A Speech, A Poem, and The Beauty of Language

 

Marcus Tullius Cicero, 106-43 B.C.

While cleaning out some things at my mom's house, I ran across something she had saved from my freshman year at Indiana University.  Apparently I had written a poem about a speech we had read in our Cicero class, and my dad had typed it up.  What could have prompted a young man of eighteen to compose on such a topic?  The answer can be found in 374 words.

A Speech and a Poem

My first Latin class at IU was a 300-level course in Cicero taught by Betty Rose Nagle, about whom I have written here, here, and here.  Among the pieces we read that semester was Cicero's Pro Milone, a speech in defense of Titus Annius Milo that he delivered in 52 B.C.  I had read some Cicero in my Latin III class in high school and was already in a bit of awe over his command of the language, but one sentence in that undergraduate class took my breath away.  I couldn't leave it alone, and so I ended up writing a poem about it.

We often talk in our upper level Latin classes about the various benefits of literature, one of which is that literary works, like works of art of music, can capture moments for us.  The artistic efforts of another can express for us the deepest emotions for which we do not possess the words.  What follows is a young man's attempt to capture in his own words something that had so captivated his mind.  It is not a good poem, borrowing too heavily on the lines by Chapman that it references and too filled with the gushing emotion of a teenager, but the poem itself is not what is important here, but rather what inspired it.

374 Words

Cicero is famous for his periodic sentences, seemingly interminable constructions filled to the brim with parallelism and subordinate clauses.  One can get lost just trying to find the main verb.  Although this is not the style preferred today, and many teachers would likely pull out the red pen to suggest that one of his creations was in fact a run-on, when you work through a sentence like this and see the incredible balance of word against word, clause against clause, and the ebb and flow of intensity of thought, you cannot help but be amazed at its construction.  Think of the feeling you had when standing in the grandest building and marveling at both its architecture and the effort of its assembly.  Here was the sentence that inspired me as an undergraduate freshman.

De qua, si iam nollem ita diluere crimen, ut dilui, tamen impune Miloni palam clamare ac mentiri gloriose liceret: "Occidi, occidi, non Sp. Maelium, qui annona levanda iacturisque rei familiaris, quia nimis amplecti plebem videbatur, in suspicionem incidit regni appetendi; non Ti. Gracchum, qui conlegae magistratum per seditionem abrogavit, quorum interfectores impleverunt orbem terrarum nominis sui gloria; sed eum—auderet enim dicere, cum patriam periculo suo liberasset—cuius nefandum adulterium in pulvinaribus sanctissimis nobilissimae feminae comprehenderunt; eum cuius supplicio senatus sollemnis religiones expiandas saepe censuit—eum quem cum sorore germana nefarium stuprum fecisse L. Lucullus iuratus se quaestionibus habitis dixit comperisse; eum qui civem quem senatus, quem populus Romanus, quem omnes gentes urbis ac vitae civium conservatorem iudicarant, servorum armis exterminavit; eum qui regna dedit, ademit, orbem terrarum quibuscum voluit partitus est; eum qui, plurimis caedibus in foro factis, singulari virtute et gloria civem domum vi et armis compulit; eum cui nihil umquam nefas fuit, nec in facinore nec in libidine; eum qui aedem Nympharum incendit, ut memoriam publicam recensionis tabulis publicis impressam exstingueret; eum denique, cui iam nulla lex erat, nullum civile ius, nulli possessionum termini; qui non calumnia litium, non iniustis vindiciis ac sacramentis alienos fundos, sed castris, exercitu, signis inferendis petebat; qui non solum Etruscos—eos enim penitus contempserat—sed hunc P. Varium, fortissimum atque optimum civem, iudicem nostrum, pellere possessionibus armis castrisque conatus est; qui cum architectis et decempedis villas multorum hortosque peragrabat; qui Ianiculo et Alpibus spem possessionum terminarat suarum; qui, cum ab equite Romano splendido et forti, M. Paconio, non impetrasset ut sibi insulam in lacu Prilio venderet, repente luntribus in eam insulam materiem, calcem, caementa, arma convexit, dominoque trans ripam inspectante, non dubitavit exstruere aedificium in alieno; qui huic T. Furfanio,—cui viro, di immortales! (quid enim ego de muliercula Scantia, quid de adulescente P. Apinio dicam? quorum utrique mortem est minitatus, nisi sibi hortorum possessione cessissent),—sed ausum esse Furfanio dicere, si sibi pecuniam, quantam poposcerat, non dedisset, mortuum se in domum eius inlaturum, qua invidia huic esset tali viro conflagrandum; qui Appium fratrem, hominem mihi coniunctum fidissima gratia, absentem de possessione fundi deiecit; qui parietem sic per vestibulum sororis instituit ducere, sic agere fundamenta, ut sororem non modo vestibulo privaret, sed omni aditu et limine."  (Pro Milone, 27.72-75)

Let your eyes scan that block of text.  It is comprised of 374 words, contains numerous historical allusions, tricola, anaphora, asyndeton, and more.  The translation by Michael Grant for the Penguin edition breaks this one, periodic sentence in Latin into twenty-two English sentences across three and a half paragraphs.

You may or may not like Cicero's philosophy.  You may or may not like his politics.  You may or may not enjoy his style of oratory.  Regardless where one stands on the content of his words, any fair reading must surely leave a person willing to acknowledge his matchless command of the language.

After finding this poem from long ago, I looked up the sentence that inspired it in the edition I still have from that class.  It contains my penciled notes in the margins, including the notation that this part of the speech is an example of prosopoeia, which my marginalia define as "putting words in Milo's mouth."  Apart from this being a trip down my own, personal, memory lane, it prompts a question.  What turns of a phrase in a favorite book or poem, what individual sentences, what whole paragraphs or stanzas, leave you breathless not only for their content, but their form as well?

Those interested in the meaning of Cicero's sentence can find a translation here.

Paul and the Courtroom

At the suggestion of my principal and thanks to the incredible response from colleagues and parents to an email I sent, I am sharing here the story of a friend of mine and how it affected some of my students.

The Crime

A few years ago, my friend Paul was driving with his son.  After they passed a car on the road, the driver of that car pursued them in a fit of road rage and brandished a gun.  No one was hurt, and my friend and his son got away safely, but they were shaken nonetheless.

The Trial

Yesterday, my friend texted several of us to say that the court date had finally arrived.  He asked for prayer, but not for the reason you might expect.

Paul's text:  Part of the agreement that I made was that I get to make a "victim's statement."  I intend to talk about God's forgiveness and my relationship with Jesus Christ.  Please pray that I do so with boldness, authority, and with grace.  Please pray that it would be well received and that it would penetrate hearts in the courtroom.

I am sure there are many of us who claim to follow Jesus who would not have taken that approach.  We would have been glad that an ugly chapter of life was behind us and we may have prayed for the perpetrator, but I doubt that any great number of us would have seen the court date as an opportunity to evangelize, but that is who Paul is.  No, he is not an evangelist by trade, but he certainly is one by calling, and not long after his first text, we received another.

Second text:  Well, it's over.  I got to say my thing.  I told the defendant, in the presence of the judge, all the attorneys, and all the people in the court, that because of my relationship with God, I am commanded to forgive when I am wronged, and that I forgive him for what he did.  I then challenged him by telling him that there is brokenness in him.  After all, who pulls a gun on someone simply because they pass them on the road?  I told him that I understood his predicament because I, too, was once a broken man.  But through a relationship with Jesus Christ, I was able to address the brokenness in my life and find peace.  And I wished him that he would find that same peace.  You could hear a pin drop in the courtroom.  When we walked out, the prosecuting attorney told me that I had spoken well, but she was surprised at the "religious context" of my speech.  She said it's not something we usually do.  She then volunteered the information that she is a Muslim.  I told her that as a Muslim, surely she would understand the impact of forgiveness and peace.  She said she did.  And then, amazingly, she asked me to keep her in my prayers!

The Classroom

Deacon Rick Wagner is the president of the school where I teach, and he is big on stories.  He is always talking with students and faculty about the importance of sharing stories as a way to share the gospel, which of course is exactly what Jesus did.  My class of Latin III students was in session when I received the texts from my friend.  Ordinarily I would have ignored my phone's vibrations, but they were preparing independently for finals, so I read them, and once I had, I had to interrupt my students in their work.  I simply had to share what friend Paul had done in that courtroom.  When I had finished reading the texts, one of my students said, "Plaudite omnes," which is Latin for "everyone, applaud."  It is something I often say when a student has done or said something extraordinary, and this young man thought it the appropriate thing to say in that moment.  The rest of his classmates must have agreed, for they all began to clap.

Custom-Made Education

 

The ad verecundiam fallacy comes up when we claim something is true solely on the grounds that someone who is not an authority says it is true.  This fallacy underlies much celebrity-based advertisement and it is why I am not inclined to accept uncritically the ideas of Elon Musk, Bill Gates, or even those who sit on boards and committees of education.  Yet a good friend sent me this video of Musk's thoughts on education, and after watching it I couldn't stop pondering what he had to say.

Hand-Crafted

Musk's approach to education is not to front load terminology and the foundational facts of a subject, but rather to set up situations in which students can explore and discover the things to be learned.  There is nothing new in this, and we have a term for it:  inductive learning.  Using an automotive example, he argues for introducing students to an engine and then, when they have to take it apart and are searching for the best way to do it, introducing them to the concept of the wrench.

There is much appeal to this approach, and we all use it at one time or another.  There was a time when I didn't know the difference between a Roman Ogee and a Roman O.G.

As I did more wood working in my garage, I eventually learned the name for the router bit that makes such an elegant curve along with all sorts of skills involving table saws, scroll saws, and more.  I learned what I needed when I needed it.  I moved at my own pace and gained much from trial and error, and this is precisely why Musk advocates for this style of learning.

There are, however, key requirements for this to be a successful method of education, including both the interest and the disposition to learn, but the two I want to focus on here are time and size.  "Had we but world enough and time," wrote Andrew Marvell in "To His Coy Mistress," there would be no rush in romantic affairs and, I would add, in educational ones as well.  As I have developed my woodworking skills over the years, I have labored under no time pressure, and this has given me the space to make mistakes and to learn from them.  As for setting an engine in front of a group of students and allowing them to discover the need for something like a wrench, a low student-to-teacher ratio is not merely important, it is essential.

Mass-Produced

In the fall of 2021, there were approximately 49.5 million preK-12 students enrolled in public schools, which of course says nothing about the number of students in private, hybrid, and homeschool models.  Although these tens of millions of students are not evenly distributed across the country, thus creating some schools with very large enrollments and some with very small, the need is simply too great for each and every one of these students to participate in an inductive, discovery-based model of learning in all areas.  Let us be clear.  This does not mean that such a method cannot work at all in larger schools.  It may be well suited to certain subjects or certain units within certain subjects, but the time and low student-to-teacher ratio necessary for the success of this model cannot be obtained in the schooling of nearly 50 million children across twelve or more years in reading, writing fiction, writing nonfiction, earth science, biology, anatomy, chemistry, physics, algebra, geometry, calculus, Latin, Spanish, French, German, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, choir, band, orchestra, 2-D art, 3-D art, coding, and the nearly endless list of curricular offerings.

When I say that time constraints and human ratios are of necessary importance for this model, I mean that unless they are gotten right, the model will not work.  Let's start with time.  We continue to find ways for time not to be an obstacle to learning, but in a large school setting, we simply cannot serve the time needs of each and every student.  Student A may need more time to grasp a concept, but Student A cannot remain in the classroom of Teacher X to do so if Student A is required to be present in another class and if Teacher X must likewise teach another group of students.  However much we are able to accommodate the time needs of Student A, and perhaps even Students B through G, we will come to a point where practicality sets in and we will not be able to meet the need for Student H.

This challenge is a function of the other necessary factor at work here, student-teacher-ratios.  Most schools are limited in the number of teachers they can employ.  To reach a workable student-teacher-ratio for the model Musk describes, a ratio that will differ depending on the subject and needs of the students, far more money would be required than even the most ardent supporter of school funding considers, for not only would more teachers need to be hired, but there would have to be significant increase in building space in which teaching and learning would be done.  To educate 50 million children across fifty states from more than twelve years, practical forces, unlikeable though some may be, shape what we can and cannot do, and those forces have brought about the form of education that most people think of when they consider education at all, a form that can seem more like an assembly line of mass-produced parts than a hand-crafted work of art.

Salad Bowls and Melting Pots

My wife, an educator with more than thirty years of experience in the classroom and in administration within a variety of public, private, and hybrid models, is fond of saying that things are "both-and" and not "either-or."  As I referenced earlier, there are traditional, public school models of education in our country alongside private, hybrid, and homeschool models.  Some are better for some students, others work better for others, and there is no reason they cannot all sit side by side.  The entrepreneurial spirit that has been so much a part of the United States since its inception must surely celebrate this.  At the same time, even when practical factors within a large school setting limit some of what can be done, they do not limit all, and it is not only possible but in fact takes place every day in classrooms led by the best teachers that students learn from blended experiences that make excellent use of deductive and inductive education.

Seeing Through a Glass Darkly: The Whys and Hows of Translation

St. Jerome Translating the Bible

 

They say that people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones, and since I am working on my own translation of Vergil's Aeneid, it may be ill advised for me to offer the scathing critique I am about to put forth here.  On the other hand, sometimes a child needs to shout, "The emperor isn't wearing any clothes!"

The Whys of Translation

Why do we translate words from one language into another?  The most obvious reason is to make ideas in one language accessible to those who cannot understand that language.  There are innumerable ideas in poetry, philosophy, theology, history, science, mathematics, law, and all types of literature that people want to share and explore, and it is not possible or reasonable for everyone who is interested in those ideas to become conversant in the languages in which they were originally written.  A person may master several languages, but even the most multilingual among us will be not be literate in all of them.

Another reason to translate is because translation itself is enjoyable and can be a work of art per se.  The King James translation of the Bible is widely acknowledged as one of the most elegant works in English, and even though Richard Bentley did not think Alexander Pope's translation of Homer's Iliad was up to the mark, he conceded that it was "a pretty poem."  My own efforts to translate the Aeneid are akin to climbing K2.  There certainly is no need of another English Aeneid, for we have a full one hundred since the first in 1513.  I simply want to do it.  I have no delusion that mine could sit on the same high shelf as that of Dryden or Fitzgerald, but I have more fun translating than working the New York Times crossword, and the Aeneid is a really good story.   

The Hows of Translation

How does one go about translating a work from one language into another?  A blog post is not the place to work through the ins and outs of translation theories, and they can drive a person close to insanity.  Do I translate word for word?  Even then, what does that mean?  If a word means a canine animal, should I write "dog" or should I choose "puppy?"  Must I keep the words in the same order as the original?  There may be a particular sense expressed in that order, but when it is retained in English the result may sound like something from Yoda.  

This takes us back to the first reason for translation.  One method, or at least its results, may become outdated.  For all its beauty, the King James translation of the Bible can be downright unintelligible to some today.  It was published in 1611, and more than a few things have changed about English between then and the 21st century, hence the offering of sixty-two English versions on Biblegateway.com.

And this leads us to the translation that I want to discuss here.

One That Cruncketh in Howling

A good friend recently emailed me a blurb about Scot McKnight's forthcoming translation of the New Testament.  After a brief glance at the preview, I replied that it might be the most godawful thing I had ever seen.  It reminded me almost immediately of one of the most mocked and reviled works in all of English translation, the 1582 attempt at the Aeneid by Richard Stanyhurst.  Filled with grotesqueries like "her burial roundel dooth ruck, and cruncketh in howling," his efforts to produce English quantitative poetry like that of the Romans forced him into infelicities of expression and the use and spelling of words not current in his time.  One of his phrases, however, could be used to describe what we have with McKnight's work, "darcklye bemuffled."

McKnight says of his guiding principle in translation, "The basic theory at work in this translation can be summed up in these words: literal, chunky, sounds-more-like-Greek than standard translations (nothing against them), transliteration of names and places (like The First Testament), and somewhat disruptive for those who are familiar with their Bibles."  Let's take a look at what this means.

Matthew 1:18

The genesis of Yēsous Christos was this: His mother, Maria, being engaged to Yōsēf, before they had assembled . . . she was found having a child in her womb of the Holy Spirit. 

McKnight has transliterated the names from Greek into English letters, just as he said, and he held more closely to the Greek word order and syntax than most English versions, but to what end?  The verb he translates as "assembled" is συνελθεῖν, which means any of the following:  come together, assemble, meet, have dealings with, be united.  Regardless of the theology you hold on the relationship between Mary and Joseph, "assembled" is simply ridiculous here.  Why not say "came together?"  "Assembled" has too many connotations in 2023 that just don't work in this instance.  We use the word to describe putting together a child's toy on Christmas Eve or the coming together of a group of people.  We do not use it to describe any action performed by only two.

Matthew 2:8

Whenever you find, declare to me so I also, going, may bow down to him.

The odd syntax here is quite common in Greek and Latin.  The present participle "going" that modifies the pronoun "I" is usually rendered into some sort of clause in English, like "so I also may go and bow down."  Keeping the Greek syntax in English reminds me of the famous story, often attributed to Churchill, about the man who was challenged on the correctness of his speech when he said, "That is something I won't put up with."  The rule was often taught not to end a sentence with a preposition, so the man showed the absurdity of that by replying, "That is something up with which I will not put."  Does McKnight's rendering follow accepted rules of English grammar?  It does, but at the cost of wrenched and jarring syntax.

You may have thought I misquoted his line, for the expression "whenever you find" seems to want a direct object.  Both Latin and Greek are okay with this, but English is not.  The King James committee that published the Authorized Version in 1611 was so scrupulous as to put in italics words not in the original languages but that were necessary for English sense.  Those translators rendered this as "and when ye have found him."  I cannot see such torturing of English to imitate Greek as yielding anything other than frustration on the part of the reader.

Matthew 3:1, 13-14

In those days Yōannēs the Dipper [John the Baptist] arrives announcing in the wilderness of Youdaias....  Then Yēsous arrives at the Yordanēs from the Galilaia [Galilee] to Yōannēs to be dipped by him.  But Yōannēs was preventing him, saying, “I have a need to be dipped by you, and come to me?”

The use of the present tense "arrives" in these verses is accurate and could even be justified in its retention if the effort is to make the narrative vivid.  The historical present does just that.  But referring to John the Baptist as Yōannēs the Dipper is beyond absurd.  Actually, it may only be absurd.  Making John say, "I have a need to be dipped by you" is beyond absurd.

The root verb of "dipper" and "dipped" in this translation is βαπτίζειν, a word meaning such things as "to plunge," "to be drowned," "to dip," and "to dye."  Whichever definition you choose, you will be setting up a theological debate about baptism by sprinkling or immersion, but that is not the problem here.  "Yōannēs the Dipper" simply sounds ridiculous, and while that may not sound like much of an objection, it is.  When we use the word "Dipper" in its capitalized form in English, it invariably calls to mind the constellation called The Big Dipper.  The phrase "John the Dipper" cannot help but summon images of Jack the Ripper, a rhyming phrase of the same number of syllables and the same rhythm.  However accurate the word "dip" may be in this context, it carries too much other freight to be effective here.  As for "I have a need to be dipped by you, and come to me," I can only assume this is a typo, since the Greek verb for "come" is not only second person singular, "you" in English, but even includes the second person pronoun σὺ, as if to emphasize "you."

You can read most of McKnight's translation of Matthew here, but you get the idea.  So, why am I displeased with this work?  It has to do with the reason McKnight had for translating.  He says on his website, "Yes, I use some nonstandard translations of terms with which we are so familiar we don’t even see the words! Our prayer is this translation will slow readers down to hear the NT afresh."  This is a laudable goal, one more worthy than my own of mere personal pleasure in the act of translation.  Unfortunately, this translation misses the mark.  The effort to be "literal," "chunky," and "more-like-Greek" has resulted in English that at times is merely awkward and at others nearly unreadable.  If the goal is to slow readers down with a Greek-like translation so they can consider afresh passages that have grown dull through familiarity, there is a better way to go.  Interested readers can learn Greek.  The Greek-like version of McKnight is more akin to the odd and stilted translationese of the secondary or undergraduate language classroom.

One blurb on McKnight's website reads, "Scot McKnight's translation of the New Testament takes us into the very world of Jesus and the apostles; it breathes the air of antiquity. Rather than try to make the New Testament too familiar, McKnight makes it sound foreign, like a distant land you are hearing about for the first time. The Second Testament is a monumental literary achievement that will enrich and excite readers for generations."  Why?  Why would we want an ancient work in modern language that sounds ancient?  First of all, the perceived oddness in the target language is not at all what first century audiences would have taken from the New Testament writings.  Read a passage from McKnight's translation of Matthew and you will experience jarring strangeness.  A first-century, Greek-literate person reading that same work in the Greek that Matthew wrote would have experienced ease and familiarity, at least with the style of writing.  The content, on the other hand, is jarring in the extreme, but that comes from the power of what Jesus had to say.  The message is already challenging.  What benefit is there to reading it in the "air of antiquity," especially when the message bore no such antiquity in the period when it was written?

What made Richard Stanyhurst's 16th century English translation of the Aeneid so execrable was that he was attempting to write in English quantitative meter.  Simply put, the quantitative meter of Homer's Greek and Vergil's Latin is based on long and short syllables, a system that does not exist in English, the poetry of which is often based on accent.  By forcing the English language into the syntax of ancient Greek, McKnight has unfortunately proven what Jesus described with another metaphor.  "Neither is new wine put into old wineskins.  If it is, the skins burst and the wine is spilled and the skins are destroyed.  But new wine is put into fresh wineskins, and so both are preserved,"  (Matthew 9:17, ESV).

If the goal had been to play with the form of languages and experiment as a jazz musician might do, then we could look upon this with a degree of interest.  Since the stated purpose, however, was to draw people into a fresh encounter with the word of God, this version must be seen as one that only darkens the glass through which we are hoping to see.