Translation Matters

it is wonderful to welcome you here today I am Sally Howard one of the priests one of the associate rector's on staff here at All Saints Church my pronouns are she her I want to also just welcome you to this place of radical inclusion courageous love and joyful spirituality we put our faith into action every week and this week we are asking you to sign a letter to Gavin Newsom supporting the efforts to settle a contract for kaiser mental health clinicians encouraging him to support a contract that we move mental health care towards parity with other areas of health care and that's so needed I'm so please sign the letter at the action table and it is really speaking of joyful spirituality it is such an amazing honor and joy to get to introduce to you today dr. Reverend dr. will Gaffney she is a prophet a poet and a professor of Hebrew Bible at Bright Divinity School in Fort Worth Texas she is an Episcopal priest canonically resident of the Diocese of Pennsylvania and licensed in the diocese also Fort Worth she's also a former Army chaplain and a congregational pastor in the AME Zion Church a former member of the dasha dark reconstructionist minion of the Germantown Jewish Center in Philadelphia she is Co taught courses with and for the Reconstructionist rabbinical seminary in white coat Pennsylvania and she is author of several books and is currently working on a women's lectionary and if you were in the service today you had the treat to hear one of those lectionary readings or stick around for the 11:15 absolutely powerful and beautiful and she is in that lectionary a new women focused calendar of Sunday readings for liturgy and preaching and her translation is poetic also we are offering today her one of her books womanís Midrash I own this myself it is again a powerful enriching and dare I say healing understanding of Midrash so without further ado may you welcome with me please good morning do we need this can I just move it away okay all right well thank you for spending part of your Sunday morning with me again my name is Wil Gaffney and I'd like to talk to you about the way in which virtually all of us encounter the biblical texts that we may not think about and that is through translation so first I'd like to do an exercise with you and have you think out well that means you have to talk to me about what the biblical texts is or what the biblical texts are as a collection as physical objects I'm not asking specifically about your religious investment in them but I want to talk about them as material objects where they come from and how we get them so I think the best way to do that is to go back in time so I know you're Episcopalians but does anybody actually have a Bible okay all right we're off to a good start so just one person from whence did you acquire your Bible just one person from your sister okay okay sisters are giving Bibles we've got a couple people who've gotten Bibles for sisters if you have some other kind of sibling you're out of luck apparently so somebody bought their Bible bought their Bible in a store so where did this store get their Bibles the sisters presumably were at a store at some point where did the stores get their Bibles publishers warehouse in the middle their publishers set words generally on paper in print even when it's a digital printing process when a publisher publishes a volume of anything they obtain the rights to publish it who holds the rights for biblical texts the rights for specific translations are held by the communities that sponsor and produce them so the New Revised Standard Version which many people encounter in churches and universities and seminaries is sponsored by the National Council of Churches and they hold a copyright so if all saints wanted to do a congregational Study Bible they could get permission to print and Allstate's version but it would come with rules because they hold the copyright so you'd have about four choices with all of the biblical text that we read as Episcopalians or with the short protestant version because it comes in two and with those little headlines that says creation first day and without those titles but the titles themselves can't be changed because they're a package because they hold the copyright so that text of the new NRSV is copyrighted by those who produce the translation what is translation and how does that get us a copy of a Bible in a store for somebody's sister to buy and give what's that part as we're going back or so we haven't even gotten all the way back it's a very slow time machine rolling back okay so people who know other languages working with earlier texts the biblical texts are not in English most of y'all know that but there are still a few people who say Jesus spoke King James English but curiously not Tyndale's English or Wickliffe English that's another lesson so the texts from which Bibles are translated collections of biblical texts are translated scriptures are translated we talk about them as being original language manuscripts but not original manuscripts because we don't have original manuscripts even our oldest and most complete manuscripts of the biblical collections are themselves copies of copies does anybody know what the oldest and most complete collection of ancient biblical manuscripts are it's the Dead Sea Scrolls that's why they're so important that's also why we have in NRSV we used to have an old RSV of course it was an old Vince oh it was just RSV the Revised Standard Version and just when it was finished the Dead Sea scrolls were discovered and one of the things we learned is that they have material that is older than any of manuscripts that we've had at that time material that agreed with some older manuscripts commentaries things like Josephus and some other ancient texts that now we know what they were talking about that they didn't make up but that they had access to these texts that we hadn't had and the NRSV is a correction of the RSV with about ninety updates in it so we have these ancient manuscripts now let's go all the way back to what I like to talk about as a God event something happens Moshe is walking around on this mountain Musa Moshe Moses by one name or another he has some kind of adventure that's the God moment how do we get from this person having an extraordinary day to some of us having biblical text on our tablets phones devices and in the Bible's our sisters gave us what has to happen when this person has this this day ma'am you got to tell somebody right so he has an adventure tree fire talking and I don't know let's call me by name it was a whole thing not only do you have to tell people but somebody has to think there's something to that story right because if you're people saying look you need to stop eating falafels before bed that story isn't going anywhere but when your children's children say t o Moses tell us the story about the bush tell us that story and the next generation says my grandfather Moses used to tell us this story there was this day he was on the mountain those stories become canonized in the telling the community says this story this just wasn't a falafel dream there is something happening there so we have a community that affirms a story even before it's written down so that when the time comes to write stories people say there's this story that we have always told and that should be in this collection now those stories get written down got written down in different ways and perhaps one of the most misunderstood aspects of doing biblical translation is that there is not a manuscript or a couple of manuscripts there are hundreds and in some cases thousands of manuscripts that are reconciled in the sort of professional critical manuscripts that those of us who are biblical scholars use with lots of footnotes and annotations and things so the path from God's pace and a counter that this person had with God to text on a tablet runs through manuscripts in other languages and the work that interests me most that has been my work for 20-some odd years translation now part of that is choosing the manuscripts and so when I translate let me back this up what languages are the biblical materials in what are the original biblical languages Aramaic Hebrew and Greek right every once in a while there's a contorted Egyptian word or some something else in there but those are the big three so translation then is rendering in womanís Midrash I do a whole appendix on translation and I commend it to you it's more in detail than anything I can do there but one of the things I say is how do you accept what translation is without using a verb to substitute for translation right so translation is taking a text in one language and putting it in another language rendering it into another language making it clear in another language circling back around translating it to another language there's a way in which talking about translation is kind of a hamster on a wheel so we have the originating languages and we have the reading hearing language we talk about source language and target language and so we've got to get a text that is an Iron Age text with some Stone Age ethics in it across to digital people we have to get a text in a language that in one cannon is rigidly binary people are just in two pots sort yourselves out those are all the pots we've got you just got to make it work - in another Testament one that has three options but is not following the the two pots that we have when we have the pots and is moving some stuff around we go from a language and when I get really philosophical about Hebrew I say things like I don't even know if we can say that Biblical Hebrew has verbs I mean is it really a verb if when you add a conjunction that changes the tense so it moves from past to present is that really a verb Biblical Hebrew doesn't have a present tense so what do we do with the philosophical notion the theological notion that God was is and is to come you can't say that in Hebrew because you don't have a present tense in the middle so how do you take these two worlds and make do a power of move and bring them together so that people can engage these texts that's the work of translation but as you know in this church perhaps more than some other places translation doesn't just happen on a laptop or a pad or even a clay tablet people do translation and people have flesh and experience and culture and ideas and so the work we produce whether it's translating or baking or painting or writing poetry or preaching is always in fleshed incarnation 'el work but there were some people who were so convinced that their incarnation was the standard of all incarnations and the thoughts that were shaped by their incarnation were the thoughts of all people but they didn't talk about or even really think about what their gender their maleness their presumptive heteronormativity their whiteness their elite nurse and education which I also share how all of these things shaped them so that's how you can get a text that was the my entree into translation that let me know just because it was on the pages of the Bible didn't mean it was right was when I heard now I'm I was a special child I loved languages I started teaching myself Hebrew way before I went to seminary I grew up speaking a couple of languages and I have the ability to puzzle them out I'm not fluid in Arabic but I can eavesdrop in Arabic I can translate what I hear I can't respond but I will know all your business so I knew that this conjunction I might not have not have known its name that it was evolved that it was pronounced verb but I knew it was conjunction junction what I knew that it connected this and I knew that it meant and and that Hebrew really doesn't have a but you have to do a bunch of stuff to make it a disjunction right and I knew that it was wrong in the King James Bible that I grew up with where it said I am black but beautiful because the people translating that could not see blackness as beautiful and so their whole identity went into that one conjunction saying in spite of being black she's all right right but that is not what the text said and so that was the first place where I understood that people make choices when they translate it and those choices affect what we hear what is it that we say on social media what TLDR too long didn't read it if you want to read it the work that I do in this book woman is Midrash does some of that unraveling and so I come to the work of translation with my whole body and my whole self and I translate not just for women the lectionary that I'm working on is a woman's lectionary because it centers women in the in the biblical text and it is for the church it is for all people it is for people who don't identify with a single gender it is for all but it is focusing on these characters who are already on the margins of scriptures and then even further on the margins of our lectionary if you've been hanging out in an Episcopal Church for a while you know we don't get the women's stories that we have right the Bible is already grossly Andrew centric right the biblical texts focus way more on yet there are for example just in the Hebrew Bible just talking about women who have names in the text not even counting the mother of and all the people who are just used as verbs to move the story aligned along and as literary incubators but characters who have a name in the text I might have said this when Austen was here so if you heard me say it then and you guess it doesn't count but how many women whose names are preserved do you think we might have in the whole first Testament not even counting the middle part with Judith and all that give me a number you were listening a hundred and eleven I always say a hundred eleven t cuz you know there's a couple that are a little wiggly so many we only have fifty two Sundays in a year in theory if we could work the text into the shape of our liturgical year focus on Advent focus on epiphany we could tell stories about God even stories that don't make God look good because often the stories come out really differently when you start putting the women on the page we could have a completely different way of telling the stories and so that's the project of the lectionary so what I'd like to do now is give you an example and it will be easier for me to do it from the book do a couple of examples of what this sounds like when I do it and what it might offer to the congregation so I started talking about the work of translation so translation occurs in largely a continuum one end of that continuum it's what's called formal equivalence and it's what most people imagine translation is like word-for-word finding the right word that matches this word and putting those words together on the page but because the languages are so different all translations have to move over towards what is called dynamic equivalence and when you get to the far end of dynamic equivalence which is where I'm not a particular fan then you get periphrastic things like the message but there's a lot of space in the middle so let me give you an example of a small line of text that most of us knew even if we were not religious the Lord is my shepherd is the way that many people have learned the intro to that song what does it say so the first thing it says is miss Morland I need there's an first line in all Psalms that for whatever reason the church has taken to throwing out the lines that contextualize them the lines that give musical direction so mizmor dahveed is a psalm that is 2 or 4 David and so there's a whole nother conversation about whether or not David wrote these Psalms or somebody wrote them down for him or they were dedicated to him because what they don't say is what is going to be at the top of almost all of your Bibles which is a psalm of David that's a different grammatical experience and so once I had my experience with the but of the Song of Songs then I sort of collected these almost like grudges right like places where I knew the text said something else but they were doing something else like giving David credit for the Psalter because that's what the church is always done but that's not what the text says right or the young woman who conceives a child in Isaiah who's not a virgin in that text in Hebrew right and so so I have this this list and I was going somewhere with that and I almost lost it so I'm trying to swim in the middle as close to formal equivalence as I can and we have ms marla dahveed the first part is a song of David Adonai ro e lo X R and then we start with what we learned in English the Lord is my shepherd but we can't even do that because there is no definite article there's no ver the the is implied by the use of a proper name that is functioning as a title but it doesn't say Lord because God's name isn't Lord Lord is the thing we say because we can't actually say God's name which are four sacred letters that have kind of a footnote system that tell you to say something other than try to pronounce what's there and so what we have used what was used in the Hebrew Bible and in rabbinic literature and going today are a number of options the most common was Lord so you get the Holy One whose name cannot be pronounced is my shepherd well there's not actually a form of the verb to be there and well Shepherd is a noun and it's not really a noun it's a participle that's functioning as a gerund with a article integrated on the back the one who pastures me or the one who Shepherds me right so is the translation the Holy One and we'll talk about God language in a minute the Holy One is my shepherd wrong it's not wrong but you had to do a lot of tap-dancing to get it there because these languages don't work in the same way right and we might not have a lot at stake when we try to figure out well can we translate shepherding verb with the noun Shepherd because participles do become substantive in Hebrew right I got to tell you the first time I taught Hebrew I was appalled because nobody knew what a gerund was and I realized I had to teach English grammar so we who do this work of translating are trying to be as faithful as possible to the text and as faithful as possible to the hearing reading audience and depending on the translator the investment in one or the other is going to shift this woman's lectionary has moved me closer to my reader hearers then I might do otherwise taking seriously that women and feminine gendered persons and entities and language descriptive language for God are there in the text but we don't get them depending on who translates and then who selects what texts for the lectionary so I'm gonna go back to the verse that if you were in service this morning you heard for the first reading and if you stay you'll also hear for the first reading and for those of you have a book I'm doing page 20 so the way that we translated the way that I translate and they reproduced Genesis 1:1 and 2 in the beginning he God created the heavens and the earth the earth was formless and shapeless and darkness covered the face of the deep while she the Spirit of God pulsed over the face of the waters I changed the verb when I gave them the lessons I'm always tinkering with it it'll never be done God introduces God's self and God uses or the texts use the text disclosed on behalf of God two different verbs with two different genders the Spirit of God is always feminine in Hebrew and Aramaic it just is some languages have gender for everything La Mesa right La Table like languages just work that way and so there's three types of gender there's biological gender so you know when you get a she asked which is a word the Bible likes or a cow it is biologically feminine when you so that's biological gender you get grammatical gender for objects everything trees cookies you know all have gender that's grammatical gender and then you get what I call ontological gender when we talk about God that gendered words are used but what are we actually saying that means in terms of what it is to be God to have a body to have an essence the Bible likes to give God parts a strong right arm feet for the footstool you know God's enemies and the earth are under God's feet God's eyes are open God's ears are open the mouth of the Holy One has spoken the only reproductive parts God has are a womb and it's the same in Hebrew and in Arabic so in in Arabic when we talk about God as being Allah meaning full of mercy it's really full of mother love that same verb in Hebrew rahama the root of that is the womb so it's sort of like singing I have a headache you can't I can't explain to you the feeling without naming the part right it's not just I'm hurting today I have a headache I have a backache the feeling is connected to the place and so when God loves one of the two words that God uses to love people it is this verb Rahu which I didn't come up with this translation Phyllis Tribble did this maybe in the 70s she called it womb love I call it mother love right that God mother loves us so even when the biblical text is using a masculine pronoun and gendering the verb masculine ly it will still say that God mother loves us right so there are these places that oh and the way that men have translated that pity or compassion so think think about this verse does a mother have pity or compassion on the child she is caring no does a mother have mother love for her child when Solomon divided the babies threatened to divide the baby and the birth mother said let her have it don't hurt the baby the text says her mother love rose up in her you will see that translated is her bowels of compassion or something like that really okay so so thinking about what it means that the Spirit of God is always disclosed with a feminine gender in the first part of our scriptures the Hebrew Bible in Greek it will become neuter which I which is whatever it is that's fine but then the church gets stuck with a masculine spirit because Jerome 400 years after Christ performs unauthorized and not volunteered for word gender reassignment on the Spirit of God chooses a gender that is not in any of the scriptures of the church a gender that just happens to be his so I do this little box on page 20 where I take a bunch of verses and say imagine what it might have been like for you growing up whether you're whether you are see yourself as having a single gender gender full woman man phim man wherever you are imagine if you heard language for God other than he him father and king so if you put the gender of the Spirit back to what it is in Hebrew then you get versus like the spirit she rested on them the Spirit she wore Gideon like a garment the Spirit of God she came upon David the Spirit of God this is one of my favorite ones in job it's often on my email the spirit of God she has made me right there are a good 30 places and I give you all the verses so you can look them up and do you do your own study it changes for me how I engage the text and ironically that is a form of biblical literalism right that's what the text says now my translation practice has a range of things but for me it's rooted in what does the text say and also for whom am i translating one of the challenges of the lectionary project is that i am translating in a world that is no longer binary and by emphasizing the presence of women and girls I have put a foot kind of firmly on the binary side of the world I'm also using inclusive language and a range of language but here's my challenge what I have learned is that for people who experience God and only learned about God with masculine language when you start to say creator and Shepherd and Redeemer that doesn't dislodge that image it's only when you say she in my experience that that image is interrupted for good or for ill so that is a part of what the work is in terms of the Technica as I said I have a whole translation appendix there and I do things like try to find the best fit in the range of words English has probably 50 to 60 words for every word in Hebrew right and so sometimes it's not just a matter of what does this word mean but what does it mean here in this place and which of all of our words can be utilized so I'm going to give you an wasn't one there's a text where after Deborah has led the Israelites to victory and in the lectionary I tend to say the women and men of Israel occasionally when there's some event and I know children were there I might say everybody or add the children but I specify the people in their bodies that in the world of the text some are women's some are men that there is a general who hasn't made it home yet and there was a court scene and his mother is with the Royal ladies and she's saying why isn't he here he's probably gathering spoils of war and the what the translations tend to say and gathering girls but what the text does in Hebrew is it uses that same anatomical body part and so you have the boys are a situation where a mother knows that her son is a rapist to the point that if he's not back from the war yet it's rape in time like that's what she's saying right but she's not saying he's collecting wounds we have this word womb this is kind of neutral that we use in Scripture he's not using a men she's not using a medical term he's collecting uteri or even vaginas right she's using a word that you properly wouldn't want me to read over the text he's out getting him some you could probably put a C word in there you could put a P word in there you could put all kinds of words in there the way in which she's using it calls for an ugly word right so even though there's the one word in Hebrew someplace else I might have used that is women someplace else I might have used that as belly but there I got to use something profane right so part of the work of translation is figuring out what is called for in each place I have no idea where we are in time I was gonna say and I wanted to hear back from you guys and I'm so sorry I did give you talk that time [Applause] [Applause]

Channel: All Saints Church Pasadena

Views: 2,633

Rating: 4.9310346 out of 5

Keywords: Progressive Christianity, Peace and justice, community, spirituality, peacemaking, inclusion, compassion, racial justice, revolutionary Jesus, womanist midrash, women's lectionary, women's lectionary project

Id: yGu_2yo_oOM

Length: 37min 50sec (2270 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 02 2019