McCrum on the surge

The dream of a true universal language is in the end dependent on perfect translation. Aside from the lessons of Babel, the history of the Bible istelf [sic] offers other cautionary tales, particularly this year – the 400th anniversary of that great cathedral of language, the King James Bible. The anniversary has proved to be both a cause for celebration and for reflection on whether there can ever be an ideal or final version of such a work. Isn't every new rendering bound to reflect the social and cultural context in which its translator works?

-- Emphasis added. To answer his question -- well, yes; though for "bound to" read "privileged to", with all the implications thereof. This quote is taken from Robert McCrum's essay reflecting on the "worldwide upsurge in demand for English versions of foreign bestsellers" in The Guardian. The word "surge" in my ear has a distinctly liquid register, as in the . Maybe this is a proscriptive metaphor, since I'd much rather see the flow of literature be cyclical -- as in the hydrological cycle, where the medium (here, letters) is by rounds gathered and distributed, homogenized and partitioned, made liquid and made vapor -- rather than linear, with texts flowing only ever down from their sources (in the different mountains of various homelands) into the ocean, sinking, until the source peters out. Pardon the flight of fancy; this contributor was reading The Agony and the Ecstasy all this holiday weekend, and he is now sodden with sentimentality.

Eugene Nida, Bible translator: 1914-2011

Eugene Nida passed away last Thursday, August 23rd, at the age of 96. As founder of the Eugene Institute for Biblical Scholarship, and overseer of translations for the American Bible Society, Mr. Nida coordinated the work of hundreds of translators all over the world and helped to make the world's most-published book accessible to the speakers of many of the world's languages.

Mr. Nida, a linguist, is given credit for developing and promoting a theory of "dynamic" or functional equivalence, which he reasoned was a more effective means of providing access to the Biblical text than literal translations which transmit Biblical concepts -- a camel through the eye of a needle, my father's mansions, nothing new under the sun -- into the new language without taking cultural and idiomatic differences. In a remembrance titled "Spreading the Word in Hundreds of Tongues", Stephen Miller writing for The Wall Street Journal notes "The results [of functional equivalence] often worked better than literal translation but can sound odd when translated back into English. For instance 'Love the Lord with all your heart' became 'with all your liver' in some west African languages." ... "But in Japan Mr. Nida encountered resistance to introducing cultural clarity [by using idioms belonging to the target language, rather than importing the idioms of the Biblical source]. They said, 'If we made the Bible that clear, what would preachers have to do?'"