Adam Nicholson writes,
By the early 17th century, a crucial difference had developed in translation theory between sacred and non-sacred texts. Anyone thinking of translating history, poetry, foreign tales or works of classical rhetoric, taking their cue from Cicero and a couple of words of Horace, would despise the literalist as a plodding, and scarcely civilized pedant. Any well-educated man would take a text in a foreign tongue and absorb its meaning so that he could reproduce something like it in his own language. Literalism, a word for word translation, would do nothing more than transfer the corpse of the original into a new language, not the living thing. Cicero, when translating Demosthenes and other great Athenian orators, ‘did not translate them as an interpreter’, he wrote, ‘but as an orator myself, keeping the same ideas and forms, or as one might say, the “figures” of thought, but in language which is more suitable to the way we speak’.
This, of course, was also a question of authority. Cicero did not consider himself subservient to the Greeks he was translating. He was at least their equal. Why, then, should he suppress his own eloquence on their behalf? Luther, fascinatingly, the grandfather of all Reformation translators, had taken a Ciceronian view of this task. When faced with translating a Bible text, he had written, ‘You’ve go to go out and ask the mother in her house, the children in the street, the ordinary man at the market. Watch their mouths move when they talk, and translate that way. Then they’ll understand you and realize that you are speaking German to them.’ His whole idea, he said, was ‘to make Moses so German that no one would suspect he was a Jew’ (“God’s Secretaries” in The Making of the King James Bible, 184-185).
We’ll be rooting worship this Sunday in Romans 3.19-28. Here is a link to the New Revised Standard Version translation of the text. The Message by Eugene Peterson is a contemporary “translation” or paraphrase of the Bible. It could be said that Eugene Peterson is interested in “translating” the verses for the mother in her house down, children in the street, the ordinary man at the market. Here is a link to Eugene Peterson’s version of the same text. How do you decide which translations to read? Does accuracy of translation matter to you? How do you hold the tension between historical accuracy and readability?
0 Comments