandoning that side of the equation but of working out how to fit it in! And that is my issue with Fox's English translation: by his own admission, it isn't very... English. Later it occurred to me that people might be more comfortable thinking of the N factor as "the naturalness factor". Either way!

The "translation triangle"

This translation triangle attempts to represent in a single diagram the three desiderata of any translation (including Genesis): to convey the informative or propositional content of the original, to reflect the literary and stylistic features that the original possesses and to achieve naturalness in ("not force") the target language. The smaller geometric figures are meant to show the difference between various approaches to Bible translation. Older translations in particular focused almost exclusively on content while largely ignoring the original's literary features and also often failing to sound natural in the target language (A). Some twentieth-century translations have prioritized naturalness of language over and above all else, even sacrificing accuracy of content in the opinion of critics, who may describe them as "paraphrase translations" (B). There is really a continuum between A and B, and it is quite possible to aim to be both accurate and idiomatic. Fox criticises the B-type translators not so much for veering away from propositional accuracy as for ignoring the text's literary features, and proposes instead a translation style which prioritizes both propositional accuracy and literary features (C). He admits the need to sacrifice naturalness of language sometimes to achieve this. I find the sacrifice of naturalness (the "N factor") inadmissible, while agreeing that both propositional content and literary features are also very important. As much as possible, we must make it our goal to cover the "whole triangle" (D).

For an illustration, almost any passage will do, so let's just look at one and see how it can be translated. For want of a better idea I shall use the last little paragraph I translated a few hours ago: chapter 41, verses 9b-13. I will place it here in Hebrew, three English translations (King James, JPS and Fox's rendering), plus my own rendering of my Nawat translation. Now I am putting myself at a disadvantage here, because the fair thing would be for me to show my Nawat translation, not an ad hoc English gloss of it for comparison, since I am not claiming anything in particular about the beauty of my English rendering, only of the Nawat text! Another thing you will notice is that in this instance my version is not formatted in verses, for as I have already mentioned, I do not lay the whole of Genesis out in short lines, only when I "hear" that coming quite clearly from the Hebrew text, and in this case I did not. On the other hand, Fox consistently "versifies" the entire text, although I suspect that here he would agree with me about the more prosaic feel of the passage in question, since his "verses" in the passage do not appear very "versy".

The background to this passage is this: while Joseph was in prison he interpreted the dreams of the Pharaoh's head cupbearer and head baker, predicting accurately that the former would be restored to his old position and the latter hanged. He asked the cupbearer to put in a good word on his behalf with the Pharaoh so that he could get out of jail: the cupbearer promised but promptly forgot his promise. Now two years have passed and the Pharaoh has had some disturbing dreams himself which nobody is able to interpret. The cupbearer's memory is jogged and he apologises for not having mentioned it earlier, then tells the Pharaoh about Joseph. And this is what he says (except in the Hebrew, I will omit verse numbers as an extraneous distraction from the real text):

Hebrew:

אֶת-חֲטָאַי, אֲנִי מַזְכִּיר הַיּוֹם.  י פַּרְעֹה, קָצַף עַל-עֲבָדָיו; וַיִּתֵּן אֹתִי בְּמִשְׁמַר, בֵּית שַׂר הַטַּבָּחִים--אֹתִי, וְאֵת שַׂר הָאֹפִים.  יא וַנַּחַלְמָה חֲלוֹם בְּלַיְלָה אֶחָד, אֲנִי וָהוּא:  אִישׁ כְּפִתְרוֹן חֲלֹמוֹ, חָלָמְנוּ.  יב וְשָׁם אִתָּנוּ נַעַר עִבְרִי, עֶבֶד לְשַׂר הַטַּבָּחִים, וַנְּסַפֶּר-לוֹ, וַיִּפְתָּר-לָנוּ אֶת-חֲלֹמֹתֵינוּ:  אִישׁ כַּחֲלֹמוֹ, פָּתָר.  יג וַיְהִי כַּאֲשֶׁר פָּתַר-לָנוּ, כֵּן הָיָה:  אֹתִי הֵשִׁיב עַל-כַּנִּי, וְאֹתוֹ תָלָה.

KJV:
I do remember my faults this day: Pharaoh was wroth with his servants, and put me in ward in the captain of the guard's house, both me and the chief baker: And we dreamed a dream in one night, I and he; we dreamed each man according to the interpretation of his dream. And there was there with us a young man, an Hebrew, servant to the captain of the guard; and we told him, and he interpreted to us our dreams; to each man according to his dream he did interpret. And it came to pass, as he interpreted to us, so it was; me he restored unto mine office, and him he hanged.

JPS:
I must make mention today of my offences. Once Pharaoh was angry with his servants, and placed me in custody in the house of the chief steward, together with the chief baker. We had dreams the same night, he and I, each of us a dream with a meaning of its own. A Hebrew youth was there with us; a servant of the chief steward; and when we told him our dreams, he interpreted them for us, telling each of the meaning of his dream. And as he interpreted for us, so it came to pass: I was restored to my post, and the other was impaled.

EF:

NBIE (Ne Bibliaj rendered from Nawat into English):

Now I remember, because I forgot. The Pharaoh, when he was angry with his workers, put me in jail at the house of the boss of the food-servers, me and the master of the bakers. We dreamt on the same night, me and him, each their own dream and we each had a dream with a different meaning. A Hebrew fellow was there, a worker of the master of the food-servers. We told him and he interpreted what we dreamt for us, he gave each of us his interpretation, and like he interpreted for us, that's how it happened: I got returned to my post and he was hanged.


I must repeat that the comparison is a bit artificial because although my Nawat version was not written to order for this blog, my English rendering of it was (a moment ago) and so I had a chance to tailor it to the purpose (an advantage none of the other contestants have had). And it is of course not the only way to "read" the Nawat, in terms of English style, though it is one of them and one that is consonant with the Nawat text as well as, in my opinion, with the original Hebrew text, which can also be "read" in this way. The linguistic style is determined by clues in the original language and situational clues: the speaker is a servant employed in the Pharaoh's court, not an orator or a nobleman, and should sound like neither. The trouble that I think Fox has is that he wants to stay so close to the Hebrew syntax that he leaves himself no room for such maneovres, whereas I do although I would claim that my translation still remains as faithful to the original as is necessary.

I also feel that part of the problem is that, as in all translating, the good translator may have one eye on keeping the translated lines coherent with the meaning of the lines of the source text but is keeping the other eye, meanwhile, on ensuring "horizontal" coherence within the translation as a text in its own right. Here there is a larger text which is the story of Joseph of which this paragraph forms a very small part, and it has to sit within that larger narrative like a piece in a jigsaw puzzle locked in place properly, as well as mirroring a certain piece in the other jigsaw puzzle that represents the original Hebrew text. The Hebrew text is telling a story here; and our translation must tell one too, and tell it as well as in the original if possible!

In any case, I think it is easier to "mimic" the Hebrew in fluent Nawat than in fluent English. Typologically, in terms of overall syntactic structure, Hebrew and Nawat have more mutual affinity and that helps a lot. Constituent order in the Nawat sentence is flexible enough that it is more often than not possible to follow Hebrew word order approximately without it sounding forced. Strategies can be found to compensate for some structural differences, such as the lack of a passive in Nawat or the requirement that inalienable nouns always have a possessor. On the positive side, Nawat has something resembling the Semitic construct state, and has a general tendency to steer towards the use of verb roots in the construction of predicates. In the lexicon, probably both ancient Hebrew and modern Nawat can be described as having a fairly limited vocabulary with a preponderance of concepts and notions focusing on a materially unsophisticated, agricultural way life. Biblical Hebrew's tendency towards flat, non-hierarchical clausal relations, discussed last week, is parallelled to a fair extent in Nawat, so the same kind of "bead sequence" discourse structure is equally at home in both languages. Both are eminently spoken languages.

Culturally, too, in a macro-sense of the stage of development of the society in particular, I feel the languages share more similar backgrounds, and this manifests itself not only in the sharing of certain concepts and patterns but in the common absence of many others that had already intruded into European life in Greek and Roman times.

Even phonologically, the two languages show some degree of affinity which makes it rather easy to adapt proper names, for instance, directly from Hebrew into Nawat, given that they both basically have the same kind of syllable structure (maximally CVC). Thus a Nawat form of a Biblical name moulded from the Semitic form often sits better on the Nawat "tongue" than the corresponding Spanish form which originates from the Greek adaptation through the mediation of Latin!

In a fuzzier, more intuitive way too, I feel that there is an ease in the way many ideas expressed in Bibical Hebrew (I will not say all of them, but most) transfer well into Nawat. Of course Semitic turns of phrase can be found all over English and other languages, unbeknownst to many, because they have been hammered into Europe's languages by two thousand years of Christian culture, and yet there are not many passages in the English Old Testament, no matter which translation you choose, that read as though they might have been composed by a native English speaker. On the other hand, without those twenty centuries of contact, you can turn a passage from Genesis into Nawat fairly easily. They seem to be "on the same wavelength".

So maybe there is a Nawat factor as well as a naturalness factor at play here, after all.

Of course these are largely subjective observations. My purpose in making them is to insinuate that maybe part (though only part) of the "blame" for the problems encountered by Old Testament translators from the Septuagint through to Everett Fox when they try to be faithful to the original yet write without violating the target language's norms of idiomatic style and usage is to be found in the languages they have chosen to translate into. European languages just aren't great at expressing things the Hebrew way.

And then there is the shared orality, in and of itself, of ancient Hebrew and a present-day language like Nawat. Fox talks about the fact that the Biblical text is essentially oral and should be read out loud and translated accordingly, but the difficulty is that English is not in this sense a primarily "oral" language in a strongly oral culture, and hasn't been for a long, long time, so the whole exercise is a precarious one; we must keep reminding ourselves to "think oral", so to speak. A language and culture like that of Nawat is oral if it is anything, to this day; hardly any of its speakers can read or write in Spanish, let alone Nawat which was never taught as a written language. We, in writing Nawat today, are the pioneers creating a written Nawat for the first time, and we must draw from the basis of the spoken language for that because there are not many other places to draw from. That is why, when oral-style material occurs in Genesis, it usually fits into Nawat like a hand into a glove. The Nawat that this generates doesn't sound like "oral Nawat" - it sounds like Nawat!

I will leave you with another passage to compare and reflect, from earlier in the same story: Genesis 37:3-11.

EF:

EF:

NBIE:
Israel loved Joseph a lot
out of all his sons
because he was born when he was old
so he gave him a striped shirt

his brothers saw it was him
that their father really loved
they hated him and couldn't
say anything good about him

he had dreams and told them
and they hated him the more
he said to them: listen
this is what I have dreamt

we're harvesting in the field
my corn stalk stands straight
your corn plants are folded down
kneeling in front of my stalk

the brother said to him: what are you saying?
you're going to be our boss and order us around?
and they hated him still more
because of his dreams and his talk

he dreamt again too
and said to his brothers again:
I had a dream and the sun and the moon
and eleven stars were kneeling in front of me

he told his father and his brothers
and his father told him off too, he says:
what's this you dreamt about me
and your mother and your bothers

are we all going to come to you
and kneel in front of you?
his brothers were envious
and his father started thinking