Speaking Again

"Losing things in translation will always be a risk. But it’s a risk we recognise. It is the same risk that all Christians face when they try to express their loyalty to Jesus in their own particular lives and situations. Translation is difficult, but it is the same sort of difficulty as we face in discipleship itself."

―NT Wright on Bible translation

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Dear Kate,

Finally on my hand, hot off the press, the English edition of The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk, a thousand-page novel that took her 7 years to write and the translator another 7 to retell in English - for me, I would like to think, a book on the strength of which she won the Nobel prize for literature in 2018 - not for me to know why, or even what, until now.

On my other hand is the English edition of The Fruit Thief (Or, One-Way Journey Into the Interior) by Peter Handke, which took the translator 5 years to retell.  And a collection of essays published at the same time, 2 months ago.

If I could have 7 wishes granted, I would want to know how to read Tokarczuk in Polish and Handke in German and every tongue in its own tongue.  I am counting on God counting funny.

The other day I picked up the Chinese translation of Alice Munro's Friend of My Youth, and read for the first time the word "Meneseteung" in my mother tongue.  The translation is well done but not done well: the language simultaneously too ordinary and not ordinary enough to capture Munro's.  If I am to retell Munro I will need to speak my words orally and preferably from a rocking chair, or with metaphors.

Last night in my Men's Group we read together again and for the first time the Binding of Isaac.  I asked my friends, Tell me the story again, in your own words.  All of us with our state-of-the-art moral sensitivity found it necessary to first address the elephant in the room, that this is a story about child sacrifice - or is it?  In the original telling (as available to us), Abraham "lifted his eyes" twice; in our telling, we cast our gaze on him from up above, necessarily 7 times, before the story even began.

Yours, Alex