KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 22 May
Found in translation
Lost in translation has become an all too familiar trope at once simplistic and naive. It contributes to the idea of translation as betrayal, literally a traducing of the text, the idea that what is expressed in one language simply cannot be expressed in another. This implies a kind of intellectual despair which runs counter to the ideals and principles of education. That there are difficulties and questions about translation is one thing; but that translation is impossible is an entirely different matter. And so perhaps, just perhaps, there is also the idea of things being found in translation.
Cultural literacy is a feature of Chapel, it seems to me, along with the effort to provide at least a limited kind of biblical literacy. In a School where there are more than two dozen different nationalities and a multitude of languages, cultures, and religious and non-religious identities, whatever that means, translation is not only a pressing concern on a day-to-day basis but is assumed as being in principle possible, indeed necessary. Translation is about more than language; it is also about the intersection of ideas in the cross-overs of culture. In short, translation is an essential quality of education. It requires a capacity to engage with one another respectfully and with a willingness to learn from one another. In this sense, translation counters the disquieting tendencies towards cultural arrogance or national superiority, to the tunnel-visions of narcissism, solipsism, or even racism.
The lesson from Ecclesiasticus read this week is partly about the question and problem of translation. One of the books of the Apocrypha, books written in the period between the setting down of the Hebrew Scriptures and the emergence of the Christian Scriptures, the New Testament, it belongs to a category of writing known as ‘wisdom literature’. It is the only apocryphal text whose author we know. Ecclesiasticus is the Latin term literally meaning ‘church book’ for what in Hebrew and Greek is The Wisdom of Jesus, The Son of Sirach, frequently abbreviated to Sirach. The work is in praise of sophia, wisdom, which already reflects something of the confluence of Greek and Hellenistic philosophy and Jewish thought; itself a kind of translation, we might say. Written in Hebrew in the early second century BC, it was translated into Greek some fifty years later by the grandson of the author as indicated in the Prologue which he added.
There we see explicitly the question of translation with respect to language. “For what was originally expressed in Hebrew does not have exactly the same sense when translated into another language.” But Sirach’s grandson also notes the desire on the part of his grandfather to communicate the wisdom of the Jewish world to others as part of an universal and ethical desire to live wisely. Thus there is a kind of congruence of cultures, a translation of ideas and principles through the love of learning that in turn governs our living.