I’ve recently made the move from standard to baritone ukulele, and, in doing so, I faced a decision: learn all new chords or play the same chord and fingering patterns I already know without really understanding what I’m playing.
You see, if you play the standard uke chord shape for a C
on a baritone, it will sound great, but you’re actually playing a G chord because of the different string tuning (DGBE vs gCEA).
So, I can play a song that feels to my fingers like C Em AM F, but I’m really playing G BM EM C. The song will sound like and unlike because while the chords have changed, the progression is the same (I V vi IV). I’m playing the same tune but in a different key.1 And if you’re playing by yourself, and your singing sucks anyway, who cares about the key?
The question for me was, should I bother "translating” my chords to the new instrument, i.e., learning the baritone fingering for a C chord when I can just fake it in a different key? I decided the answer is yes, I should, not just because I have fantasies of jamming with other people someday and playing in the right key, but also because I want my songs to sound more authentic.
Now “authenticity” is what in academia we used to call “a vexed issue.” Is there such a thing? Sometimes not.
My father, for example, used sometimes to reminisce about an “authentic” Thai soup he once ate. Whenever we went to a Thai restaurant, he would order a soup and then complain it wasn’t “authentic” because it didn’t taste like the one he had in mind. But who can say what is an authentic Thai soup? How would you determine its authenticity? Because it was made by a Thai person? Or in Thailand? But surely, there are many varieties across the geography of time and place, even in Thailand. In reality, there is no authentic Thai soup.
In reality, this is not a pipe.
But there is, I would argue, an authentic “Let It Be” (unless you start getting into debates about mono vs. stereo recordings, remasters, and stuff like that), and that’s what I want to play when I play it. I want to play the original chords in the correct key and to have in mind their correct names.2
I feel the same way about davening and translation.3 I want my English translation of Hebrew prayers to be as close as possible to the original. I don’t want shortcuts. I don’t want help that “makes it easier.” I don’t want the translation to sound like modern English; I want it to sound like ancient Hebrew.
I’ll give you a quick example of what I mean. There’s a prayer we’re supposed to say, “once a month during the first part of the lunar cycle.” It’s called “Kiddush Levana,” which is usually translated as “Sanctification of the Moon.”
Now, frankly, it’s an annoying prayer because it comes right after the service that closes out Shabbat, and I’m just wanting to get into my car and get home and check my email, but guys are passing out pamphlets and expecting me to stand behind the shul in the dark, stare at the moon for a second, say half a dozen prayers that I never finish before they start leaving, say “shalom aleichem” to three different people who’ve got their own prayers to get through, and answer back, “aleichem shalom” to whoever says it to me. The whole thing is kind of awkward and stressful. 4
But that’s not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about the title of this prayer.
“Kiddush” comes from the term קָדוֹשׁ—“kadosh”—which means “holy.” The angels, according to the prophet Isaiah, say, “Kadosh, kadosh, kadosh. Holy is the Lord.” So, to my mind, “kiddish levana” doesn’t mean “sanctification of the moon” but something more like “declaring the holiness of the moon.” But it doesn’t mean that either. Because the Hebrew word for moon is actually יָרֵחַ—yareich. “Levana” means something like “the white (one).”
“Declaring the holiness of” is kind of awkward in any language, and “sanctification” to my mind is too stuffy, so one might translate this simply as “Blessing the White.”
I told my son that, and he said my translation sounded like a caveman talking, and I said, “Exactly!”
When I think, “blessing The White,” I picture some lone shepherd in the desert, four thousand years ago, staring up at the sky in gratitude. When I read “Sanctification of the Moon,” I picture some pious medieval scholar who doesn’t trust the language of lowly shepherds.
Maybe it’s just the Romantic in me, but just as Wordsworth said that poetry should be a “man speaking to other men”—as opposed to a poet speaking to men, or worse yet, a poet speaking to other poets—prayer should be a simple person speaking to God in the language of real people. 5
Real men don’t eat quiche, it was once said. I say real men don’t use the word “sanctify.”6
I’m getting into deep water here because a. I don’t know nearly enough Hebrew to be offering opinions on translation and because b. every translator I’ve ever read says exactly the opposite of what I’m asserting.
Aryeh Kaplan, for example, in his preface to A Call to the Infinite, a book that excerpts various instructive teachings on prayer, says he has chosen a “‘modern’ style of translation, which stresses readability and intelligibility. . . even at the expense of slavish literalness.”
Kaplan’s attitude is typical of nearly every translator’s preface I’ve ever read. The argument goes something like this: You can’t do a literal translation because it will sound too foreign, and the original work didn’t sound foreign to those who wrote or spoke it, so it shouldn’t sound foreign to those who read it.
I, however, believe the work should feel foreign to a modern American reader because it is foreign. I don’t want some translator transmogrifying the ancient world into modern America; I want him to transport me to a different time and place. Unlike my position on immigration, I don’t want the work to assimilate; I want it to maintain its difference.
Let me give you an example I often give my students. In 1999, there was a made-for-TV movie about Jesus, aptly named Jesus. In that film, there’s a scene where our hero meets his cousin, the prophet John (the Baptist), for the first time since they were children. Jesus walks up to John’s campfire and says, “What’s the matter, John? Don’t you recognize your own relative?” Then he sits down with John and his followers, and the conversation goes something like,
“How long has it been?”
“20 years?”
“How are you? What are you doing now? How are Joseph and Mary?”
Though dressed in desert clothing, Jesus and John’s mannerisms, facial expressions, and mode of speech feel more like two old friends meeting at a bar mitzvah in New Jersey than two prophets meeting by a campfire in Judea. When I got to that scene (about 17 minutes in), I turned the show off. I didn’t want my Jesus to sound like my cousin from New York (no offense, Andy). I wanted him to sound like a man from a vastly different culture and time.7
The director obviously thought otherwise, but I suspect that was because he didn’t trust that his late-nineties audience could relate to a man from a vastly different culture and sensibility. He had to translate the words, the gestures, the intonation, even the facial expressions, into last-year-of-the-twentieth-century American. He wanted a Jesus who felt more like Brad Pitt than “the Lord.” In short, he pandered.
There are many reasons (besides pandering) why translators avoid the literal.
One is the misbegotten attempt, such as the Jesus example above, to translate not only the words but also the culture of the original so that it feels as familiar to the reader as it did to the original audience. This, however, is a mistranslation because it renders what ought to be strange as familiar.8
Another motivation common in religious works is the desire to elevate. The religious translator may consider the common language to be too common. He doesn’t want the language of shepherds and peasants but of priests and scholars, courtiers, and bureaucrats. He wants “edifice,” not “house,” “manifold,” not “many.”
Then there is the fear of idioms—or, more accurately, of the reader’s laziness. For example, the translator of my siddur renders the line of prayer, “v’hara af adonai bechem” as “then the Lord’s anger will flare up against you,” but the literal translation is more like, “then the nose of the Lord will redden against you.”
The translator doubtlessly figures the modern reader won’t get that “redden his nose” is an idiom for anger, so he omits the metaphor. And he may be right. The reader might not get it at first. But just as a Japanese reader9 of English can learn that “raining cats and dogs” does not mean that animals are falling from the sky, a modern reader can eventually learn that “redden his nose” is a colorful way of rendering anger in ancient Hebrew.
Or if that one is too far-fetched for you, how about this line from Judaism’s central prayer, “The Amidah”: “for You hear the prayer of kol peh,” which I translate as “all mouths,” but which the translator renders as “everyone.” “All mouths” is a synecdoche, a type of figurative speech in which a part substitutes for the whole, as in “all hands on deck” instead of “all sailors on deck.” Why substitute the bland “everyone” for the more embodied “all mouths?”
Or take the “Viduy,” the confessional prayer, where we say “she’ain anu azi panim,” which my siddur’s translator renders, “we are not so impudent,” but which literally means, “we are not so strong-faced.” Now, I might accept replacing “strong” with “brazen,” but we definitely need to save face.
This leads to the doctrinal motivation. Some translators don’t trust readers with the implications of metaphors and similes. They fear simple-minded people will reify the metaphor, that is to say, take it literally, not figuratively. They’ll see, for example, God as having a nose, which is a no-no. Maimonides explains that the great second-century translator Onkelos,
made it his task to oppose the belief in God’s corporeality. . . Thus he paraphrases “the Lord will come down” [as] “The Lord will manifest Himself” . . . . or the words “under his feet” he therefore paraphrases “And under the throne of his glory.”
Onkelos took pains to ensure readers didn’t see God’s feet, which, of course, He doesn’t have, in the interest of theological purity. Maimonides approves of such translations. I do not.
I mean, if we believe that God wrote the Bible, can’t we trust His metaphors? And if we don’t believe it was God, but was some kind of ancient poet, can’t we trust his metaphors? Or trust the reader not to read as a child.
Of course, Maimonides would say that many readers do read like children. Fine, right, I agree. But teach them to read like adults rather than adulterating the text.10
Of course, I go along with some “rewriting” for clarity. I would translate beit gadol as “big house” instead of “house big.” I’d support “David is King” over “David King” for a translation of “Dovid Melek,” despite my appreciation of the cave-man like dropping of the verb to be. I want to maintain the difference, but I don’t want the translation simply to be strange.
How does one determine what is permissible and what is not, according to the principles I’m suggesting? Intuition, art, just as the translators have always said. I’m just saying I prefer when they err on the side of the literal. I prefer they don’t treat me like a child who must be protected from his own misreadings or who must have his texts pre-chewed to avoid choking on them.
Of course, it’s all very personal. You may prefer King David to sound more like Keanu Reeves than Laurence Olivier. Or you may enjoy sanctifying more than declaring holy. You may prefer standard tuning to baritone. You may prefer that I leave ukuleles out of the discussion altogether.
I don’t blame you. I blame myself. I’ve got ukuleles on the brain and a penchant for the literal.
This is music theory stuff. Chord progressions map chords in relation to each other rather than referring to specific chords. So you can play an I V vi IV progression in the key of C or of G or F or whatever. The same progression, regardless of the key, will result in, roughly speaking, the same tune.
Of course, I’m translating the song, regardless, from guitar to uke because, well, six strings are just too much for me. This is one of the many ways in which this strained metaphor keeps disintegrating.
What you have been reading until now is a journalistic device I despise: the back-in lede. I almost always skip the back-in lede and jump to the spot where the real article begins. If you do that also, this is the place where the authentic discussion begins.
It’s even more annoying after the 25-hour Yom Kippur fast, though one writer argues that it’s worth going hungry and thirsty for another ten minutes.
The writers of the Bible may also have been Romantics of a type. Maimonides says “The Torah speaks in the language of men.”
Real men also don’t apologize for using the word “man” in the old sense of meaning “human.” I got chastised by a fellow student back in the late 90s for using the word “man” that way in my mock oral exams at the University of Chicago. I had done a pretty piss poor job in that warm-up for the real thing, and that correction was like rubbing salt in the wound, like the student in David Mamet’s Oleanna telling her professor not to call his wife “baby.” Unlike the professor, though, I just sat there and took it. But I’m still bitter, as you can probably tell.
Compare the 1999 TV Jesus to the corresponding scene in the incomparable Zeffirelli film Jesus of Nazareth, which maintains the strangeness and holiness of the Gospels (1:38:11). Jew that I am, I’m still impressed by Michael York’s stunned face when he finds Jesus standing before him. “It is I who need baptism from you, and yet you come to me,” he says. “Let it be so,” says Jesus. “We must fulfill all righteousness.” Jesus Christ Superstar and even Godspell are maybe counter-examples to my point, as they somehow did incorporate modern culture into the story while somehow maintaining the strangeness of it.
[Foot note to this footnote] It’s been suggested that this critique of the film Jesus contradicts my earlier point that a poet should “be a man speaking to other men.” But I’m not saying a poet or biblical figure should be a dude speaking to other dudes. Wordsworth, anticipating this problem, asserts that men such as he has in mind are “endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness. . . . a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind. . . .” and that is reflected in the way they express themselves. What holds for poets holds for prophets, who the Romantics would argue were poets.
It also dooms your translation to an ephemeral historical audience. Graeme Wood points this out in his discussion of a new translation of The Illiad in the January issue of the Atlantic. He lists several preceding translations, each of which “was heralded in their time as having chased away the previous generation’s archaisms.” And then wryly comments on the mortality of such projects, “The bell of fustiness: it tolls for thee.”
Interestingly, Japanese anime and manga have a whole repertoire of visual idioms that do not translate across cultures without educating the audience. In anime, for example, a bleeding nose can signal sexual arousal.
Of course, there’s one other motivation for translation: money and prestige. You don’t leave much room for new translations if you stick to the script. The whole academic and publishing industry of translation is built on creating a need that may or may not be there.