The Problem and the Genius: Mary Rakow on John Felstiner’s translation of Paul Celan’s “Todesfuge”
The novel The Memory Room (shortlisted for the 2003 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing) written by Mary Rakow (winner of the Lannan Literary Fellowship for the book) is just incredible enough. But Rakow offers more. At the end of her novel, she provides readers with two sets of notes: A. explanations of the “names of the four parts of the novel” … “from the poems of Paul Celan” and short translations of the chapter titles all given in Latin; and B. a discussion of Celan’s best known poem, “Todesfuge,” or “Deathfuge,” which readers may have already recognized bits of appearing in the novel as early as chapter 2.
I don’t want to give anything away. I do want to post here to say that I found myself reading Rakow’s sets of notes at the end while I was reading the text of The Memory Room. You may want to know that this gave me a readerly sense, then, of struggling along, of going back and forth, with the protagonist to remember, to try to keep track of, important and significant details.
For this post, I’m mainly interested in sharing with you the last bit that Rakow shares with her readers, her final paragraph before she goes even further to share with us Paul Celan‘s “Todesfuge” in the particular English translation she chose. What is noteworthy is the attention that novelist Rakow gives to the decisions of translator John Felstiner. (The translation first appeared in Felstiner’s, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew [Yale UP 1995], winner of the Truman Capote Prize for Literary Criticism, and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award and the MLA’s James Russell Lowell prize.). So, without further ado, here that is:
—–
The problem, and the genius of this translation, is that the words Felstiner leaves untranslated are words a person may not wish to know. One feels a sense of having one’s own speech defiled. One feels repulsion at what one has just learned rather innocently. It is even possible to feel one’s innocence, itself, robbed, i.e. the innocence with which one came to the poem. In this minute experience, one comes perhaps a little closer to understanding Celan’s deepest predicament, feeling in some sense his profound ambivalence toward the language that was his true and only home, the German language, his mother tongue, which was, due to the recent events, both a murderous and a murdered language, a defiling and defiled language. Felstiner’s most recent translation, found in Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan [Norton, 2001, winner of the MLA's biennial Lois Roth Award for Translation of a Literary Work, the American Translators Association's biennial award for German translation, PEN West's prize for literary translation, and runner-up for American PEN's translation award, the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize, and the British Society of Authors' Schlegel-Tieck prize], is as follows:
DEATHFUGUE
Black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening
we drink it at midday and morning we drink it at night
we drink and we drink
we shovel a grave in the air where you won’t lie too cramped
A man lives in the house he plays with his vipers he writes
he writes when it grows dark to Deutschland your golden hair Margareta
he writes it and steps out of doors and the stars are all sparkling
……..he whistles his hounds to come close
he whistles his Jews into rows has them shovel a grave in the ground
he orders us strike up and play for the dance
Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at morning and midday we drink you at evening
we drink and we drink
A man lives in the house he plays with his vipers he writes
he writes when it grows dark to Deutschland your golden hair Margareta
your ashen hair Shulamith we shovel a grave in the air
……..where you won’t lie too cramped
He shouts dig this earth deeper you lot there you others sing up and play
he grabs for the rod in his belt he swings it his eyes are blue
jab your spades deeper you lot there you others play on for the dancing
Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at midday and morning we drink you at evening
we drink and we drink
a man lives in the house your goldenes Haar Margareta
your aschenes Haar Shulamith he plays with his vipers
He shouts play death more sweetly Death is a master from Deutschland
he shouts scrape your strings darker you’ll rise then in smoke to the sky
you’ll have a grave then in the clouds there you won’t lie too cramped
Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at midday Death is a master aus Deutschland
we drink you at evening and morning we drink and we drink
this Death is ein Meister aus Deutschland his eye it is blue
he shoots you with shot made of lead shoots you level and true
a man lives in the house your goldenes Haar Margarete
he looses his hounds on us grants us a grave in the air
he plays with his vipers and daydreams der Tod is ein Meister aus
……..Deutschland
dein goldenes Haar Margarete
dein aschenes Haar Shulamith
Cherokee Translators: essays from the Cherokee Phoenix
Yesterday, February 21st, the first Native American newspaper and the first bilingual newspaper in America celebrated its 184th birthday. It is called:
The paper was started by Galagina [The Buck] Watie, who went by the English name Elias Boudinot. He was the editor and the main translator, but he also sought assistance from others, including his bilingual English-Cherokee friend Samuel Worcester. The Cherokee Phoenix was distributed internationally and originally was mostly in English with certain parts in Cherokee. The purpose of the translated parts was not always obvious to the readers of English only, and the Cherokee articles often served as an insider text for bilingual readers of the Cherokee Nation.
Galagina "The Buck" Oowatie (aka Elias Boudinot)
Today, the paper continues even in an online digital format. It is still mostly English. However, the editors of the Cherokee Phoenix retain six translators on staff. Recently, the translators respectively have written in English to contribute to a series of articles regarding their work. The purpose of the translation these days seems mostly to invigorate the language and its uses as much as possible. The linked titles of each can be found below.
Cherokee Nation translation specialists are, from left, Dennis Sixkiller, Anna Sixkiller, David Pettit, Durbin Feeling, John Ross and Phyllis Edwards.
CHEROKEE TRANSLATORS: Preserving the Cherokee language
Jan 31, 2012 – The Cherokee Phoenix is running a six-part series on the Cherokee Nation Translation Specialists.
Cherokee Translators: Translation specialist set on preserving the Cherokee language
Jan 31, 2012 – John Ross enjoys being part of the effort to revitalize the Cherokee language.
CHEROKEE TRANSLATORS: Cherokee translator making up for lost time
Feb 2, 2012 – The Cherokee translation specialist is part of an effort to bridge the generation gap that exists for Cherokee speakers.
CHEROKEE TRANSLATORS: Translator strives to keep Cherokee language relevant
Feb 9, 2012 – Translation specialist David Crawler says a lot of work is still needed to revitalize the Cherokee language.
CHEROKEE TRANSLATORS: Cherokee Bible led Sixkiller down translation path
Feb 7, 2012 – Translation specialist Anna Sixkiller became dedicated to learning the written Cherokee language after reading the Bible.
CHEROKEE TRANSLATORS: Curiosity leads Feeling to Cherokee literacy
Feb 14, 2012 – Translation specialist Durbin Feeling is a self-taught Cherokee reader and writer.
CHEROKEE TRANSLATORS: Sixkiller: Cherokee language key to Cherokee identity
Feb 16, 2012 – Translation specialist Dennis Sixkiller says the language is at a “use it or lose it” point.
Details
John D’Agata (U. Iowa) began the original version of his essay thus:
On the same day in Las Vegas when 16-year-old Levi Presley jumped from the observation deck of the 1,149-foot-high tower of the Stratosphere Hotel and Casino, lap dancing was temporarily banned by the city in 34 licensed strip clubs in Vegas, archaeologists unearthed parts of the world’s oldest bottle of Tabasco-brand sauce from underneath a bar called Buckets of Blood and a woman from Mississippi beat a chicken named Ginger in a 35-minute-long game of tic-tac-toe.
Which prompted this e-mail response from one of the magazine’s fact checker:
Hi, John. I’m Jim Fingal. I’m the intern who’s been assigned to fact-check your article about Las Vegas, and I’ve discovered a small discrepancy between the number of strip clubs you’re claiming there are in Las Vegas and the number that’s given in your supporting documents. I was hoping you could clarify how you determined that there are thirty-four strip clubs in the city while the source you’re using says thirty-one.
Which D’Agata replied to by saying:
Hi, Jim. I think maybe there’s some sort of miscommunication, because the “article,” as you call it, is fine. It shouldn’t need a fact-checker; at least that was my understanding with the editor I’ve been working with. I have taken some liberties in the essay here and there, but none of them are harmful. I’m not sure it’s going to be worth your time to fact-check this.
The above two paragraphs are combined together from an excerpt published in Harper’s Magazine and an excerpt from the New York Times. Harper’s quotes portions of their subsequent discussion as follows:
FINGAL: I hear you. But I think it’s just policy to fact-check all the nonfiction pieces the magazine publishes. So could you help me out with that number?
D’AGATA: All right. Well, from what I can remember, I got that number by counting up the number of strip clubs that were listed in the local yellow pages. However, since that issue of the phone book was long gone by the time I started writing this, I found that porn article that I gave the magazine so that they could check up on my estimate.
FINGAL: I guess that’s where the discrepancy is, because the number that’s mentioned in the article is different from the number you’re using in your piece.
D’AGATA: Well, I guess that’s because the rhythm of “thirty-four” works better in that sentence than the rhythm of “thirty-one,” so I changed it.
FINGAL: Hey, John… again =). I was wondering if you could weigh in on this tic-tac-toe game with the chicken. It looks like it happened after Levi Presley died. Also, the woman who won it wasn’t really from Mississippi. I think she was a local resident. Does this matter?
D’AGATA: I realize that, but I need her to be from a place other than Las Vegas in order to underscore the transient nature of the city—that nearly everyone in Vegas is from someplace else. And since she did in fact originally come from Mississippi, I think the claim is fine as it is.
FINGAL: What about that fact that this didn’t occur on the day Presley died? It’s not accurate to say that it did.
D’AGATA: It was part of the atmosphere of that particular summer.
FINGAL: Then isn’t that how it should be framed?
D’AGATA: No, because being more precise would be less dramatic. I don’t think readers will care whether the events that I’m discussing happened on the same day, a few days apart, or a few months apart. What most readers will care about, I think, is the meaning that’s suggested in the confluence of these events—no matter how far apart they occurred. The facts that are being employed here aren’t meant to function baldly as “facts.” Nobody is going to read this, in other words, in order to get a survey of the demographics of Las Vegas or what’s scheduled on the community calendar. Readers can get that kind of information elsewhere.
FINGAL: There’s no mention of this accident in the archives of either the Las Vegas Review-Journal or the Las Vegas Sun, the two major papers in the city. John, do you have a source for this?
D’AGATA: I heard about this from a woman I interviewed at the Aztec Inn, which is across the street from the Stratosphere.
FINGAL: Can you send me a copy of your notes from this interview?
D’AGATA: I didn’t keep notes from the interview. I just relied on my memory of what she told me. Besides, this wasn’t a formal interview. I was just wandering around the Stratosphere trying to gather information.
FINGAL: To be honest, I suspect your casual interviewing strategy is going to be a problem.
D’AGATA: Well it might be a problem, but with all due respect, it’s your problem, Jim, not mine. I’m not a reporter, and I have no interest in pretending to be a reporter or in producing journalism. Also, even if this had been a formal interview, I still wouldn’t have taken extensive notes, because I tend to be casual whenever I’m interviewing people so that they feel more comfortable with me. The minute you take out a tape recorder or a notebook during an interview people get self-conscious and start “performing” for you, watching what they say and how they say it.
FINGAL: Well, OK… I guess… but this still seems to violate about ten different rules of journalistic integrity.
D’AGATA: I’m not sure that matters, Jim. This is an essay, so journalistic rules don’t belong here.
FINGAL: “… his answers to the questions on the last pop quiz he took in school…” These questions are taken from an “Art Pretest” rather than a “pop quiz.” And the test is dated August 25, 1999, and Levi’s death was on July 12, 2002, so even if this were a “pop quiz,” it’s very unlikely that it was “the last pop quiz he took in school,” unless he was one lucky kid.
D’AGATA: OK, you’re probably right that this wasn’t his “last” quiz. But it’s more dramatic to say that it was, and I don’t think it’s harming anyone to do that. It’s not like there’s a quiz out there that’ll get jealous if we claim that this was Levi’s last quiz. Really, Jim, respectfully, you’re worrying about very stupid sh**. (By the way, also very stupid would be calling this quiz a “pretest,” because I kind of suspect that half the readers out there wouldn’t even know what the fuck that was.)
FINGAL: Unfortunately I don’t get to decide which facts are stupid; I have to check all of them.
FINGAL: Can’t find any reference to this Zurich ordinance anywhere. Source?
D’AGATA: I’m sure I could find it if nailing down this tiny little fact is that important.
FINGAL: “Important” is relative at this point. But I’d like to have it for the sake of thoroughness.
D’AGATA: OK, will hunt around.
FINGAL: Awesome, thank you.
D’AGATA: Sorry, can’t find it.
FINGAL: “There was, for a long time, when construction on it began, the rumor of an anomaly that locals called a ‘kink,’ a bend in one of the tower’s three 800-foot-high legs.” I can’t find evidence of this. John?
D’AGATA: The “rumor” about the Stratosphere kink is entirely anecdotal, which is why it’s called a “rumor.” I took my first trip to Las Vegas in the summer of 1994. On a bus tour I took from Las Vegas to Hoover Dam, we sat briefly in traffic at the foot of the tower, and the bus driver—who doubled as our tour guide—told us that one of the three legs on the tower’s tripod was crooked and that because the sight of it so unnerved local residents (even though it was supposedly safe), the building’s contractor filled in the leg’s crooked angle with Styrofoam.
FINGAL: Do you have any documentation of that, like notes from your trip?
D’AGATA: You’re asking for evidence of a rumor?
FINGAL: If you’re saying that there was a rumor, I have to find out whether there was in fact a rumor, even if I ignore the truth value of the rumor. Do you remember the name of the company that ran the tour?
D’AGATA: Are you serious? No, I don’t remember the name of a tour company from more than fifteen years ago. Sorry, readers are going to have to feel factually unfulfilled here.
FINGAL: Then what about the notes you took during that trip?
D’AGATA: In 1994 I was a sophomore in college, studying Latin and Greek—not writing—and on vacation with my grandparents. We were going to Hoover Dam on a thousand-hour bus trip through the desert without any air-conditioning. No notes were being taken, Jim.
The entire process of the exchange between the D’Agata and Fingal is apparently documented in a new book (which I have ordered just now but have not read), entitled The Lifespan of a Fact. The New York Times reports that
Thus begins the alternately absorbing and infuriating exercise that is the book The Lifespan of a Fact, a Talmudically arranged account of the conflict between Jim Fingal, zealous checker, and John D’Agata, nonfiction fabulist, which began in 2005 and resulted in this collaboration. D’Agata’s original paragraphs appear in chunks at the center of the pages, and their exchanges on the disputed facts in question appear in the marginal running text. D’Agata starts with the casual assurance that the article doesn’t need to be fact-checked, but the process is standard at most magazines, and it remains a fundamental, if hidden, support for their credibility. And besides, the only reason the article ended up at The Believer in the first place was that Harper’s had already killed it — on the recommendation of its own fact-checker.[…]
Over the next 100 or so pages — the fact-checking comes to at least five times the length of the piece itself — Fingal questions not just a few dates but also the existence of entire conversations, etymologies, histories. By the end, they’re reduced to exchanges like this:
Jim: “I, the hypothetical reader, am putting my trust in you to give me the straight dope, or at least to make some effort to warn me whenever you’re saying something that is patently untrue, even if it’s untrue for ‘artistic reasons.’ I mean, what exactly gives you the authority to introduce half-baked legend as fact and sidestep questions of facticity?”
John: “It’s called art, dodobrain.” (He doesn’t actually say “dodobrain”; I had to alter the quote, in keeping with The Times’s standards of crude language thereby violating another Times rule that quotations cannot be changed. But why should D’Agata mind?)
So, do facts really matter – especially in pursuit of a larger truth? D’Agata does not think so:
D’Agata proposes that we give up the idea that there is a genre called “nonfiction” and instead return to the blurrier, artier time (from Herodotus until around 1940) when we were content with the term “essay” — “an attempt, a trial, an experiment.” From his rostrum as an influential professor in the nonfiction program at the University of Iowa, D’Agata has often argued that we read such essays for the poetry of “experience” rather than for mere “accuracy.” This rhetoric has gained him a cult following among young writers who write what is typically if inadequately called “nonfiction.” If it were possible to stop using the term “nonfiction” and instead to talk about “essays,” what might that mean for writers and readers?
D’Agata thinks this question is interesting in the abstract, but the relevant definitions are, in the end, inescapably sociological. We compliment something by calling it “nonfiction” if it accords with the standards set out by an institution that has, over time, published credible reports. D’Agata is well aware of this and is careful not to cross any lines that would make him look silly; he’s never, for example, going to be caught claiming that Jayson Blair deserved our admiration because he was actually writing poetry. But he does defend James Frey, sort of, because even though he thinks Frey is a bad writer, he did fulfill his one obligation to his readers: “to give them a good experience.” Where, then, do we draw the line between irresponsibility and poetic license? The only way to cash out this third-way argument is to ascribe to him the wish for a new kind of institution that would generate expectations consistent with a new kind of work that would be, as he likes to say, “consequential” as art. Many writers already qualify within existing institutions, but it could be interesting to make a claim for the necessity of a third way if D’Agata could name some specific improvements.
I could not disagree more with D’Agata’s thesis. Nonfiction derives its power entirely from the thesis that it is factually true – writing poetic or literary material within the confines of an essay is an exercise in restricting to form, much like writing a sonnet. If one wishes to take liberties with the facts, then one should deliberately state that one is deviating from the facts. (Of course, there are intermediate cases, such as a writer who claims a false fact in good faith, not realizing that his source is flawed; or one who simply makes an accidental mistake with no malice intended. However, it is incumbent on such a writer to make a correction when the error is pointed out.)
As a corollary, we need to treat with special scorn biopics, movies or telefilms that claim to present true facts. Such biopics, unless they contain purely documentary footage, cannot help but be false depictions of prior events. We cannot know Abraham Lincoln’s body language because we have no sufficiently accurate record of his body language. It is better to watch a documentary film, such as Ken Burns’ Civil War, than a dramatization, such Ted Turner’s (Robert Maxwell’s) Gettysburg.
The problem seems especially urgent in the case of online media: blog posts, tweets, Facebook walls. Here, there is no fact-checking at all, and it is all too easy to create cycles of false claims (as Nina Zumel and XKCD have noted.)
Details do matter. And an essay is more powerful when it gets things right.
A final coda: D’Agata’s essay was published (in edited form) and then expanded into a 2010 book. The book was generally well-received, but reviews mentioned that D’Agata was fast and loose with the facts; Charles Bock wrote:
Rarely does D’Agata betray his emotions or reactions to an event; rather, he works by establishing a scene, introducing tangentially related elements, building layers of complexity and scope, then jump-cutting or circling back at just the right moment, guiding the reader safely — and unexpectedly — to a destination D’Agata had in sight the whole time. Along the way, he provides media reports, expert opinions and first-person reportage. He gives statistics, calculations and projections; he cites policy papers and delves into scientific and academic studies. Also mixed in are literary references, modernist collages and postmodern composites that should leave any decent fact-checker wanting to set himself — or, better, D’Agata — on fire.[…]
Indeed, D’Agata’s prime reason for steering us through all the glittery factoids and scholarship is to take us to the ledge of what knowledge can provide, and to document how perilous it can be to stand on that ledge. These 200 pages are nothing less than a chronicle of the compromises and lies, the back-room deals and honest best intentions that have delivered us to this precarious moment in history. The book is a shouted question about who we are and how we move forward. This is how art is made. And the final pages of “About a Mountain,” which consist of a single long paragraph leading through the last evening of Levi Presley’s life, are unquestionably art, a breathtaking piece of writing.
Unfortunately, there’s a problem.
At the heart of a crucial section, D’Agata writes, “There is no explanation for the confluence that night of the Senate vote on Yucca Mountain and the death of a boy who jumped from the tower of the Stratosphere Hotel and Casino.” But the accompanying endnote reads: “I should clarify here that I am conflating the date of the Yucca debate and the suicide that occurred at the Stratosphere Hotel. In reality, these two events were separated by three days.”
Maybe there’s a claim that since the Obama administration is shutting down Yucca anyway, and since D’Agata is sensitive beyond a fault to the Presley family, and since the book is so aesthetically impressive, there’s no harm in doctoring the dates — especially since doing so gives the book a better hook, and thereby (perhaps) a better chance at finding readers and keeping Levi’s memory alive. And, absolutely, all kinds of licenses are taken in the name of creative nonfiction. As D’Agata himself writes, in his introduction to “The Lost Origins of the Essay”: “Do we read nonfiction in order to receive information, or do we read it to experience art? It’s not very clear sometimes. So this is a book that will try to offer the reader a clear objective: I am here in search of art.”
With “About a Mountain,” D’Agata goes further, attempting to create art through the exploration of what happens when we “misplace knowledge in pursuit of information.” But he shimmies too close to the flame. In pursuing his moral questions, he plays fast and loose with a verifiable historical date, one involving a kid’s suicide. He does this just for the sake of a tight narrative hook. To me, the problem isn’t solved by a footnote saying, Hey, this part of my gorgeous prose is a lie, but since I admit it, you can still trust me. Rather, it damages the moral authority of D’Agata’s voice, which is his narrative’s main engine. It causes me to question the particulars of two other important scenes that, according to endnotes, were actually composites — a visit to a mall and a tour of Yucca Mountain. I don’t know what to think. What’s specific or representative or smudged? Pandora’s box is wide open.
D’Agata might argue that such questions are just part of the truth-wisdom debate in which his book engages. I certainly would listen to his case, and undoubtedly will read anything he writes. Still, my sense is that this singular author unnecessarily compromised an otherwise excellent book. To me, that’s a shame.
Aristotle’s rhetorical Urbanities and the Septuagint’s
Indeed, it [i.e., “the 'urbanity/beauty' (or 'political/beauty') meme”] seems so subsumed into Athenian culture that by the time of Aristotle’s Politics, it seems to be taken for granted.
Theophrastus wrote the above in a recent discussion. And it may be so.
However, I want to show that Aristotle taught urbanity explicitly. I was going to leave a simple reply, and yet there’s a good bit more to say that seems to deserve a new blogpost. Aristotle’s discussion of urbanity is a central concept in the Athenian Constitution, which also could be the topic of a separate blogpost. In my blogpost here, I’d rather continue to focus on the rhetorical.
Much more interesting and relevant to this discussion of LXX translators ascribing Greekish urbanity to the beautiful baby Hebrew boy savior is how Aristotle taught urbanity in his Rhetoric. In his treatise on rhetoric, Aristotle taught urbanities as lexical and as learnable. Urbanities were, he stressed, not only part and parcel of philosophic epistemology (i.e., “knowledge” and “means of knowing”) but were also essentially rhetorical (i.e., “enthymematic,” or persuasive by means of shared implicit assumptions in the speaker and in his audience, a sort of rhetorical syllogism). I think we might all agree that “urbanities,” as Aristotle lectured and wrote about them, are technical. The notion of urbanities and Aristotelian urbanities themselves were not child’s play.
To call a baby “urbane,” even a male baby, is not the sort of thing Aristotle would do. Of course, for non-Greek and likely bar-bar-ian parents to view their non-Greek and likely un-civilized newborn as “urbane” might really mark the parents as ignorant. Let’s come back to that in a moment.
There are many passages in Book III of the Rhetoric where Aristotle spells out the important concept for elite Greek men who would establish a Greek empire, men such as Alexander the Great, a student of Aristotle’s. One bit from Book III, for example, is the one translator George A. Kennedy entitles this way:
“Chapter 10: Asteia, or Urbanitites, and Pro Ommatōn Poein or Bringing-Before-the Eyes, Visualization; with Further Remarks on Metaphor.”
Kennedy’s headnote for the chapter runs as follows:
Astu means “town,” usually in the physical rather than the political sense, the latter being polis. In contrast to the country, towns often cultivate some degree of sophistication; thus, asteia, “things of the town,” came to mean good taste, wit, and elegant speech (see Schenkveld 1994). Latin urbanitas (from urbs, “city”), and thus English “urbanity,” have similar meanings; cf. also “polite” from Greek polis (city state) and “civil” from Latin civis (citizen).
Aristotle’s chapter gets his students understanding this way (and it stresses to us non-Greek readers of his translated Greek text just how important “urbanities” were); below are excerpts from Kennedy’s translation [with his emphases and his bracketed interpolations]:
1. Since these things have been defined, there is need to say what are the sources of urbanities [asteia] and well-liked expressions [eudokimounta]. Now it is possible to create them by natural talent or by practice, but to show what they are belongs to this study. Let us say, then, what they are and let us enumerate them thoroughly, and let the following be our first principle [arkhē]
2. To learn easily is naturally pleasant to all people, and words signify something, so whatever words create knowledge in us are pleasurable. Now glosses are unintelligible, but we know words in their prevailing meaning meaning [kyria]. Metaphor most brings about learning; for when he calls old age “stubble,” he creates understanding and knowledge through the genus, since old age and stubble are [species of the genus of] things that have lost their bloom.
3. Now the similes of the poets also do the same thing; and thus, if they do it well, they seem urbane….
4. Those things are necessarily urbane, both in composition and in enthymemes, which create quick learning in our minds. This is why superficial enthymemes are not popular (by superficial I means those that are altogether clear and which there is no need to ponder), nor those which, when stated, are unintelligible, but those [are well-liked]….; for [then] some kind of learning takes place, but in neither of the other cases.
5. In terms of the thought of what is said, such kinds of enthymemes are well-liked; in terms of the composition [an expression is urbane] on the one hand because of the figure, if it is spoken with some contrast (for example, “regarding the peace shared by others as a war against their own interests,” where peace is opposed to war)
6. or on the other hand because of the words, if they have metaphor…. Furthermore, [urbanity is achieved] by means of bringing-before-the-eyes [pro ommatōn poein, "visualization"]….; [To achieve urbanity in style] one should thus aim at three things: metaphor, antithesis, actualization [energeia].
7. Of the four kinds of metaphor, those by analogy are most admired, as when Pericles said that the young manhood killed in the war vanished from the city as though someone took the spring from the year. And Leptines, speaking about the Lacedaimonians, [said] that he would not allow [the Athenians] to stand by while Greece was deprived of one of its “two eyes.” And when Chares was ….
We get the idea. Urbanities are, for Aristotle, things to be epistemologically mapped and rhetorically taught. Aristotle sought to practice what he preached, and when we pay careful attention to his technical, his metaphorical, his enthymematical, uses of Greek — even as he explicitly teaches urbanities and their classes and their uses — then we get a sense that he’s desperate to impart such knowledge and such rhetoric to men, Greek men, elite Greek men, who would learn it. Men such as Alexander the Great learned this sort of Greek urbanity from Aristotle.
Thus, when we find in Alexandria, Egypt, Jewish translators of a Hebrew text using the Greek word for “urbanity,” we find them doing something rather rhetorical. Let’s assume they are changing the Hebrew טוב with the Hellene ἀστεῖον. In other words, what the Masoretic text has retained (that Hebrew word for “good”) was not long after Aristotle rendered into this Greek (that technicalized word for “urbanity”). Such a translation, this rendering, could be viewed as just a mistake, a slip, a sloppy misunderstanding of either the Hebrew or of the Greek or possibly of both.
But historians, Jewish scholars such as Sylvie Honigman and Naomi Seidman, might read the translating here as urbane, as rhetorically so. Honigman (studying the contexts of the letter of Aristeas) generally suggests that the LXX translators followed not the Alexandrian paradigm and not even the Hebrew Exodus paradigm but rather the Homeric paradigm. Seidman (reading an account in the Talmud) proposes that the Septuagint was a trickster translation; and thus the text enacts the sort of sophistic and barbaric rhetorics that Plato and Plato’s Socrates and eventually Aristotle tried to work against.
In this light, I’d like to stress something:
To call a baby “urbane,” even a male baby, is not the sort of thing Aristotle would do. Of course, for non-Greek and likely bar-bar-ian parents to view their non-Greek and likely un-civilized newborn as “urbane” might really mark the parents as ignorant.
The Septuagint translators, as NETS translator and project editor Albert Pietersma says, were not hacks. I’d like to suggest that they were rather urbane themselves. They knew Aristotle, and they knew Alexander; they understood the Greek project of linguistic and global domination. And in that context, they were rather resistant. The Septuagint translators assign to baby Moses, as viewed by his parents who were saving him, the explicit and sophisticated Greek term ἀστεῖος. This elevated the book of Moses, the book they called Ex – Odus, to a Greek status ironically, a Homeric status, that circumvented Aristotle’s post-epic style of urbanity. The LXX seems to have acknowledged but resisted Alexander’s establishment of a Jewish-marginalizing political center in, of all places, Egypt.
Throwing away Harlem Renaissance public art
The story is absolutely stunning – UC Berkeley casually sold, for $150 plus tax, a massive WPA art work valued at over a million dollars.
The art work was created by the Harlem Renaissance artist Sargent Johnson. How did this happen?
In 1937, under the auspices of the W.P.A., Johnson designed two large Art Deco redwood reliefs, one of which depicted an idealized natural world of gilded gazelles, open-beaked birds, spiky-leafed plants and a boy clapping cymbals.
Designed to cover organ pipes at the old California School for the Deaf and Blind in Berkeley, this natural-world relief was affixed to a wall until 1980, when the school moved. As squatters (and rats) took shelter there, the university, which had taken over the premises, moved any valuable property to a secure basement warehouse, and the organ relief was disassembled. But one of the organ screens was misidentified as belonging to Berkeley’s graduate schools, so when the university reopened the building three years later, only one of the two Johnson reliefs was returned to its rightful place. The other remained in storage until 2009, when the university emptied the storage space in preparation for the sale of the building and transferred the relief to the university’s surplus store.
That’s where, in late summer of that year, Greg Favors, an art and furniture dealer, came upon eight cracked but still handsome panels in a plywood bin. Mr. Favors did not know what they were or who had created them, but he thought them “amazing and cool,” he said. He paid $164.63, including tax.
Now even under these circumstances, the art should not have normally passed to private ownership: work produced under the WPA program belongs to the public. But lawyers hired by the lucky new owners found a loophole:
Movable art from the W.P.A. falls under federal jurisdiction. But according to a November 2010 e-mail from a General Services Administration lawyer to the university … the federal government does not retain ownership of W.P.A art affixed to nonfederal buildings.
Jennifer Gibson, director of the General Services Administration’s art in architecture and fine arts program, said in an interview that despite the ruling, her agency hoped Johnson’s work would go “to an institution that provides public access.”
The university tried to buy back the art work, but it could not raise the funds. It passed to a private New York art dealer who sold it to the Huntington Library.
One wonders if the claims of the artist’s friend might not be correct:
Arthur Monroe, an African-American artist and friend of Johnson’s, said that if the missing art had been by a white sculptor, “the university would have turned the campus upside down to find it.”
Gasconade, historians, and the American West
This post is honor of this year’s centennial celebrations of New Mexico and Arizona’s admissions to the Union.
Wallace Stegner’s 1954 Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West is an absolutely blockbuster biography – the best thing by far that I have read by Stegner. Wallace considers the good Major not as a wild adventurer who had a nearly-out of control trip down the Colorado River, but rather as a scientist; as a professor of geology and the director of bureau of ethnology at the Smithsonian Institute, whose contributions to linguistic studies and geological surveys of the American West laid the foundation for the modern scientific studies of that region. Stegner considers Powell’s major work not to be The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons but rather to be his The Arid Lands – which he argues was a work of prophecy that foresaw the Dust Bowl of the 1930s and the Water Wars of our own day. (Stegner edited The Arid Lands for republication.)
The book starts strong, with Stegner’s dedication to Bernard DeVoto, the celebrated Western historian and Harvard instructor who had a particularly flamboyant style of writing. (Stegner would later write a biography of DeVoto and edit DeVoto’s letters). DeVoto also contributed the introduction to Stegner’s biography of Powell, and I want to quote from it to indicate DeVoto’s style – and, although I think DeVoto makes his case somewhat outrageously, I think he is thinking is sound:
A book called The Growth of American Thought [by Merle Curti] was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1944. At the end of a chapter on “The Nature of the New Nationalism” the central figure [John Wesley Powell] of Mr. Stegner’s book makes a momentary appearance. A passage which all told is nearly two pages long is discussing “the discovery of the West by a group of scientists who revealed it to the rest of the country.” (They revealed it, we are to understand, primarily as interesting scenery.) A paragraph pauses to remark that at that time time these scientists made their discovery, the frontier was vanishing but it “had left distinctive traces on the American mind through its cult of action, rough individualism, physical freedom, and adventurous romance.” Here are four fixed and indestructible stereotypes about the West, all of them meaningless. No wonder that on the way to them Mr. Stegner’s subject is dismissed with a sentence which records that “the ethnologist and geologist, John Powell, who explored the Colorado River, the Grand Canyon, and the homeland of Indian tribes of the Southwest, promoted extremely important geological surveys for the federal government.”[…]
Thus “John Powell” was an explorer who embraced the cult of action, whatever that may be, and went down the Colorado and wrote an adventure story. He also had something to do with geological surveys which were “extremely important” but not important enough to be specified. Our historian perceives in them nothing that bears on the growth of American thought.[…] Because the historian of thought approaches the West with a handful of clichés, the conditions of life and society are not important. What counts is […] an “adventurous romance.”[…]
The reason historians have ignored Powell is that the preconceptions with which they have approach the area Powell figures in correspond exactly to the misconceptions with which the American people and their government approached the West. […] My part here is to explain why writers of history have for so long failed to understand the massive figure of John Wesley Powell and therefore have failed, rather disastrously, to understand the fundamental meaning of the West in American history.
One of the reasons for that failure is beyond explanation: the tacit classification, the automatic dismissal, of Western history as merely sectional, not national, history. No such limitation has been placed on the experience of the American people in New England, the South, or the Middle West. These sections are taken to be organic in the United States and cannot safely be separated from their functional and reciprocal relationships. When you write Southern history in the round you must deal with such matters as, for instance, the cotton economy, the plantation system, slavery, States’ rights, the tariff, secession, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. They are so clearly national as well as Southern in implication that it would be impossible to write about them without treating them in relation to the experience of the nation as a whole. The same statement holds for the historical study of, say, Southern institutions, Southern politics, and Southern thinking – to ignore their national context would clearly be absurd. Southerners too are acquainted with “action” if not a cult of action, and are known to value “individualism” if not a rough kind of it. We may observe, even, that the South has some awareness of “physical freedom” and “adventurous romance.” But an intellectual historian would not write a summary that implied that history need inquire no further – would not dismiss Jefferson with a sentence about his governorship of Virginia or Calhoun with one about his term in the legislature of South Carolina.[…]
The West was the latest and most adventurously romantic of our frontiers, and its history has been written, mostly, as frontier history. When the word “frontier” is used in history it has, to begin with, been raised to a tolerably high degree of abstraction. And its inherent abstractness has been almost immeasurably increased by a hypothesis which has dominated much writing about the West and has colored almost all of it, Frederick Jackson Turner’s theory of the function of the “the frontier” in American life. That theory has, I suppose, begotten more pages of American history than any other generalization. Till recently no one dreamed of writing about the West without its help. Indeed its postulate of a specific kind of “frontier” independence, which it derives from the public domain and which it calls the principal energy of American democracy, has heavily buttressed our illusions about the West. So our problem here exists in a medium of pure irony. For, to whatever degree the Turner hypothesis may be applicable to the American experience east of the 100th meridian, it fails almost altogether when applied to the West. The study of a single water war, in fact of a single irrigation district, should reveal its irrelevance.[…]
A small holding that included a water source could prevent access to the basis of life and so give its owner the usufructs of a much larger area which he could keep others from owning. Adjoining holdings along a stream could similarly dominate a much larger area. So at a small expense (and by fraud) a corporation could keep individual stockgrowers from a really vast area it did not own but could thus make use of. Or a corporation could not only charge its own price for water, that is for life, but could control the terms of settlement with all that settlement implies. Here was another powerful force making for monopoly and speculation. Clearly, that is clearly to us now, the West could exist as a democratic society only if the law relating to the ownership and use of water were changed. The changes required were repugnant to our legal system and our set of mind, and again the experience of the West produced turbulence but not understanding.
Moreover, to bring water to land at any distance from the source was an undertaking expensive beyond the ability of an individual landowner to afford. As the distance increased it would become expensive beyond the ability first of co-operative groups, then of profit-making corporations, and finally of the individual states to afford. At they heyday of “individual enterprise” elsewhere in the United States, therefore, the natural conditions of the West demanded federal action in the procurement of water. And this was repugnant not only to our set of mind but, especially, to our mystical vision of the West, the very citadel, so we insisted on believing, of “rough individualism.”[…]
These principles are described and analyzed, and most of the institutional changes necessary to bring Western society into effective accord with them are stated in Powell’s Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States. In fact, they are set forth in the first forty-five pages of that monumental and astonishing book, a book which of itself opened a new era in Western and in national thinking. It is one of the most remarkable books ever written by an American. In the whole range of American experience from Jamestown on there is no book more prophetic. It is a scientific prophecy and it has been fulfilled – experimentally proved. Unhappily the experimental proof has consisted of human and social failure and the destruction of land. It is a document as basic as The Federalist but it is a tragic document. For it was published in 1878 and if we could have acted on it in full, incalculable loss would have been prevented and the United States would be happier and wealthier than it is. We did not even make an effective effort to act on it till 1902. Half a century after that beginning, we are still far short of catching up with it. The twist of the knife is that meanwhile irreversible actions went on out west and what we did in error will forever prevent us from catching up with it altogether.[…]
Any day now we may expect the appearance of a historian with a generalizing mind who is bent on achieving a hypothesis about the West in American history that will square with the facts. When someone achieves it, it will be a more realistic and therefore a more useful theory than Turner’s.
Tzvee Zahavy’s “God’s Favorite Prayers” free today (February 20, 2012)
Blogger Tzvee Zahavy has made his Kindle book God’s Favorite Prayers free for today only. Tzvee talks about his Kindle book in many, many of the posts on his blog.
Remembering Gunther Plaut’s Chumash (Pentateuch)
On February 8th, Gunther Plaut died at age 99, after a nine-year-long struggle with Alzheimer’s disease. He was a leading rabbi in the US and Canadian Reform Judaism movements.
There are many interesting points of his life that can be noted: his parents’ courage in running a Jewish orphanage (dissolved in 1939) in Hitler’s Berlin, his escape to the United States, his service in the US Army (as a chaplain) in 104th Infantry unit that liberated the Dora-Nordhousen concentration camp (his NY Times obituary states “though the survivors were starving, he recalled, they did not ask for food, but for religious items”), his work in rescuing a Torah nearly destroyed during Krisstallnacht, his service on the Ontario Human Rights Commission (and his decision allowing Sikh students to wear ceremonial daggers in public schools), his sermons, his newspaper columns, and his many books.
Instead I plan to focus on two of Plaut’s books: in this post, I want to talk about Plaut’s Chumash (Pentateuch). In a later post, I will talk about Plaut’s 1992 Leo Baeck Memorial Lecture:
German-Jewish Bible Translations: Linguistic Theology as a Political Phenomenon
W. Gunther Plaut is one of the great rabbis of Reform Judaism today. In 1992, he held the 36th Leo Baeck Memorial Lecture at the Leo Baeck Institute New York. Plaut analyzes German Bible translations by Jews. In order to explain why German Jews have produced such a plentitude of translations, he looks at the translations by Moses Mendelssohn, Leopold Zunz, Samson Raphael Hirsch, Simon Bernfeld, Martin Buber-Rosenzweig and Harry Torczyner (later known as Tur-Sinai). Plaut shows that the translations are in a significant measure part of the tension between Germanness and Jewishness.
Jewish Bibles are different than Protestant Bibles. At a first glance, they might seem analogous: in a typical Protestant church you expect to find pew prayerbooks, hymnals, and
Bibles; in a typical Jewish synagogue you expect to find pew siddurim (prayerbooks), tehillim (psalters), and chumashim (Pentateuchs). But open up the pew books and the similarity breaks: in particular, a Jewish chumash is likely quite different in format than a Protestant Bible. While the Protestant Bible will contain an English Bible and perhaps some cross-references, a chumash in an American synagogue will likely contain the Hebrew text of the Torah, an English translation, and either classical commentary (e.g. Rashi or Onkelos Targum) or modern commentary.
For decades in the US, the Hertz chumash reigned supreme. In many ways, the Hertz chumash was a remarkable edition. S. (who now mostly posts at the On the Main Line blog), on one of his early blogs, quotes Artscroll general editor Nosson Scherman in a Forward interview:
“The Hertz was a masterpiece in its time, a piece of literature. What he did was heroic,” said ArtScroll’s Rabbi Scherman. “He was trying to convince people that the Chumash was worthwhile. He would quote Shakespeare, church fathers and other Christian sources. Nowadays, people are offended by that. Now you have people with a yeshiva education. They want to know what the Chumash means to Jews, what the traditional sources have to say.”
If American chumashim have generally turned to the right since Hertz, the Plaut chumash (which began to be published in 1974,was completed in 1980, and was revised in 2005) was a marked turn to the left. The publisher describes the original Plaut chumash as “the first liberal Torah commentary ever produced.” I am not certain that is correct, but it was certainly set a high standard for liberal chumashim that have not yet been exceeded by other volumes. It was shocking. Instead of being organized by traditional parashah divisions, it was organized by smaller thematic units. In addition to extensive scholarly (not particularly devotional) commentary, it featured critical essays on each every section of the Torah text. But most shocking of all was its brief “gleanings” that drew from the broadest range of writers – not only Jewish sources, but non-Jewish authors like Gerhard von Rad and John Ruskin and Karl Barth and William Shakespeare and works like the Koran and the New Testament and the Enuma Elish and Giglamesh. Scholars including William Hallo and Bernard Bamberger contributed to Plaut’s chumash (and, in the 2005 revision, Adele Berlin and Carol Meyers and David E. S. Stein).
The Plaut chumash did not apologize or seem embarrassed for its position at all. It was a confident entry that clearly proclaimed a point of view. It suggested that liberal Jews – not scholars, but ordinary synagogue members – could be equally familiar with the text as their more traditional brethren who attended Orthodox services.
Moreover, the Plaut chumash opened the gateways for a large variety of later liberal text-based books; ranging from the Kravitz-Olitzky liberal commentary on Mishnaic classic Pirkei Avos (which has a foreword from Plaut!) to the Lawrence Hoffman multi-volume commentary on the Jewish prayerbook.
In producing his chumash, Plaut was not only a scholar and leader, but a great teacher. The New York Times quotes his publisher as claiming that the volume has sold more than 120,000 copies. Plaut’s chumash may be radical in many ways, but in some ways it is traditional: it is focused on teaching and devotion; it is textually based with the Hebrew text being supreme; and it is created for people of faith. Even when the Plaut chumash finally loses its supremacy in the marketplace to new entrants, it is hard to imagine that any liberal chumash would not be influenced by Plaut’s example.
The Beauty of Moses, or his Urbanity? how the Exodus puts it
Jared Calaway, in his post “The Beauty of Moses,” suggests that the New Testament considers baby Moses beautiful. I’d like to suggest something different, something significantly rhetorical. But I wouldn’t have thought about this if it weren’t for Calaway’s astute observations.
He says:
But there is another detail that I had not previously considered about Moses they share: his beauty. When Stephen begins his discussion of Moses (which takes up about half of his speech), he states:
At this time Moses was born and was beautiful (ἀστεῖος) before God. (Acts 7:20)
Similarly, in the “hall of faith” chapter of Hebrews, one reads:
By faith Moses, when he was born, was hid for three months by his parents, because they saw that the child was beautiful (ἀστεῖον). (Heb. 11:23)
I am not particularly surprised by its occurrence, in and of itself. It appears to be merely a reference to the LXX version of Exodus 2:2: “Seeing that he [Moses] was beautiful (ἀστεῖον) they sheltered/covered him for three months.” There it translates the Hebrew טוב. To see where the NT authors found the tradition of Moses’ beauty at birth, one need look no further than Exodus. Nonetheless, I think it is worth stopping and considering.
Calaway’s post, after some smart analysis, ends with questions, good questions:
So, clearly his beauty was important enough to heighten it (before God) and mention it in the sketchiest of biographies. So why recall this aspect of Moses? Put another way: why is this social memory pattern preserved? Why Moses the beautiful, Moses the urbane, Moses the lovely, Moses “of the astu” for the earliest Christians?
I’d suggest that to understand why the New Testament retains the Greek word ἀστεῖος from the Septuagint is the real question.
The real fascinating thing, the focus of my post here, is why the Septuagint translators used this description of the baby Moses in the first place. So consider the place where the Jewish translators are rendering Hebrew in the first place. It’s back in Egypt again. It’s in Alexandria, the namesake city of Alexander the Great, the great pupil of Aristotle.
The Exodus is a big book there. The people of Joseph lose their status there, they become enslaved there in the book of Genesis, of generations, of birthings. Moses leads them to liberation, to the adventurous way out, the Ex – Odys.
Greek readers of this story, this Ex – Odys, must understand. There will be no more enslavement of Jews in Egypt, not even in a Greek empire. And all Greek readers of the Odyssey get who the hero is: Odysseus. So in the Ex – Odys, there’s a hero. From his birth, his very own mother saw that this child was ἀστεῖον, that he was “urbane.” Now, in Greek, that’s extremely political. It’s agonistic. It’s the core value in the contests of states and of nations. “Beauty” is a later sense, even for this context of a little beautiful unnamed baby.
So where do the Septuagint translators look for inspiration? Not from Aristotle’s Politics, not from Plato’s Socrates’ Republic. Rather the Jews back in Egypt, in Alexander’s City now, find their inspiration from Odysseus. And Odysseus is crying like a woman.
Here’s the salient text, from the Odyssey, Book 8, lines 520 – 535. Here’s the A.T. Murray translation, but notice the political, urban emphasis, the parallels that Murray’s English retains [with the highlighted Greek words in brackets]:
This song the famous minstrel sang. But the heart of Odysseus was melted and tears wet his cheeks beneath his eyelids. And as a woman wails and flings herself about her dear husband, who has fallen in front of his city and his people [πόλιος λαῶν], seeking to ward off from his city and his children [ἄστεϊ καὶ τεκέεσσιν] the pitiless day; and as she beholds him dying and gasping for breath, she clings to him and shrieks aloud, while the foe behind her smite her back and shoulders with their spears, and lead her away to captivity to bear toil and woe, while with most pitiful grief her cheeks are wasted: even so did Odysseus let fall pitiful tears from beneath his brows. Now from all the rest he concealed the tears that he shed, but Alcinous alone marked him and took heed, for he sat by him and heard him groaning heavily.
Now compare this with Lancelot Brenton’s and then with Larry J. Perkins’ (NETS) translations of Ex-Odys 2:1-2. Is it too much of a stretch to imagine that the Greek of the Septuagint translation here is Jewish rhetoric hidden in the Hellene? In the context here of a man and a woman, a wife, a mother, concerned for a child, astute readers might hear Odysseus, like a wife, a mother, crying in the Odyssey. So listen (in Brenton’s and in Perkins’ and in the Septuagint translators’ language):
And there was a certain man of the tribe of Levi, who took to wife one of the daughters of Levi. And she conceived, and bore [ἔτεκεν] a male child; and having seen that he was fair [ἀστεῖον], they hid him three months.
Now there was a certain man from the tribe of Leui who took one of the daughters of Leui and married her. And she conceived and bore [ἔτεκεν] a male child. Now when they saw it was handsome [ἀστεῖον], they sheltered it for three months.
What may get lost a little in Brenton’s “fair” born baby and in Perkins’ “handsome” delivered male child is all that is inferred by the Septuagint translator’s ἔτεκεν ἀστεῖον.
What may be inferred is that the Hebrew baby is as urbane, as political, as Odysseus. Greek readers in Alexandria, in Egypt, should understand.
Lin-credible
L’affaire de Jeremey Lin shows that racism is well-ingrained into the American psyche. Why can’t we talk about about Lin without talking about his racial heritage? (Lin, after all, is an American: he was born in Los Angeles and grew up in Palo Alto. He is not comparable to Yao Ming at all.)
Ugly racism is all over the way we talk about Lin. Lin went to Harvard (a school that does not offer athletic scholarships) and he is smart – so in this narrow way, Lin fits a certain racial stereotype; which makes us all the more stunned when it turns out that he his a competent basketball player. We have a different stereotype that we prefer for NBA players: we expect our professional athletes to be big and not particularly articulate.
It gets worse and worse – after the loss to the Hornets, ESPN couldn’t stop racist punning about the “Chink in the Armor”:
How could anyone possibly think that this was funny? Why are certain racial epithets “humorous” and others offensive? Why can we not simply revel in the talents of a spectacular athlete?
Nathan Englander’s and Jonathan Safran Foer’s “hyper-literal” Haggadah translation?
Fiction authors Nathan Englander and Jonathan Safran Foer are publishing a new translation of the traditional Passover liturgy, the Haggadah, entitled the New American Haggadah.
(There are certainly hundreds, if not thousands of Haggados in print. I hesitate to recommend one since there are so many good ones; but one Haggadah with interesting historical commentary is the Schechter Haggadah.)
I have not seen the new Englander-Foer Haggadah yet (Amazon reports it will be published March 5th) but Nathan Englander is on the radio talk-show circuit describing the translation as “hyper-literal.” Here is a portion of what he said on one radio talk-show last week:
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I’m Terry Gross, back with Nathan Englander. His collection of short stories, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, draws on his experiences growing up in an Orthodox Jewish family neighborhood and school in Long Island.
As a young man, he moved to Israel, where he quickly gave up on organized religion. So it’s kind of surprising that he spent the past two years doing a new translation of the traditional Jewish text, the Haggadah. His translation called the New American Haggadah, was edited by his friend, the writer Jonathan Safran Foer, and will be published next month.
I’ll let Nathan Englander describe what the Haggadah is.
ENGLANDER: It’s the story of Exodus. And every year on Passover, when the, you know, we all know the Red Sea getting split and the 10 plagues and all that stuff, as Jonathan Foer, who is the editor of it keeps saying, it’s, you know, probably the most popular story around. But yes, so it’s a way to commemorate the Jews, you know, freedom from slavery.
GROSS: And it’s basically a, you know, a book that is read during the Passover Seder, the dinner or it’s right before the dinner.
ENGLANDER: Right.
GROSS: Dinner’s very late.
ENGLANDER: Yeah. I was going to say, it’s the Jews like to eat – if your audience doesn’t know that – and it is the dinner with the biggest buildup of the year, I have to say. But…
GROSS: And it’s also – so you have a new translation and the book is called the New American Haggadah. It’s about to be published.
ENGLANDER: Yes.
GROSS: The editor is Jonathan Safran Foer, who I think initiated the project.
ENGLANDER: Yes.
GROSS: You did the translation. And I’m sure our listeners, who heard the beginning of this interview, are thinking why did they choose this guy? This guy used to be Orthodox then he became really secular. He rebelled against religion. So who is he to be translating a very important religious text? So why you?
ENGLANDER: I have to say that I was going to say and Jonathan’s, you know, I’ve been working on the translation for three years. I think Jonathan has been working on this project for six. But I think it’s just, I don’t think anybody else could’ve talked me into it. He really sort of knows how my synapses fire, he’s got a good read on my brain, but it was I thought it was a really bad choice on his part as well. You know, my point is, I’ve never translated before, I’ve left religion, everything you’ve said and, you know, he just made it clear – he just had a vision for this book and he really wanted me to translate it. And he just made it clear that it would be something that we’d really be proud of at the end. He was really adamant about that. And I have to say, it’s informed my writing. It’s changed the way I think. And I am having the book here, I’m really thankful for it. And it ended up being, I thought it would be, I was going, you know, I thought it would be this hipster Haggadah and take me six weeks; I have been working on it for three years.
GROSS: What language did you translate from?
ENGLANDER: Oh, well, this is the point I thought also, you know, I speak Hebrew and I’m very familiar with this text. And I, you know, so that’s it. I had the religious education and then I lived in Israel for all those years, so I’ve got old Hebrew and I’ve got old Hebrew and new Hebrew. So, yeah, it’s translated from the Hebrew and Aramaic. It’s translated from primary sources.
GROSS: And what was your ambition? What did you think needed changing? I mean why do we need a new Haggadah?
ENGLANDER: We need new Haggados and they’ll be endless. It’s sort of I think out all the traditional Jewish documents, it’s the one that’s most living. People – there’s, you know, there’s an Armed Forces Haggadah and an Alcoholics Anonymous Haggadah and an LGBT Haggadah. There are Haggadahs for everything. Some families make them new every year. People, it’s a really wonderful living document. And, you know, even Jonathan’s choice of the New American Haggadah, they’re always have a place. A very legendary one is the Sarajevo Haggadah. They’re just constantly made throughout time and he felt it was time for a new one.
But about what made the decision for me to translate it? It was really clear when I went back to think about it and look at texts, you know I’ve always used the Hebrew side of the Maxwell House, which is a really great liturgy, that is a very traditional great liturgy. The point is, I had never really looked at the English and, you know, what committed me to it is that back to loving texts, which is, the Haggadah, you should literally read it and weep. It is so beautiful. It is just such a moving document to me. And I looked at – I guess I’m always a naive, you know, back to living in Israel it’s when I think I understood that governments were run by actual people. I thought presidents and prime ministers knew more. There were these great moments and I just didn’t understand, oh my God, translators are people too, they’re human beings. I just didn’t understand that, even as someone who writes books but about religious texts. You know, that people were making decisions, you’re always making decision. And the line that I can tell you is that really clinched it for me is in Hebrew, it says, you know, “HaMavdil Bein Kodesh l’Kodesh.” And in English it was translated, which is what it means, :to differentiate between the Sabbath and the holiday.” But in Hebrew what it says is, you know, “to differentiate between holy and holy.”
And I was like someone made this decision to for clarity and understanding. It means between these two days. But to me the poetry, the metaphysical space, the space between “holy” and “holy,” for that to not be there in the English was just, it made me understand that I wanted to do, you know, it turned it from this what I thought would be a six-week project into me working with a study partner head-to-head. It’s called Havrusa style, face-to-face, we studied. You know, I don’t even want, my girlfriend says we can’t have a Mezuzah on the door but I have to come home to you with the Talmuds and haggados piled to the ceiling arguing. You know, it was like living in a study hall for her. But, yeah.
GROSS: So I’d like you to choose a passage from the New American Haggadah, which you translated. That you’re, a passage that you think is particularly beautiful.
ENGLANDER: Oh sure. My pleasure.
GROSS: And after you read it, maybe you could tell us what you changed and why you changed it from the translations that you were familiar with.
ENGLANDER: Super. This is actually – this is not just – this is from Nishmas kol chai, which is not just in the Haggadah, but it’s considered a very beautiful Hebrew passage. And so give all credit to the original.
Were our mouths were filled with a singing like the sea, and our tongues awash with song, as waves-countless, and our lips to lauding, as the skies are wide, and our eyes illumined like the sun and the moon, and our hands spread out like the eagles of heaven, and our feet as fleet as fawns. Still, we would not suffice in thanking you, lord God of us and God of our fathers, in blessing your name for even one of a thousand, thousand, from the thousands of thousands and the ten thousandss of ten thousands of times you did good turns for our fathers and for us.
GROSS: So in your translation, how different is that from ones that you knew?
ENGLANDER: I was going to say that, you know, there’s maybe – first of all, I didn’t know any and that’s the point. I literally, you know, it’s just from the Hebrew. That’s it. I have no familiarity with translation except for, you know, during the project, you know, after it’s finished, may be looking to see it, you know, other stuff. So, but yeah, so yeah, it is – sorry, I know I’m stuttering through, it seems a strange thing to say, but yes, the English is simply unfamiliar to me.
GROSS: […] Now you use the term in your translation in referring to God to “king of the cosmos.” Now I can’t say that I remember hearing the word cosmos in any services or prayers…
ENGLANDER: Yeah.
GROSS: …and or in the Bible. I mean not that I’d necessarily know.
ENGLANDER: Yeah.
GROSS: But it seems to me an interesting choice. I think I’ve heard like “king of the universe” but “cosmos”? So tell us about choosing the word “cosmos.”
ENGLANDER: You are such a generous reader, as I know both as a listener, but here I am. But, thank you. You know what? It’s been so long it just becomes part of you, these projects, but I guess I hadn’t thought about it. Those choices were the most wrestled over. You know, it’s maybe that one and also God of us for “Elokeinu.”
GROSS: Mm-hmm.
ENGLANDER: You know, it’s just, it’s always “our God.” So it’s always this idea, I think back to language, the things we don’t hear anymore. You know, it’s something like “friendly fire” or something, these things that are very loaded and they have meaning and you know the meaning, that’s how we get through life in a speedy fashion. You know, words have meanings and we already have them at the ready and we move through them. And I thought people say these things in English and I think they’re forgetting what they’re saying and it, you know, it means the world to me that you asked that question because that’s the point. You know, because you say, you read past it. But that’s what it’s saying, you know, “of the cosmos” and it makes you think and that’s it. And that was really it.
I think maybe the most dangerous choice in the whole book was “God of us” instead of “our God” because we say “our God, our God.” It’s not our God that we own like our God, our TiVo, or our lunchbox. You know what I’m saying? God, it’s, you know, it’s “our God” means “the God over us” and I really thought about that a ton, and I think that’s, you know, I’ll see how people respond. But to me, I wanted people to be thinking about what they’re saying.
If you are, you know, a lot of people – that’s the weirdest – again, this choice of me doing it. But I could not take it seriously. And Jon, I thought we were going to be ironical and sassy, you know, sassy guys. But the point is we ended up taking it so deeply seriously and I, you know, and I just felt people are going to be – because I speak the Hebrew I just always assumed have people the same knowledge base as me. I suddenly thought my God, people are going to be praying from this sincerely and I owe, you know, I owe them a debt. I better think.
GROSS: So why “cosmos” and not “universe” or “all”?
ENGLANDER: It’s – I was going to say we need a whiteboard or something. These, I can’t even tell you how many hours of arguing for things like that. But again, I think because it did make you think, A. And I think because to me, you know, just really looking at the Hebrew and thinking about what that word means and just thinking it encompassed the cosmos. And also even that, the biggest point of translation is choice. Every word you’re choosing rhythm, clarity, communication, meaning, intent. And I think maybe, you know, even that one can be feel of king of the cosmos does it justice.
GROSS: Now one of the times you used “king of the cosmos.” I’m going to do the larger reading there. Like “you are blessed, lord God of us, king of the cosmos, God, our father, our kind, our majesty, our creator, our redeemer, our shepherd, shepherd of Israel, the good king who makes good for all.”
You know, when you read something like that – when I read something like that, part of me wonders does God need to be praised that much? Like, why is there so much praise for God? Is it just a kind of thanksgiving for life, thanksgiving for, you know, whatever it is, that animating force that we call God?
ENGLANDER: Yes.
GROSS: Or is God like this egotist and we need to say, hey, man, you’re number one. You are great. You are the God of all – do you know what I mean?
ENGLANDER: Yes. I was going to say I am going to answer that question for you now but I’m sure you’ll get a bunch of emails answering it for you. But I guess this is the point of also, you know, of doing a translation of what you hear in Hebrew, exactly that it’s not cloying – that’s the point of wanting to make it sound the way it sounds in my head which to me is very beautiful.
Right? There can be over-cloying thanks. You know, that’s what we—right? Nobody wants that. Nobody even enjoys it when they get it. It’s often just acknowledging a power structure. I know what you’re saying where, like, you know, someone gives you a job. Oh, thank you. You saved my life. This is the best. You know, it’s over the top and trust me, I’m an over the top thanker.
So I know what you’re saying. But I guess I find this – you know what? This is about freedom from slavery. This is about being redeemed. This is about getting your homeland that was, you know, promised to you. This is about return. It’s actually – it is a deeply sincere text. I think it is truly thanking God for the food that we are eating, for the freedom that we have, for the, you know, for the family around us.
You know what I can tell you? This is so personal and will, you know, probably make my family cry but, you know, I remember – my brother-in-law – as I said, I’m like fourth or fifth generation and sitting there with my sister’s husband, you know, his father is an Auschwitz survivor. And, you know, he – and sitting there with him, I remember one Seder with his family.
I don’t know if they’ll remember it but this is when we all became one family. But sitting there – this is also probably, you know, fifteen years ago or more. You know, fifteen or twenty years ago. But all of us sitting together and just seeing this guy. That’s what makes it a living document. He sat there and he looked at the table and he started to cry.
And he said I have been a slave. And I thought about it. I said this man was in Auschwitz. I don’t know if I’ve ever met – he literally had been a slave and that freedom, there’s a lot of thanks for survival and freedom that goes into that.
GROSS: […] The Haggadah tells the story of the exodus of the Jews from Egypt, a story that if you don’t know the Bible, maybe you know from the movie The Ten Commandments.
ENGLANDER: Which is awesome.
GROSS: Do you like that movie?
ENGLANDER: Who does not love that movie? That and The Wizard of Oz, you know, for those of us, you know, before TiVo and all that stuff and on demand. Those were big watches for the year, were Ten Commandments and Wizard of Oz.
GROSS: Mm-hmm. Which I don’t know if they still do it, but they used to show it, like, every year on either Easter or Passover.
ENGLANDER: Exactly.
GROSS: Yeah. So one of the most famous parts of that story is when God inflicts the ten plagues on the Egyptians who have enslaved the Jews. So I would like to have you read some of that from your new translation. And then we’ll talk about it.
ENGLANDER: With pleasure. Here are the ten plagues. Everybody dip your fingers at home. “Blood, frogs, lice, a maelstrom of beasts, pestilence, boils, and hail full of fire, locusts, a clotted darkness too thick to pass, a killing of the firstborn.”
GROSS: That’s some scary stuff. “Hail full of fire”? Not just “darkness” but “a clotted darkness” – that’s C-L-O-T-T-E-D. So have you gone back to English translations? I should’ve brought one so I can compare it.
ENGLANDER: Oh. This? I was going to say, you would make an excellent rabbinical student. You sort of picked out – as I said, it’s a hyper-literal translation. There are a few chances I took in this translation and that was one of them because I thought about this section is for – it’s for adults but it’s also really for children.
I think that’s, you know, aside from, you know, hunting for the Afikomen, I think this is a huge, huge part of the Seder for children and as orthodox children we were taught – we were not, you know, yes, you’re saying them at the Seder but you’re taught this stuff in school and at shul and the ideas – we were always told, yes, the hail came but it wasn’t just hail, it was a ball of ice with…
It was fire and ice living together. There was a fiery center. Or when God made it dark it wasn’t dark, it was so thick that you couldn’t even move. Everybody was – if you were walking in the street you were frozen. And I thought when I heard those words, back to translation, if you’re asking me to be translator when I hear hail that’s what I see. When I hear darkness that’s what it means. And I decided to commit to that for the translation.
GROSS: So you’re saying this wasn’t a literal translation; this was your understanding of it?
ENGLANDER: The whole translation is hyper-literal and this one instance is what it literally means to me.
GROSS: You are no longer an observant Jew. Will you have a Seder and use your own Haggadah this year?
ENGLANDER: I was – Jonathan and I were joking about this. We’re like if we don’t find our Haggados at the Seder people are going to be in trouble. But, you know, at least our families can use them. But, yeah, I have to say of all the holidays, I really don’t do anything. I really do go to – if I can get to my family I get there or I’ve been going to a friend’s the last few years.
But, yeah, I do do the Seder every year. I really – I was going to say I don’t know if I’m softening or finding comfort or some different – my point is, it’s OK to live in conflict with yourself. That’s a nice thing that I’ve discovered. It’s OK for me to be really secular. That’s the idea, you know, people can just, you know, I’m trying to calm down.
The point is I really enjoy that holiday and, yes, I go to a Seder every year and I, you know, drive there and a keep a house full of bread and all that stuff. But I really do enjoy that meal and this book.
GROSS: What were your Seders like as a child?
ENGLANDER: As you say that, actually, it’s really rare for me to have a brain that only records – I can never remember. I only retain negative memories. It helps with my worldview.
But I can literally be like – you know, my girlfriend Becky, you were never happy in childhood? I’m like not that I recall. You know, when I see a picture of me smiling or my mother – I sort of can’t remember being happy but it’s – my grandparent’s house was happy to me. And I think, yeah, I do remember the Seders.
It’s also the idea of the work behind – you know what? What I remember more it’s the switching of dishes. You have to switch your dishes, and this idea, you know, the Old Country stuff that comes over, the dishes that survive. But it’s getting, you know, these boxes of China. You know, we ate on Corningware like everybody else did then. Good white plates that you could drop down the stairs and they’d bounce back up.
You know, but this idea, suddenly delicate plates would come up from the basement and these big sort of 1920s spoons. And really remember the stuff of it and the switching of the house. I mean, it is such a huge deal getting the house ready. I mean, it’s really obsessive, the hunt for, you know, bread.
GROSS: Well, Nathan Englander, thank you so much for talking with us.
ENGLANDER: This has been a great pleasure. Thanks so much for having me.
Whose Mark 16:9–20? Mine, Yours, Theirs?
Ben Witherington, who blogs as “one of the world’s leading evangelical scholars,” has up a post entitled, “Evidence of Mutilation and Deterioration— Mk. 16.“ He gets us looking at a corner not part of this text
or of this text either
and comes to some rather final conclusions. These:
I remain utterly unconvinced by the arguments that Mark 16.8 is the original ending of that Gospel, an ending that involves all sorts of problems…. [T]he second and later century additions such as the Freer logion, or the long ending (16.9ff.) were attempts in the early church to supply an ending because the church recognized Mark 16.8 couldn’t have been the ending.
and
Of course this is bad news for the KJV only/Majority Texters, but good news for Protestants in snake handling Kentucky, as it means that those verses about snake handling and drinking poison are not an original part of the inspired text of Mark’s Gospel.
Now, I don’t know what Mark 16:9-20 is for you (despite your practices or beliefs about snake handling and poison drinking or the lack thereof). But I like to read this little Greek text rhetorically.
I find it fascinating that a presumably male author (someone like “Mark”) writing to other men, would presume to end it the way Mark 16:9-20 ends this good news. Even if it’s an attempt by “the early church” to complete this story, maybe especially if it’s such an attempt, then it’s amazing.
We have a woman who was once familiar with demons, seven of them, being the first one Jesus appears to after death. We have her as the witness, testifying to emotional, weepy and mourning men.
And like Ben Witherington, these men “remain utterly un-convinced by the arguments.”
Or, as the little bit of Greek rhetoric puts it: κἀκεῖνοι ἀκούσαντες ὅτι ζῇ καὶ ἐθεάθη ὑπ’ αὐτῆς ἠ-πίστησαν.
Then Jesus shows us himself, to two of the men, who also remain utterly un-convinced: οὐδὲ ἐκείνοις ἐπίστευσαν.
Then this final text of “Mark” has Jesus showing himself to the remaining living disciples and the author describes them to us readers as the ones who remain utterly unconvinced: τὴν ἀ-πιστίαν αὐτῶν.
And Jesus speaks a few choice rhetorical words at them because these men had remained utterly un-convinced: οὐκ ἐπίστευσαν.
Is the little addition, then, about the snake handling and the poison drinking and the ascension of the dead body now alive something we readers are to be less convinced of than we are of this implausible prior, womanly post-demonic failed rhetoric?
Happy Presidents Day–Favorite President?
Greetings to all from Theophrastus in poor-Internet-connectivity-land!
Insha’allah (Deo volente) I should resume regular posting after Presidents Day. In the meanwhile, here is a brief snippet of a conversation I had with my secretary:
Me: I hope you have a good Presidents Day weekend. My favorite president was Franklin Roosevelt – who was your favorite?
Secretary: Nixon.
If you feel like it, be sure to contribute your favorite president in the comments.
(Alternatively, you can answer Kumi Mizumi’s question to Tatsuya Mihashi [Phil Moscowitz] in What’s Up Tiger Lily: “name three presidents.”)
The Symposium: on the masculine feel
John Piper has his say on the “masculine feel” of his Christian masculine God of his Christianity. Scot McKnight looks for “a Greek word for ‘masculine’ (andreia)” in the New Testament and can’t find it.
Then Suzanne gets us thinking even more: “Andreia [in Greek] is rather a necessary quality for all men and women.” Maybe it’s time we listened.
Here’s from The Symposium of Plato. In Greek (as translated into English by Benjamin Jowett), we hear Aristophanes talking, finally taking his turn. This is about the supreme God, the masculine feel, and humans, both males and females. [Pay close attention to the Greek words]:
Aristophanes professed to open another vein of discourse; he had a mind to praise [the God of] Love [ἔρωτος] in another way, unlike that either of Pausanias or Eryximachus.
Mankind [ἅνθρωποι]; he said, judging by their neglect of him, have never, as I think, at all understood the power of [the God of] Love [ἔρωτος]. For if they had understood him they would surely have built noble temples and altars, and offered solemn sacrifices in his honour; but this is not done, and most certainly ought to be done: since of all the gods [θεῶν] he is the best friend of men [ἀνθρώπων], the helper and the healer of the ills which are the great impediment to the happiness of the race. I will try to describe his power to you, and you shall teach the rest of the world what I am teaching you. In the first place, let me treat of the nature of man and what has happened to it; for the original human nature [τὴν ἀνθρωπίνην φύσιν] was not like the present, but different. The sexes [τὰ γένη τὰ τῶν ἀνθρώπων] were not two as they are now, but originally three in number; there was man, woman [ἄρρεν καὶ θῆλυ], and the union [κοινὸν] of the two, having a name corresponding to this double nature, which had once a real existence, but is now lost, and the word “Androgynous” [ἀνδρόγυνον] is only preserved as a term of reproach. In the second place, the primeval man [ἀνθρώπου] was round, his back and sides forming a circle; and he had four hands and four feet, one head with two faces, looking opposite ways, set on a round neck and precisely alike; also four ears, two privy members, and the remainder to correspond. He could walk upright as men now do, backwards or forwards as he pleased, and he could also roll over and over at a great pace, turning on his four hands and four feet, eight in all, like tumblers going over and over with their legs in the air; this was when he wanted to run fast. Now the sexes were three, and such as I have described them; because the sun, moon, and earth are three;-and the man [τὸ ἄρρεν] was originally the child of the sun [τοῦ ἡλίου], the woman [τὸ θῆλυ] of the earth [τῆς γῆς], and the man-woman [τὸ ἀμφοτέρων] of the moon [τὸ δὲ ἀμφοτέρων], which is made up of sun and earth, and they were all round and moved round and round: like their parents [τοῖς γονεῦσιν]. Terrible was their might and strength, and the thoughts of their hearts were great, and they made an attack upon the gods [τοῖς θεοῖς]; of them is told the tale of Otys and Ephialtes who, as Homer says, dared to scale heaven, and would have laid hands upon the gods. Doubt reigned in the celestial councils. Should they kill them and annihilate the race with thunderbolts, as they had done the giants, then there would be an end of the sacrifices and worship which men offered to them; but, on the other hand, the gods could not suffer their insolence to be unrestrained.
At last, after a good deal of reflection, Zeus discovered a way. He said:
“Methinks I have a plan which will humble their pride and improve their manners; men [ἅνθρωποι] shall continue to exist, but I will cut them in two and then they will be diminished in strength and increased in numbers; this will have the advantage of making them more profitable to us. They shall walk upright on two legs, and if they continue insolent and will not be quiet, I will split them again and they shall hop about on a single leg.”
He spoke and cut men [ἀνθρώπους] in two, like a sorb-apple which is halved for pickling, or as you might divide an egg with a hair; and as he cut them one after another, he bade Apollo give the face and the half of the neck a turn in order that the man [ἄνθρωπος] might contemplate the section of himself: he would thus learn a lesson of humility [ὁ ἄνθρωπος]. Apollo was also bidden to heal their wounds and compose their forms. So he gave a turn to the face and pulled the skin from the sides all over that which in our language is called the belly, like the purses which draw in, and he made one mouth at the centre, which he fastened in a knot (the same which is called the navel); he also moulded the breast and took out most of the wrinkles, much as a shoemaker might smooth leather upon a last; he left a few, however, in the region of the belly and navel, as a memorial of the primeval state. After the division the two parts of man, each desiring his other half, came together, and throwing their arms about one another, entwined in mutual embraces, longing to grow into one, they were on the point of dying from hunger and self-neglect, because they did not like to do anything apart; and when one of the halves died and the other survived, the survivor sought another mate, man or woman [γυναῖκα καλοῦμεν] as we call them, being the sections of entire men or women [γυναικὸς —εἴτε ἀνδρός], and clung to that. They were being destroyed, when Zeus in pity of them invented a new plan: he turned the parts of generation round to the front, for this had not been always their position and they sowed the seed no longer as hitherto like grasshoppers in the ground, but in one another; and after the transposition the male generated in the female [τοῦ ἄρρενος ἐν τῷ θήλει] in order that by the mutual embraces of man and woman [ἀνὴρ γυναικὶ] they might breed, and the race might continue; or if man came to man [ἄρρην ἄρρενι] they might be satisfied, and rest, and go their ways to the business of life: so ancient is the [Love] desire [ὁ ἔρως] of one another which is implanted in us, reuniting our original nature, making one of two, and healing the state of man [ τοῖς ἀνθρώποις].
Each of us when separated, having one side only, like a flat fish, is but the indenture of a man [ἀνθρωπίνην], and he is always looking for his other half. Men who are a section of that double nature which was once called Androgynous [ἀνδρόγυνον] are lovers of women [φιλογύναικές]; adulterers are generally of this breed, and also adulterous women who lust after men [γυναῖκες φίλανδροί]: the women who are a section of the woman [γυναικῶν γυναικὸς] do not care for men [τοῖς ἀνδράσι], but have female attachments; the female companions [τὰς γυναῖκας] are of this sort. But they who are a section of the male follow the male [ἄρρενος ... τὰ ἄρρενα], and while they are young, being slices of the original man, they hang about men and embrace them [φιλοῦσι τοὺς ἄνδρας], and they are themselves the best of boys and youths, because they have the most manly nature [ἀνδρειότατοι ὄντες φύσει]. Some indeed assert that they are shameless, but this is not true; for they do not act thus from any want of shame, but because they are valiant and manly, and have a manly countenance [θάρρους καὶ ἀνδρείας καὶ ἀρρενωπία], and they embrace that which is like them. And these when they grow up become our statesmen, and these only, which is a great proof of the truth of what I am saving. When they reach manhood they are loves of youth, and are not naturally inclined to marry or beget children,-if at all, they do so only in obedience to the law; but they are satisfied if they may be allowed to live with one another unwedded; and such a nature is prone to love and ready to return love, always embracing that which is akin to him. And when one of them meets with his other half, the actual half of himself, whether he be a lover of youth or a lover of another sort, the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy, and would not be out of the other’s sight, as I may say, even for a moment: these are the people who pass their whole lives together; yet they could not explain what they desire of one another. For the intense yearning which each of them has towards the other does not appear to be the desire of lover’s intercourse, but of something else which the soul of either evidently desires and cannot tell, and of which she has only a dark and doubtful presentiment. Suppose Hephaestus, with his instruments, to come to the pair who are lying side, by side and to say to them, “What do you people want of one another?” they would be unable to explain. And suppose further, that when he saw their perplexity he said: “Do you desire to be wholly one; always day and night to be in one another’s company? for if this is what you desire, I am ready to melt you into one and let you grow together, so that being two you shall become one, and while you live a common life as if you were a single man, and after your death in the world below still be one departed soul instead of two-I ask whether this is what you lovingly desire, and whether you are satisfied to attain this?”-there is not a man of them who when he heard the proposal would deny or would not acknowledge that this meeting and melting into one another, this becoming one instead of two, was the very expression of his ancient need. And the reason is that human nature was originally one and we were a whole, and the desire and pursuit of the whole is called love. There was a time, I say, when we were one, but now because of the wickedness of mankind God has dispersed us, as the Arcadians were dispersed into villages by the Lacedaemonians. And if we are not obedient to the gods, there is a danger that we shall be split up again and go about in basso-relievo, like the profile figures having only half a nose which are sculptured on monuments, and that we shall be like tallies.
Wherefore let us exhort all men to piety, that we may avoid evil, and obtain the good, of which Love is to us the lord and minister; and let no one oppose him-he is the enemy of the gods who oppose him. For if we are friends of the God and at peace with him we shall find our own true loves, which rarely happens in this world at present. I am serious, and therefore I must beg Eryximachus not to make fun or to find any allusion in what I am saying to Pausanias and Agathon, who, as I suspect, are both of the manly nature, and belong to the class which I have been describing. But my words have a wider application-they include men and women everywhere; and I believe that if our loves were perfectly accomplished, and each one returning to his primeval nature had his original true love, then our race would be happy. And if this would be best of all, the best in the next degree and under present circumstances must be the nearest approach to such an union; and that will be the attainment of a congenial love. Wherefore, if we would praise him who has given to us the benefit, we must praise the god Love, who is our greatest benefactor, both leading us in this life back to our own nature, and giving us high hopes for the future, for he promises that if we are pious, he will restore us to our original state, and heal us and make us happy and blessed. This, Eryximachus, is my discourse of love, which, although different to yours, I must beg you to leave unassailed by the shafts of your ridicule, in order that each may have his turn; each, or rather either, for Agathon and Socrates are the only ones left.
The masculine feel, and the Greek
Regarding the “masculine feel” kerfuffle, Scot McKnight recently wrote,
There is a Greek word for ‘masculine’ (andreia), it never occurs in the New Testament (a word close to it occurs in 1 Cor 16:13, but seems to be addressing the whole church — and means courage). Nor does it appear once in any words quoted here of J.C. Ryle. This is a colossal example of driving the whole through a word (‘masculine’) that is not a term used in the New Testament, which Testament never says ‘For Men Only.’ Pastors are addressed in a number of passages in the NT, and not once are they told to be masculine.
I hesitate to accept andreia as a simple equivalent for “masculine” because of the way it is used in the ancient literature. Andreia is rather a necessary quality for all men and women. It typically means “brave” or “courageous” or perhaps “valiant” or “heroic.” Here are examples of how the word was used.
Γυναῖκα ἀνδρείαν τίς εὑρήσει; τιμιωτέρα δέ ἐστι λίθων πολυτελῶν ἡ τοιαύτη. Proverbs 31:10
Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far above rubies.Γρηγορεῖτε, στήκετε ἐν τῇ πίστει, ἀνδρίζεσθε, κραταιοῦσθε 1 Cor. 16:13
Take heed, stand fast in faith, be brave like men, and make yourselves strong.πολλαι γυναικες εδυναμωθεισαι δια της χαριτος του θεου επετελεσαντο πολλα ανδρεια. 1 Clement 55:3
Many women, waxing strong through the grace of God, have performed many manly(heroic) deedsκαὶ πάλιν διηπόρουν ἐπὶ ταῖς παρθένοις, ὅτι τρυφεραὶ οὕτως οὖσαι ἀνδρείως εἱστήκεισαν ὡς μέλλουσαι ὅλον τὸν οὐρανὸν βαστάζειν.
And again I was perplexed concerning the virgins, that delicate as they were they stood up like men, as if they intended to carry the whole heaven. Shepherd of Hermas, Parable 9.2.
Here are some of the relevant entries from the Liddell, Scott Lexicon. Andreia has some gender neutral meaning range, used for both men and women, and some male specific meaning,
ἀνδρεία , ἡ, – manliness, manly spirit, opp. δειλία, Il.cc., cf. Arist.Rh.1366b11, EN1115a6; also of women, S.El.983, Arist.Pol.1260a22; “ἀνδρεία ἡ περὶ τὰς ναυτιλίας” Str.3.1.8:—in pl., brave deeds, Pl.Lg.922a; ironically, “αἱ διὰ τῶν λόγων ἀνδρεῖαι” D.Prooem.45.
II. in bad sense, hardihood, insolence, D. Chr.12.13.
III. = ἡ τῶν ἀνδρῶν ἡλικία, Antipho.Soph.67a.
IV. membrum virile, Artem.1.45.
V. skill, LXX Ec.4.4.
In this entry, we can see that andreia is not the opposite of some Greek word for femininity, but rather it is the opposite of deilia, “cowardice.” This is in no way related to any word for female. So, andreia is in a close semantic relation with cowardice, rather than with femininity. Women clearly could also be brave without betraying a trait of the opposite sex. Part of the problem is that the original word aner, from which andreia is derived, has several meanings – male, adult, citizen, human, warrior, and so on. Some of these meanings are gender neutral.
Here are two other words derived from aner that have both male specific meanings, and gender neutral meanings,
ἀνδροφόνος – A. man-slaying, Homeric epith. of Hector, Il.24.724, etc.; of Achilles, “χεῖρες ἀ.” 18.317; homicide, Pl.Phd.114a; generally, murderous, “ἀ. τὴν φύσιν” Theopomp.Hist.217:—rarely exc. of slaughter in battle, but in Od.1.261 φάρμακον ἀ. a murderous drug:—epith. of αῖμα, Orph.H.65.4.
2. of women, murdering their husbands, Pi.P.4.252.
II. as law-term, one convicted of manslaughter, homicide, Lys.10.7, D.23.29, cf. ib.216:—hence as a term of abuse, “τοὺς ἀ. ἰχθυοπώλας” Ath.6.228c, cf. Amphis 30.
III. ἀ. Κῶνος, a landmark at Athens, IG3.61 Aii 15.ἀνδριάς , ὁ, gen. άντος (Att. ᾶντος, acc. to Hdn.Gr.1.51): (ἀνήρ):—
A. image of a man, statue, Pi.P.5.40, Hdt.1.183, 2.91, Ar.Pax1183, Th. 1.134, etc.; “ἀνδριάντας καὶ ἄλλα ζῷα λίθινά τε καὶ ξύλινα” Pl.R.515a; ἀνδριάντ ας γράφειν paint statues, ib.420c; esp. of portrait-statues, “ἀ. εἰκονικός” Plu.Lys.1; “ἀ. ὁλοσώματος” IG12(7).240 (Amorgos); “ἀ. ἔφιππος” SIG730.26 (Olbia); of female figures, Ath.10.425f, etc.; of men, opp. ἀγάλματα of the gods, Gorg.Hel.18, Plb.21.29.9; rarely of gods,
In these examples, there is clearly a use of andrias that refers to human beings. In spite of the harsh gender boundaries in ancient societies, there appears to have been an ideal of a woman of noble class, or of Christian character, who had the same qualities as noble or Christian men. Women are andreia without this contrasting with their femininity, but rather it enhances their femininity. Both men and women ought to display this characteristic, which perhaps should be translated as “valiant” as Al Wolters has done here.
For your schadenfreude reading
The Hatchet Job of the Year Award is for the writer of the angriest, funniest, most trenchant book review of the past twelve months.
http://hatchetjoboftheyear.com/
New directions in dance film: Wim Wenders’s “Pina”
Wim Wender’s tribute film to Pina Bausch and Tanztheater, Pina, is now in art house release in the US. This work opens new vista in the use of sterographic film (3D film) and in dance movies.
It is, easily, the best release of 2012 so far (stereographic or traditional [2D] film), and compares well to the very best stereographic films I have seen to date (Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder, and Martin Scorsese’s Hugo.)
The following preview is just in 2D – and thus loses much of the incredible magic of this film, but but it can show you how strong the thematic and dance material is.
My prediction – this film is so strong that it will revolutionize the way that dance film is made. I also predict it will win the “best documentary” film at the Academy Awards. I believe that it deserves to win the “best film” award.
Unrelated postscript: I will have limited access to the Internet for the next two weeks – but I am sure that my steadfast co-bloggers will make sure things stay exciting on the BLT blog.
“Jewish Indiana Jones” Pleads Guilty to Fraud Charges
The New York Jewish Week today posted this remarkable story. I wish I had heard the story earlier—before the rabbi’s claims had been exposed. It’s nearly as much fun as Morton Smith’s discovery (or, as his debunkers would say, his creation) of a lost fragment from Mark’s gospel buried in a previously unknown letter from Clement of Alexandria. But what I find most thrilling is that I used to shop in the rabbi’s store in Wheaton, Maryland, and spoke with him frequently. He was a really nice guy.
Rabbi Menachem Youlus, the self-styled “Jewish Indiana Jones” who turned out to be a Jewish Walter Mitty, has pleaded guilty to fraud.
Youlus’ accounts of remarkable tales of rescuing Holocaust-era Torah scrolls were contradicted by historical evidence, witness accounts, and records showing that he simply passed off used Torahs sold by local dealers who made no claims as to the scrolls’ provenance.
“I know what I did was wrong, and I deeply regret my conduct,” said Youlus, who pleaded guilty in Manhattan federal court on Thursday.
In court, the 50-year-old Baltimore resident admitted to having defrauded more than 50 victims, misappropriating some of the donations and secretly depositing them into the bank account of his Wheaton store, called the Jewish Bookstore. Youlus defrauded his charity, Save A Torah, Inc. and its donors of $862,000, according to prosecutors.
“Menachem Youlus concocted an elaborate tale of dramatic Torah rescues undertaken by a latter day movie hero that exploited the profound emotions attached to one of the most painful chapters in world history — the Holocaust — in order to make a profit. Today’s guilty plea is a fitting conclusion to his story and he will now be punished for his brazen fraud,” Preet Bharara, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, said Thursday.
A January 31, 2010, Washington Post investigative report brought to light questions about Youlus’ claims.
Shortly after the Washington Post story ran, MenachemRosensaft wrote a fascinating commentary on the case. Rosensaft is adjunct professor of law at Cornell Law School, distinguished visiting lecturer at Syracuse University College of Law, and vice president of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants. He wrote:
Some years ago, there was Binjamin Wilkomirski, the author of a purportedly autobiographical account of his years as a Jewish orphan during the Holocaust but who actually is a Swiss-born Christian clarinetist. Then there was the case of Herman Rosenblat whose heartwarming tale of a little girl tossing him an apple every day for seven months across the electrified barbed wire fence of a Nazi concentration camp turned out to be a hoax….
In 2007, on the website of Save a Torah, his 501(c)3 tax exempt organization, Youlus claimed to have found and restored “Torah scrolls hidden, lost or stolen during the Holocaust” which he then “resettled” in more than 50 Jewish communities throughout the world. On a promotional video featured on the same website, he said that “we’ve done over 500 today.” And in a recent Washington Post interview, Youlus boasted of having rescued not 50 or 500 but 1,100 such Torah scrolls.
Youlus also gave his Torah scrolls dramatic histories. Two were allegedly found buried in a “Gestapo body bag” in a Ukrainian mass-grave of murdered Jews. He supposedly discovered one under the floorboards of a barrack in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany, a “rescue” that is described on his website’s video alongside photographs taken at the camp at the time of its liberation by British troops in April 1945. Youlus claims that he dug up yet another Torah scroll in what had been the cemetery of Oswiecim, the town adjacent to the Auschwitz death camp, and reunited it with four missing panels that Jews from Oswiecim had taken into the camp and had entrusted for safekeeping to a Jewish-born priest who eventually gave them to Youlus.
If even one of these stories seems fantastic, improbable, even incredible, the odds that any one person could have found all four of these Torah scrolls and brought them surreptitiously to the United States are, conservatively speaking, astronomical. As has been said repeatedly in connection with Bernard Madoff’s multi-billion dollar Ponzi scheme, if something sounds too good to be true, it most probably is….
It is bad enough when unscrupulous individuals rip off their marks, as it were, with variations of the proverbial Nigerian e-mail scam in which the recipient is promised part of a multi-million dollar fortune in exchange for a relatively minor up-front investment….A fake Holocaust memoir or a Torah scroll purportedly rescued from the ruins of World War II Europe is altogether different. Preying on the emotions of people overwhelmed by the memory of tragedy in order to make a buck is contemptible.
Rosensaft’s entire column is worth reading, but of note is his conclusion:
One of Youlus’s defenders argues that exposing his deception “may very well be in service of the truth but in disservice of a greater truth.” That is utter bunk.
Truth is absolute. The Holocaust was a tragedy of unfathomable proportions. Its victims, including the hundreds of thousands of destroyed and desecrated Torah scrolls and other Jewish religious artifacts, deserve nothing less than the dignity of authentic memory.
While I certainly don’t disagree, I wonder about the whole question of religious myths that are believed as being literal. While the mythic stories have great power and truth, they are rarely if ever true in an historic sense. Yet millions of believers of all faiths cling to them as if they were facts. It gives them comfort and meaning. Many times I’ve heard people say that if it were proven that Mary was not a literal virgin, or that Jesus did not literally rise from the dead corporeally, or that Moses did not receive the stone tablets and the Book of the Covenant from God on Sinai in the way Exodus recounts it, that their faith would not be able to stand.
Shmuel Herzfeld, a rabbi at Ohev Sholom in Washington, DC, was shopping at Youlus’s store when he saw a Torah scroll. Youlus told him that the Torah scroll had survived Auschwitz. Herzfeld asked Youlus if he could borrow the Torah scroll for use in his congregation one Shabbat, and Youlus agreed. When news of Youlus’s arrest broke, Herzfeld wrote, “That Shabbat in the presence of this Torah scroll I prayed with more intensity than ever before and I connected to the chanting of the Torah as I had never before connected. The very possibility that those emotional and intense feelings that I experienced can now be the result of manipulation and dishonesty overwhelms me with sadness.”
It was his faith, his emotional and spiritual attachment to a belief, that added such intensity to his prayers. Jesus frequently said, “It is your faith that has made you whole”—implying that the individual’s belief was the operative factor in the equation. So the question is, if what we believe is proven to be a lie, where does that leave whatever we have built on that faith?
A saying attributed to the Buddha may apply here: “All instruction is but a finger pointing at the moon. Those whose gaze is fixed upon the finger will never see beyond.” It doesn’t matter if the story is real or imagined; what matters is that we look not at the story, but at its meaning in our lives.
Unless, of course, you’re bilking people out of their money when you sell them the story!
J. K. Gayle
Theophrastus
Craig R. Smith
Suzanne McCarthy
