/lit/ - Literature

>David Crystal comments in his genial and entertaining Begat: The King James Bible and the English language, “evaluating the notion of ‘influence’ proves to be remarkably difficult”, and many writers, when challenged to demonstrate the influence of the KJB, tend to retreat into vague generalizations about its distinctive rhythms and cadences. Crystal prefers a more precise approach. His method of quantifying the influence of the KJB is to count the number of idioms it has contributed to the language. Begat takes the reader on a gallop through every biblical cliché in the book – girded loins, whited sepulchres, feet of clay, lands of milk and honey – and the many ways in which they have been creatively adapted in the media and popular culture.

>After doing his sums, Crystal comes up with a grand total of 257 idioms, most of which are not original to the KJB but are carried over from Tyndale or another early translation. This, as he admits, may seem a “surprisingly small” number, though still considerably more than any other single source (even Shakespeare, who clocks in at fewer than a hundred). Where this leaves the influence of the KJB is not altogether clear.

>Tadmor points to the virtual disappearance of slavery and polygamy from English Bibles. The word ’eved occurs 799 times in the Hebrew Bible, but its English counterpart, “slave”, appears only once in the KJB’s version of the Old Testament, which uses the word “servant” instead (or “handmaid” for female slaves) and reinterprets the language of bondage in terms of a legal contract or covenant. The word ’ishah was translated either as “woman” or “wife” (though, as early modern commentators were aware, there was no warrant in the Hebrew for any distinction between the two), and references to the “taking” of women were expressed in terms of marriage, thus bringing the Bible into line with early modern patterns of monogamy and marriage. Its implications are profound. Crystal’s collection of biblical idioms may be the most obvious way of evaluating the influence of the KJB, but it is Tadmor who makes the strongest case for its long-term effect on our language and cultural assumptions.

>Tadmor argues that, far from introducing extra diversity, the KJB had the effect of flattening subtle differences within the text. No fewer than fourteen different Hebrew words were conflated by the KJB into the single term “prince”, while a whole constellation of other titles were anglicized as the familiar sounding “captain”, “lieutenant”, “sheriff” or – in the case of eunuchs – “chamberlain”. As Stephen Prickett remarks, the translators created a “massive uniformity”, “the King James steamroller”, which effectively ironed out the differences, linguistic and cultural, between the Hebrew of the Old Testament and the Greek of the New, and turned the whole Bible into a “single dignified amalgam”.

>Poets resort to diverse devices to serve their intentions. They apply a variety of figures of speech; there is rhythm, rhyme, tone; there is deviation from the institutionalized linguistic code, and there is musicality expressed through meters and cadence.

>Poetry, possessing all the above components, aroused doubts and queries on the possibility of its translatability. Whereas some people look at it as a sacred entity, others dared to conquer its impregnable fortifications!

>The opponents of poetic translation such as W. B. Bateson and Turco propose their reasons: when poems, especially philosophical ones, satires, lyrics, etc, are translated into another language, they become not only flabby poems, but rather new ones in a new language. They stress that poetry in translation surely loses its basic elements. Such views go with the belief that poetry is wholly lost in translation.

>Should we, then, refrain from translating poetry, or should we attempt at translating it irrespective of all precautions? The second view is advocated here for if poetry is left inaccessible to translation, mankind would be deprived of a huge number of poetic works which are masterpieces themselves.

>One may wonder whether the translation be in verse or prose. A variety of views have been proposed in this regard. Theodore Savoy in his book The Art of Translation, 1968, mentions some of these views. He says that people such as Carlyle, Leigh Hunt and Professor Postates believe that poetry cannot be translated into a form other than poetry, for its aesthetic impact is expressed through meter.

>The difficulty of poetic translation leads many to think that the translator of poetry must himself be a poet otherwise he should not dare to square the circle!

>To conclude, poetry can be translated by those who have deep interest in poetry and who possess the poetic feel and sensation, in addition to their mastery of the other language. The poet, in this regard, is a leading translator. But, how many poets, who master a foreign language, can be found?

http://www.translationdirectory.com/articles/article1362.php

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-tragedy-of-google-books/523320/

Somewhere at Google there is a database containing 25 million books and nobody is allowed to read them.

>You were going to get one-click access to the full text of nearly every book that’s ever been published. Books still in print you’d have to pay for, but everything else—a collection slated to grow larger than the holdings at the Library of Congress, Harvard, the University of Michigan, at any of the great national libraries of Europe—would have been available for free at terminals that were going to be placed in every local library that wanted one.

>At the terminal you were going to be able to search tens of millions of books and read every page of any book you found. You’d be able to highlight passages and make annotations and share them; for the first time, you’d be able to pinpoint an idea somewhere inside the vastness of the printed record, and send somebody straight to it with a link. Books would become as instantly available, searchable, copy-pasteable—as alive in the digital world—as web pages.

>It was to be the realization of a long-held dream. “The universal library has been talked about for millennia,” Richard Ovenden, the head of Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries, has said. “It was possible to think in the Renaissance that you might be able to amass the whole of published knowledge in a single room or a single institution.” In the spring of 2011, it seemed we’d amassed it in a terminal small enough to fit on a desk.

>“This is a watershed event and can serve as a catalyst for the reinvention of education, research, and intellectual life,” one eager observer wrote at the time.

>On March 22 of that year, however, the legal agreement that would have unlocked a century’s worth of books and peppered the country with access terminals to a universal library was rejected under Rule 23(e)(2) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.