Faithful Renderings: Jewish-Christian Difference and the Politics of Translation
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Faithful Renderings: Jewish-Christian Difference and the Politics of Translation
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Overview
Bringing together central issues in translation studies with episodes in Jewish–Christian history, Naomi Seidman considers a range of texts, from the Bible to Elie Wiesel’s Night, delving into such controversies as the accuracy of various Bible translations, the medieval use of converts from Judaism to Christianity as translators, the censorship of anti-Christian references in Jewish texts, and the translation of Holocaust testimony. Faithful Renderings ultimately reveals that translation is not a marginal phenomenon but rather a crucial issue for understanding the relations between Jews and Christians and indeed the development of each religious community.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226745077 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 02/15/2010 |
| Series: | Afterlives of the Bible |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 312 |
| File size: | 497 KB |
About the Author
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Faithful Renderings
Jewish-Christian Difference and the Politics of Translation
By NAOMI SEIDMAN
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2006
The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-74506-0
Chapter One Immaculate Translation
Sexual Fidelity, Textual Transmission, and the Virgin Birth
Many a man has made his way into an honest girl's bedroom by calling himself a god. OVID, Metamorphoses
It is a founding insight of feminist translation theory that translation discourse in the West has been profoundly sexualized, drawing on a web of erotic folk wisdom, misogynistic epigrams, and ribald innuendo. The Hebrew poet Haim Nahman Bialik reputedly declared that reading a poem in translation was like "kissing the bride through her veil"; Gilles Ménage coined the phrase "les belles infidèles" to describe a "free" translation; and a familiar witticism holds that, like women, translations may be either faithful or beautiful but never both. Following Barbara Johnson's pioneering analysis of the analogy between translation and matrimony, Lori Chamberlain writes:
Fidelity is defined by an implicit contract between translation (as woman) and original (as husband, father, or author). However, the infamous "double standard" operates here as it might have in traditional marriages: the "unfaithful" wife/translation is publicly tried for crimes the husband/original is incapable of committing. This contract, in short, makes it impossible for the original to be guilty of infidelity. Such an attitude betrays real anxiety about the problem of paternity and translation; it mimics the patrilineal kinship system where paternity-not maternity-legitimizes an offspring.
That this sexualized rhetoric is more than a little slippery can be gleaned even from Chamberlain's summary. While she begins by asserting the femininity-and potential infidelity-of the translation as wife, the passage slides, propelled by its own allegorical logic, into the problem of the translation as (potentially illegitimate) child, whose relationship to the original/father is called into question by the translator's infidelity. Once one recognizes that not only infidelity but also kinship itself is at stake, the implicit threat to the very meaning of translation encoded in this rhetoric becomes clear. Translation and paternity announce a relation, between source and target texts, between father and child, that is open to disruption by the very conduit-the translator/mother-through which this relationship is established. The legal and contractual apparatus that hedges kinship and translation can never hope to control the mysterious gestational process at their center.
This sexual semantics of translation is often accompanied by a religious rhetoric. Translatio has a long and various theological history: to be translated is to ascend to heaven without dying; the Nicene Fathers discuss the translation of bishops from one see to another; and, for the medievals, sacred relics are translated in being moved. The rhetoric of "faithful" translation further suggests the influence of the religious as well as marital (and political) spheres. Unfaithful translations sin against originals, while faithful translations acquire their sacred aura. But just as the marital analysis of faithful translation calls into question the relationship between original and translation, reading faithful translation through a theological lens threatens to expose the faithfulness of a translation as a religious rather than an ostensibly neutral linguistic judgment. As with the laws of paternity, the idealized and disembodied model of semantic equivalence acts as a cover for the ideologies and loyalties of particular translators, stifling the recognition that the equivalence-value of a particular translation is a matter of faith (in both senses) rather than verification. In the case of translations that cross religious boundaries, where translators render texts of another religion or where one "faith community" adopts a translation composed by translators affiliated with a rival group, the stakes multiply.
It is just such a fraught contest that stands behind the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, which has often been described as the first great translation project in the West. The Septuagint (or Seventy, abbreviated as LXX) was originally composed by Alexandrian Jews, by most accounts for their own use. The Septuagint was later adopted as the Bible of the early Church (it remains so for the Greek Orthodox Church) and rejected as inaccurate by the Greek-speaking Jewish community that had been its first readership. The curious controversy that resulted, in which it was the Christian community that, until Jerome's fateful return to the hebraica veritas, insisted on the fidelity of the Alexandrian Jewish translators while Jews of the same period cast doubt on this faithfulness, poses the problem of faithful translation both at its origin and at its most intricate.
The Septuagint opens the problem of faithful translation in its sexual as well as religious dimensions. Nowhere, in fact, does the overdetermined significance of faithful translation-as linguistic accuracy, sexual fidelity, and religious orthodoxy-come closer to the surface than in the Hebrew-Greek translation crux in Matthew 1:23. It is in this famous verse that Matthew cites the Septuagint version of Isaiah 7:14. In 7:14, Isaiah gives Ahaz a sign that his salvation is soon to come. Isaiah promises: "Hiney ha'almah harah veyoledet ben veqarat shemo 'imanu'el" (Behold, the young woman [ha'almah] is with child and about to bear a son and she will call him Immanuel). Matthew, rendering Isaiah's Hebrew word 'almah as parthenos in accordance with the Seventy, cites Isaiah as saying that a virgin (parthenos) will give birth, thus casting Isaiah as the Hebrew prophet of Jesus's virgin birth. At stake in the Jewish-Christian interpretations of this crucial passage is not only the reliability of the translation Matthew was using, which would have been the Septuagint, the Bible of Greek-speaking Jews and Christians of the first century. In the arguments over this passage in Matthew, no less is at issue than the legitimacy of Jesus, the virginity of Mary, the relationship between the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, and, ultimately, between Judaism and Christianity. To rephrase this complex hermeneutic knot in terms of Chamberlain's feminist analysis, the difference between the Hebrew 'almah and the Greek parthenos simultaneously throws religious authority, textual reliability, and the paternal line into anxious question.
To outline the problem, Matthew 1:20 describes the angel coming to Joseph to urge him to take Mary into his home, "for what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit" (NIV). In 1:22-23, the narrator continues:
All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet: The virgin will be with child and she will give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel, which means "God with us." (NIV)
A fierce controversy over this passage erupted almost immediately. The debate between Justin Martyr and his fictionally constructed Jewish interlocutor, described as a philosopher and Jewish leader, in Dialogue with Trypho the Jew (ca. 150 CE), centers largely around a double issue: the virginity of Mary (to which Justin is one of the first post-Matthean witnesses) and the reliability of the Septuagint as prophetic testimony to this virginity. While Justin is generally willing to dispute using Trypho's own Hebrew texts, on this crucial point he insists on citing the Greek. Trypho's rejoinder sets the stage, at this early point, for what would become the standard Jewish response to Matthew:
And Trypho answered, "The Scripture has not, 'Behold, the virgin shall conceive, and bear a son,' but, 'Behold, the young woman (neanis) shall conceive, and bear a son,' and so on, as you quoted. But the whole prophecy refers to Hezekiah, and it is proved that it was fulfilled in him, according to the terms of this prophecy."
Trypho, claiming privileged access to Hebrew sources and Jewish readings, rejects both Matthew's messianic typology and his use of the LXX. In Trypho's view, the prophetic line that, for Justin, connects Isaiah's prophecy with the birth of Jesus is interrupted by two mistranslations: one restores a Greek hymen to a young Hebrew girl, and the other postpones the fulfillment of Isaiah's pregnant prophecy for seven hundred years after its proclamation-a long gestation indeed!
Controversy over this crux has not abated even in our own time. The Revised Standard Version of the Bible (completed 1952) was burned by some American fundamentalists because it had "young woman" rather than "virgin" in Isaiah 7:14, thus opening an awkward gap between Matthew and his prophetic proof text. Two decades later, "the reading 'virgin' in Isaiah was imposed by a decision of the American bishops on the reluctant Catholic translators of the [New American Bible, 1970]." Until the RSV's "heresy," the translation of 'almah had served as a dividing line separating Jewish and Christian translations, with Christian translations rendering the word as "virgin" while Jewish translations unfailingly had the prophet make reference to a girl or young woman.
The narrowest discussions of the issue are philological: what are the precise meanings of 'almah, parthenos, and the Vulgate's virgo (the term from which our English discussion most closely derives), and what is the relationship among these terms? Does parthenos, as some scholars claim, mean either a young girl or a virgin (perhaps having different meanings at different periods or different locales), which allowed it to serve as a bridge or pivot between the less ambiguous Hebrew and Latin terms? The discussion was not clarified even with the third-century "Jewish" (or Jewish-Christian) translations of Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion that attempted to "correct" the Greek Bible toward the Hebrew: these three translations have neanis rather than parthenos in Isaiah 7:14. While Jewish readers took for granted that neanis meant a girl or young woman, the third-century Father Origen argued that neanis also signified a virgin! Nor does Jerome's turn to the Hebrew sources in the 390s simplify the discussion, as Adam Kamesar has shown; conceding the Jewish point that 'almah is not the usual Hebrew term for virgin, Jerome combines Christian theological aims and rabbinic midrashic technique to derive the hyper-virginity of Isaiah's 'almah from the Hebrew root signifying "concealment." As in the description of Rebecca in Genesis 24:42, Jerome argues, the Hebrew word 'almah means "a virgin secluded, and guarded by her parents with extreme care." Kamesar points out that Jerome here transforms the patristic discourse of "double virginity," which normally signifies a spiritual virginity beyond the merely corporeal, into a "super-guaranteed physical virginity."
These philological questions are, moreover, complicated by textual problems. Matthew 1:23 differs from extant LXX versions of Isaiah in a number of details (though not in the word parthenos), making his citation simultaneously an interlingual and an intralingual translation-that is, the citation involves both a crossing of the Hebrew-Greek linguistic border and a rewriting of the Septuagint in slightly different Greek words. That the Hebrew Vorlage of the LXX is no longer extant, and represents a different textual tradition from the ones manifest in the Masoretic or the Qumran textual traditions, renders problematic the very notion of source and target text. Finally, both Jewish and Christian copyists and translators were (and are) suspected not only of the usual scribal errors and textual misunderstandings, but also of deliberate interpolations, censoring, and alterations guided by ideological, religious, and political Tendenzen.
Given these textual issues, is it possible that the Hebrew Vorlage used by the Seventy originally had the word betulah, which some commentators suppose more unequivocally means virgin (though that is far from a unanimous view)? If so, does that Vorlage represent a Jewish tradition alternative to the Masoretic one that is now reflected only in translation, or did the Jews later create this difference by deliberately falsifying their Hebrew manuscripts to avoid bearing witness to the divinity of Jesus, as more than one Father suspected? Is parthenos simply one problematic translation among many in the Septuagint, as the many pre-Christian Jewish revisions of the LXX itself, and the retranslations of Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion, seem to imply? If parthenos does indeed normally mean virgin, then did the LXX translators intend to suggest by the phrase "the virgin will conceive" that "a woman who is now a virgin will (by natural means, once she is united to her husband) conceive the child Emmanuel," as Raymond Brown postulates? Or does Matthew simply have it wrong, reading parthenos as testimony to the virginity of the young girl in Isaiah's prophecy when no such claim was intended by the Seventy, as a long Jewish tradition has insisted? Amidst this discussion, one thing is undeniable: while Christian biblical interpretation has often had recourse to Jewish exegesis, and Jewish translation has been influenced, perhaps less consciously, by Christian interpretation (Orlinsky's example is the "spiritualizing" of Hebrew ruah in many Jewish translations of Genesis 1:3), in the case of Isaiah's 'almah, Jewish and Christian interpretive communities have, until very recently, gone their radically separate ways.
The driest philology, in exploring these questions, is forced to acknowledge the indeterminacy, even the patriarchal violence, that renders the signification of these Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and English words so difficult to establish. Implied here, after all, are the legal categories, religious meanings, and physical determinations that govern the status of a woman within a patriarchal system and that rest on the notion of her "possession," legal or sexual, by a man. This possession, moreover, is charged with a range of uncertainties both reflected in and constructed by language. Are the terms 'almah or parthenos legal or clinical categories? Do they signify age, marital status, or sexual condition? Within what regime does virginity function, and by whose testimony is it established? Does it signify a presence-an intact hymen-or the absence of a husband or lover? Is it guaranteed by the veritas of a Hebrew root, or the walls of a cloister? That patriarchal marriage and the patrilineal line have often hinged on female virginity is evident from the Bible itself, not least from Matthew's infancy narrative-even if it is not entirely clear what is socially or legally at stake in Joseph's hesitation about accepting the pregnant Mary into his house. That virginity is sometimes difficult to prove is at the root of a rich and various body of folklore and ritual practice; as we shall see, internal Christian as well as Jewish-Christian discussion of the birth of Jesus revolve around this uncertainty. Indeed, for Derrida, the word "hymen" becomes the very site of the undecidable. The concept of virginity, then, disorders meaning within a language as well as destabilizing the fixed relations between languages. Pregnancy and virginity, and a fortiori the paradoxical sign of the pregnant virgin, suggest the workings of difference in language, the unstable borders between appearance and reality, between lack and supplement, and between self and other.
My intention in this chapter is to enter into neither the textual nor the theological details of the 'almah-parthenos debate-and certainly not to attempt to settle it! As Daniel Boyarin has argued, insistence on the hebraica veritas, for contemporary scholars as for Jerome, slights the integrity and legitimacy of the Christian exegetical traditions-Origen and Augustine, in Boyarin's view, were right to hold fast to the Septuagint. My aim here is to leave the "substance" of the 'almah-parthenos crux and turn, rather, to its "form," illuminating the architecture of the debate in its two primary and, I will argue, interconnected aspects: the sexual and the translational. Because Matthew's narrative consists of both a sexual and an intertextual claim, Christian and Jewish responses to it encompass both the textual arguments sketched above and sexual/genetic arguments-the questions of whether a virgin can conceive, whether Marywas in fact a virgin, the Davidic ancestry of Jesus, the status of Jesus as son of God, and the cultural meaning of virginity. It is certainly significant that the 'almah-parthenos debate brings together two relational processes, translation and gestation, whose workings and provenance are shrouded in obscurity and open to accusations of infidelity. I will argue here not only that these two aspects of the debate are isomorphic, but also that this sexual-textual knot forms the very center of what came to constitute Jewish-Christian difference. From the perspective of translation studies, an analysis of the 'almah-parthenos crux promises to ground the feminist discussion of fidelity in translation within a more particular historical context than it has so far discovered, that of the Jewish-Christian polemic over the perfection of the Septuagint. As a contribution to the study of Jewish-Christian relations, the paired analysis of translation and kinship aims to bring into focus not so much the separate terms "Judaism" and "Christianity" as the dash that connects them-that is, the notion of relationality as such.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS INTRODUCTION The Translator as Double AgentCHAPTER ONE Immaculate Translation
Sexual Fidelity, Textual Transmission, and the Virgin Birth
CHAPTER TWO "The Beauty of Greece in the Tents of Shem"
Aquila between the Camps CHAPTER THREE False Friends
Conversion and Translation from Jerome to Luther CHAPTER FOUR A Translator Culture
CHAPTER FIVE
The Holocaust in Every Tongue
CHAPTER SIX
Translation and Assimilation
Singer in America
EPILOGUE
Endecktes Judenthum?
A Translator's Note
Notes
Index