Dear all,
First of all, before the brief reflection below, let me explain the attachments for you:
- Summary-Pedagogy: the first of a list of documents (just the titles) already translated into English from the ‘Rua’ era (1888-2010) and which will form part of Salesian Sources 2. Should you be interested in any of them for any particular reason let me know and I will send them to you. This list concerns Part Two on Pedagogy. Next week I shall provide a list of documents in Part Three on Spirituality.
- Best Practice 12: a bit different this time, but it follows on from the reflection below.
- Testi Rettor Maggiore and Preghiere.... These are the ‘story board’, I suppose you could say, for the video presentation of the Novena to Mary Help of Christians. So effectively, this is the textual content for the video which will be made available on sdb.org in time for the novena lead-up to the Feast on 24 May. But for now, you can have them to assist you with anything you might be doing locally, either in English or in your own language. At the very least you have the overall structure of the novena and its textual content to work with.
-------------------------A REFLECTION
Last Saturday (20 April) the first reading at Mass from Acts 9:31-42 set me thinking. Hang on, I thought to myself, the one who is writing this story about Peter's 'raising/reviving' of Tabitha is engaging in an act of translation: “Now in Joppa there was a disciple whose name was Tabitha, which in Greek is Dorcas” [which means gazelle, a female deer. An endearing Aramaic name, reminiscent of the Song of Songs]. Indeed, Luke writes both his Gospel and the Acts to a man called Theophilus, who was obviously a Greek speaker, knew no Aramaic, so every time something comes up like a name, a place, a local custom or even a reference to the Hebrew tradition that Theophilus is unlikely to understand, Luke translates or interprets it for him. You will find many examples in these two books.
Then I came to the Gospel. Jn 6:60-69, where many of the followers of Jesus said “This is intolerable language...” Sure, we know that it was the content of Jesus’ words that were intolerable to them, but I was already in a frame of mind to ask myself: did Jesus always speak in Aramaic with a Galilean accent (like the servant girl said to Peter, “your accent betrays you” Mt 26:73!), which could also have put them off? How many languages did he speak? It is John who reminds us that Pilate had nailed Jesus’ ‘title’ to the cross “in Hebrew [Aramaic], Latin and Greek”. Why? One reason is certainly because Jerusalem was a multilingual population, especially just at that moment with people visiting. But was that the only reason?
Jesus was living among, interacting with people who spoke different languages, and had been doing so since birth, so some of those languages must have rubbed off on him. How did Jesus converse with Pilate when he was put on trial? Roman Governors were not known for speaking Hebrew or Aramaic. Occupiers generally despise the language of the place they have invaded (a reason we should write Kyiv and not Kiev, by the way!). Had Pilate spoken Aramaic, one of the Evangelists surely would have pointed it out. But we know a conversation went on between himself and Jesus (except when Jesus remained silent, but I assume that was not because he did not understand what Pilate as saying!) so it is more than likely they conversed in Greek, which Pilate certainly would have spoken, since beyond Rome, Greek was the language of commerce and the ‘lingua franca’.
And again, staying with John, we are told in Jn 12:20-22 that some Greeks turned up and wanted to speak with Jesus, but they went first to Philip (who must have understood Greek), who went and told Andrew (did he speak Greek too?) and they both went and told Jesus (in what language?). There is every chance Jesus understood and spoke Greek as well, especially since he moved around the cities of the Decapolis where Greek, not Aramaic, was spoken most. And what about the story of Jesus’ encounter with the Syrophoenician woman whom Mark (7:25-30) calls a ‘Gentile’ or ‘hellenis’ depending on the translation you have. She may have spoken Aramaic but Jesus may also have spoken to her in Greek.
Where am I going with all of this?
One: we are not alone in this task! It's nice to know that Jesus had to learn more than one language and work out meanings, implications of the words he was using, and almost certainly ‘translate’, at least for himself, when he listened to some people, and that some others might have even had difficulty understanding his accent or looked down on him because of it! He also made sure to choose examples from local contexts they would understand when he wanted to present challenging ideas. Simple style and vocabulary, as far as possible. And given that the gospels were written in Greek about a person and situations where Aramaic was the common domestic language, then there was a lot of translation going on at one or other level!
Two: a bit more attention to the Scriptures might reveal a few things to us that we hadn’t grasped earlier, especially when it comes to what we might call ‘implicit intertextuality’. So back to Tabitha for a moment. Is Luke possibly playing with a word/phrase and an event reported by another Evangelist (Mark 5:41) when Jesus raises the daughter of Jairus? Talitha kum (Tabitha/Talitha). Luke would be very aware of the power of words and what can be achieved with them, and it is interesting, too, that he calls Tabitha a 'female disciple' (his word for her in Greek is mathetria, female gender and the only time it is used in the New Testament). Is he also making an allusion to Elijah 1 Kings 17:17-24 where Elijah revives the widow’s son? Translators (of the Bible in this case, but the point obviously applies more generally) would need to be aware of these implicit echoes across the Scriptures, because it may affect their translation in fundamental ways.
Three: keep a close eye on names in translation. Where the Scriptures are concerned, but even more generally, names are very important. Just imagine how the Evangelists must have grappled with the Saviour’s name. Could they just transliterate (swap the Hebrew-Aramaic letters into Greek letters)? A bit difficult actually. The Y (yod) was easy enough - they could use I (iota). But unlike Greek, all the letters of the Aramaic-Hebrew alphabet are consonants. The marks for the vowels were not invented by the Masoretic scribes until some centuries after the Messiah, and were simple dots and dashes, placed above or beneath the letters. The first vowel on the Saviour’s name was pronounced like the e in yes, and the Evangelists believed they could approximate that sound by using the closest Greek letter eta, which had an ei sound like the a in gate (the capital Greek letter looks just like our English letter H). And so on.
Anyway, that aside, what do we do about names? The tendency today is to retain the original unless people are already accustomed to seeing it in the other language... we say John Paul II not Giovanni Paolo II in English, but maybe a Salesian translator will say Francesco Frascarolo rather than Francis Frascarolo, since the individual is less well-known (he was an SDB brother, missionary to Argentina, who died with a reputation for holiness). Something I did recently was on an early Salesian, formerly diocesan priest, from Chile (also half French) called Camilo Ortuzar Montt. The Italian text called him Camillo; maybe I could have called him Camillus, but it is not a well-known name, so reverted to the Spanish spelling, Camilo. Mind you, ‘Don Camillo’ is a well-known name even in English! But the text in question was written long before Don Camillo and Peppone were around!
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best_practice_12-christianese.docx