233 - Musings of a Translator

Musings of a Translator
Patrick D. Miller

This issue of THEOLOGY TODAY features a symposium reviewing the recently published revisions of the New English Bible and the Revised Standard Version, now to be known respectively as the Revised English Bible (REB) and the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV). Because of the attention that these publications have drawn, and because I have spent much of my personal time and energies over the past fifteen years in two translation projects, serving on the Inclusive Language Lectionary Committee and the Revised Standard Version Bible Committee, I find myself engaging in considerable reflection on all that work and its results.

While Bible translation is hardly an earth-shaking enterprise in our time, particularly since it has become so popular, there is nevertheless intense interest in such activity on the part of many people, and they manifest widely varying reactions to its results. To some extent, in the projects I worked on, that is in part due to the fact that one of them was highly controversial (An Inclusive Language Lectionary, otherwise known as ILL) and the other involved a revision of a translation that was controversial forty years ago but has become the principal translation used in many of the churches in this country and is widely used in the academy also. Reactions to ILL ranged from threats against the persons and families of the translators and disdainful and arrogantly dismissive responses on the part of media and scholarly reviewers, to serious discussion on the part of others, including great joy and enthusiasm from those who had yearned to be able to read the Scriptures in the church without the heavy gender-oriented form in which they were encouched from their appearance to the present. The arrogance of some in dismissing the work of the committee was disturbing but understandable; I carried much of that same attitude to my reading of the draft work of the committee when I joined it well after it was underway. That began to melt quickly as I encountered intelligent discussion and realized how thoroughly the committee had considered each decision and how superficially-and traditionally-I had reacted. It is too early to tell what the spread of reactions to the NRSV will be. The intense interest is already visible as bookstores are selling out of copies as fast as they can get them.

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I

The proliferation of translations, an often bewildering fact to a lay person, is due in part to the different goals that may be pursued quite legitimately by different translators. ILL is an example of a translation heavily shaped by a single goal, the one reflected in its title-the production of a translation whose language is as inclusive as possible and whose use is specifically for the church's worship. Attention was also given to other factors, such as good English style, solving textual and philological difficulties, simple language, and the like, but the primary aim of the translators was centered on one task. Today's English Version is a translation whose title also reflects a single primary goal, the production of a Bible version in simple, clear, everyday English style. The RSV committee bad several goals. These included the reduction of gender-oriented language as much as possible, but just as much attention was given to philological considerations, to the impact of textual and other discoveries upon our understanding of the Hebrew and Greek texts, and to improvement in style and syntax. The variety of goals, the larger committee, and the gradual addition over fifteen years of new members to the RSV committee also meant that conflicts arose among members of the committee over how much weight to give to different aims. The original intention of the committee to be highly conservative in making changes began to give way to more radical change as the committee itself changed and progressed in its work.

Translation by committee has a long history. It has advantages (for example, drawing upon a wider circle of expertise) and disadvantages (the danger of inconsistency and weak compromise decisions). What I became aware of also is how different may be the processes of translation work even when done by committees. The RSV translators, for example, worked in subcommittees even in the early stages when the New Testament and Old Testament committees worked separately. The ILL committee, with a much smaller agenda of texts to be covered, worked always in full committee. Not only were there not subcommittees in general, but the shift between testaments did not affect how we worked except that some members of the committee had more expertise in one testament than the other. The RSV committee always made its decision by vote. In the early stages of the committee's work, the votes on each decision were actually recorded. In later subcommittee work, that practice disappeared. We were conscious of how often decisions were unanimous and also how often they were by a divided vote, not infrequently with a margin of one vote on some very important issues. I had assumed that the ILL committee would work in a similar fashion. It was some time before I realized that we had made many decisions but had not taken a single vote. Even when I assumed that we were so deadlocked that we would finally have to vote, we were able to continue working on the problem until we reached a consensus. It would be difficult for me to judge that one process produced better or poorer

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results than the other. The consensus process does seem to have produced a greater sense of unity and harmony on the part of the committee about the results of its work, an outcome clearly to be distinguished in both cases from the actual quality of the work. Close and conflicted decisions are not necessarily bad ones.

II

As a translator, I came away from both enterprises with a sense of satisfaction about the results but also a nagging ambivalence. The satisfaction is real. While I do not know how widely ILL has been used in the churches, many persons have turned to it and found it helpful. The same is true for me. And as I begin to use the NRSV that has taken up so much of my energy, I am frequently and quietly pleased by its many improvements in style, inclusive language, accuracy, and the like. I hope and believe that it will take its place as a useful and much read translation in the classroom, the church, and the home.

But other thoughts and feelings are there also, Revision may be necessary, but it is not all boon. What happens to the RSV now? Has it been made obsolete? As it has taken its place and become increasingly the translation by which many in the church have learned the Scriptures, the shift to a revision complicates the educational task of the church. It may be that there are so many translations loose in our midst that one more makes no difference. But that simply confirms the sense that translation activity is a mixed bag, contributing to biblical illiteracy and ignorance of Scripture as well as overcoming it.

The sense of ambivalence is apparent in other ways. One is aware of how much has been accomplished and also of what could have been done, for example, if the ILL committee had been able to start from scratch rather than revising RSV, or if all the RSV committees could have worked together the whole time. Inevitably, too, each translator thinks, even if the thought is repressed, that it could have been better if he or she had prevailed on more decisions. Personally, that feeling is happily matched by the conviction upon reading the final published translation that it is better than I thought it would be. One looks back already and wonders in some cases: "How did we happen to translate it that way?" Memory is fleeting, but remembering and justifying decisions is finally not as important as whether or not the final results bring the text to life faithfully and powerfully. Buried in deep discussion and argument that outcome may get temporarily forgotten. Now that the work is done, one hopes the text will come to life in just such fashion.

III

This issue of THEOLOGY TODAY also calls attention to another kind of "translation" activity that has been going on in the life of the church. Hymnal revision is not the same as Bible translation, but there are important commonalities as committees work to preserve the good of the old and change for the better, to bring out a text that is in a

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contemporary idiom and attentive to language change of various sorts. Indeed, the church may become more excited-or agitated-by hymnal revision than by Bible revision. For the hymns of the church always become our own words and song. Much of the time, we may encounter the Bible only as words read and spoken to us. Hymns always, by their nature, become our words sung to God.