A Mini Rant Set off by an Ancient Jewish Poem of Thanksgiving

Nostalgically, I grabbed my worn-out copy of Biblia Hebraica off my bookshelf this afternoon and started flipping through it. Then I realized that I had placed a bookmark at the location of poem #136 in the collection of ancient Jewish poetry known by its Hellenized name, the Psalms. It's a thanksgiving poem. And today is thanksgiving in the US. Uncanny. I still can't recall why I placed my bookmark there.

By the way, psalm 136 is a beautiful poem, but something about the repetition in it just doesn't appeal to me. I'm more interested in poems like Psalm 119 which is brilliantly acrostic. Now that's hard to compose. Repeating the same sentence over and over in the same poem? Not so much.

Regardless, let's get back to #136.

As any competent translator will tell you, nothing presents more difficulty than the task of rendering poetry from one language to another. The task of translation is already extremely challenging. In fact, show me a translator who finds his/her job easy and I'll show you someone who stinks at what s/he does). Subjecting one poem structure used in one culture and language group to another poem structure used in another culture and language group requires a skill which, well, I'd say, nobody has. If you want accurate translation of a poem in its entirety, the structure goes out the window. If you want to preserve the poetic appeal of the original poem, the translator almost always has to take poetic license, in which case dynamic translation becomes necessary and literal translation not only impractical but utterly impossible.

And that's perhaps why if you ask anyone well-versed in classical Hebrew, they'll tell you that the translators of the Septuagint (LXX) which is the Greek version of these Jewish sacred writings kind of messed it up.


The sentence that is repeated throughout #136 is כִּי לְעוֹלָם חַסְדּוֹ which says, for/because his (i.e. YHWH's) "hesed" is forever. We'll come back to hesed in a moment.

The LXX has rendered that Hebrew sentence thus: ὅτι εἰς τὸν αἰῶνα τὸ ἔλεος αὐτοῦ. Literally, it means, "for/because his mercy [is] forever."

The Greek word used to render חסד (hesed) is ἔλεος (elelos), the word that Hebraists will tell you is too general, too weak, too insufficient to convey the meaning of something so deep and relationship-focused as hesed. "Loyalty" or "covenantal loyalty" have been suggested as a better translation. Even so, it's still not quite accurate. Hesed is a loaded word carrying with it tons of historical and religious significance, and "mercy," it's been pointed out, is merely a tiny, tiny part of this covenantal loyalty which the main deity of the ancient Hebrews, to and about whom this poem is written, has with his people.

Why, then, is the suggested translation not more prevalent among the various English versions? Given what we know about western civilization, which language has more chances of influencing/reaching the masses? Not classical Hebrew. Which version of the psalm reached far and wide into the world? Not the Hebrew version.

Hence the feeling that this is not right, that a culture or a language group is misrepresented. This may not represent one of the cases that are considered big deals—and this whole thing may seem trivial to many—but I figure it's kind of a big deal to the misunderstood.


Which brings me to something that has bothered me for nearly two weeks now.

I don't know why this bugs me so much. It happened a long time ago; and by this time people know better than to reconstruct the history of Thailand based solely, or even heavily, on the various accounts of western visitors who perceived things through their western lenses.

An outsider's view is not a bad thing. Not only is it not bad, it can also be very useful in providing a perspective you don't have as an insider. An outsider's view is bad only when the outsider is not aware of—or, worse, will not acknowledge—the limitations of his/her view or the possibility that it could be skewed due to various factors. An outsider's view is particularly bad when the outsider commits a preventable gaffe of making assertions without proper and thorough verification with respectable sources.

For example: "Having no corn, they supply its lack by cakes of rice," said François Henri Turpin of the Burmese, in Histoire naturelle et civile du royaume de Siam (1771).

The Burmese ate rice because they lacked corn? Is rice what you eat when you don't have corn? Nothing personal, but shut up, Turpin. Oh, sorry, I was being rude. Shut up, s'il vous plaît.

But the screen shot above doesn't come from Turpin; it's an excerpt from a different book, Du Royaume de Siam by Simon de la Loubère.

In this excerpt, de la Loubère asserts that the Siamese in the 1600s called their king, "Pra Maha Crassat." The word, "crassat [sic]," says he, means "living" (vivant). Since "pra" generally means "god" ("according to the Portuguese," he writes) and "maha" means "big," de la Loubère concludes that "Pra Maha Crassat," the term used to refer to the king of Siam, means, "The Great Living God" (le Grand Dieu vivant).

O. Kay.

Although ... the Thai word for "king," กษัตริย์ (ka-sat), comes from the Sanskrit Kshatriya (क्षत्रिय) which means "warrior." And since Kshatriya is one of the four varnas in Hinduism which apply only to people, its semantic range can't possibly cover "god."

[Also, I can't figure out what led the guy to such a messed-up spelling, "crassat," which suggests he couldn't hear very well (for I can't imagine the Siamese collectively pronounced the word with the consonant cluster "cr/kr" in the first syllable). But this is a minor point compared to the previous one. It can also be corrected more easily.]

Regardless, De la Loubère "facts" aren't facts. The guy was wrong. And if he was wrong about objective, verifiable things, one wonders how wrong he might have been in the less verifiable parts of his accounts. But did his readers realize this? Unlikely. Did they have the ability or the curiosity to find out? Back then, probably not. The guy went to a foreign land where most of his readers had never gone to. He comes home with tales about that place and its people. He's now the expert among his own people. If De La Loubère had written a magazine article about the food/culture/lifestyle of the Siamese, his piece would probably won a few awards from a committee of people who couldn't/didn't bother to verify his "facts" too.

Did the Siamese have any chance of correcting those pieces of misinformation? No. They didn't speak the language spoken by de la Loubère's audience; they didn't know what was being said about them in the first place. And even if they did and tried to correct it, being from a non-dominant culture, they most likely wouldn't have a voice or a platform to do so. Some of them probably even noticed that people from the dominant culture had a tendency to believe their fellow countrymen, who looked like them and whose names rolled off their tongues more easily, than some foreigners from a faraway land.

Now I know why this whole thing about De la Loubère still bugs me today. It's precisely because this kind of thing still happens in the present time.

On Foreign Words Used in the American-English Vernacular - Part Two: Confused Parts of Speech

While Part One discusses what I believe to be a futile attempt to apply the pluralization rules of the original languages to borrowed words that have entered the English vernacular, Part Two (uh, yeah, this one) suggests where that vigilant energy could be better spent.

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*As a food writer, I use the word "sauté" a lot in my writing. And every time I look at the word in all its variations (sauté, sautés, sautée, sautées, sautéd, and sautéed), I always feel there's something weird about it. The verb in its original French infinitive form,"sauter," has most likely entered the English vernacular in its passive participle form, i.e. sauté (when used with a masculine singular noun), sautés (when used with a masculine plural noun), sautée (when used with a feminine singular noun), and sautées (when used with a feminine plural noun). Then the forms became "frozen" or "fossilized" and regardless of their functions in English sentences, the French passive participle forms are used. This is the only explanation I can think of.

For those who know French, you already know what I'm getting at. For those who don't, let's just say that "sauté, sautés, sautée, and sautées" are all analogous to the English "fried" as in, "the mushrooms are fried," or "broken" as in, "the glass has been broken." In other words, passive participle.

Just as "fried" is an inflected form of the naked form "to fry" and "broken" is an inflected from of "to break," "sauté, sautés, sautée, and sautées" are inflected forms of the infinitive "sauter." Saying, "I am going to sauté that piece of meat,"therefore, is akin to saying, "I am going to fried that piece of meat."

Throw in the variants sautée with an extra e (which in French indicates its agreement with the feminine gender of the noun with which it is used), and you get deeper into confusion.

This is a different issue from the use of fiancé to refer to an engaged man and fiancée to refer to an engaged woman. In that case, it's just a matter of using an extra e to indicate the feminine gender; the way the words are used in English still retains the French syntax, i.e. fiancer (infinitive) --> fiancé/fiancée (passive participles used as adjectives, then as substantives).

Using sauté as an infinitive in English, i.e. to sauté is a bit bizarre. As I mentioned earlier, it's analogous to saying, "to broken" a glass. Using sauté as a verb in the past tense in English as in, "she sautéd/sautéed the vegetables," is like saying, "she brokened a glass," in light of the French syntax.

So weird. So unfixable. So pointless. Yet it needs to be brought up.

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Amandine vs. Almondine

This one is a personal pet peeve of mine. Amandine is a word that indicates the manner in which something is cooked, i.e. with almonds. Almondine is an illegitimate child of French amandine and English almond and not recognized as a word despite its prevalent use. I'm pretty sure it will be soon, though. You start using a word often enough, it will eventually be included in the lexica someday. Heck, it's even found on the White House menu for the dinner honoring Queen Elizabeth II and her husband back when George W. Bush was president.

Dover Sole Almondine. (sigh) If the sole was made with pecans, would you call it Dover Sole Pecanine? Peanutine? Cashewine? Maybe I'm being ridiculous for thinking this is ridiculous, but I think it's ridiculous.

Paninis or gelatos don't bother me that much. But almondine does. A lot.

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Au Jus

When something is served "au jus," it means that thing is served with its own juice which has been rendered in the process of cooking. "Au" is a preposition used in conjunction with its object "jus;" it's not part of the "jus" proper. When people say, for example, "a French Dip is served au jus," they mean the sandwich is served with the jus or "juice" of the beef (for you to dip your sandwich into). And saying something like, "the sandwich will be served with its au jus," is like saying, "the sandwich will be served with its with juice."

A crude example in English would be "burger with fries."

"Fries" and "with" are not of the same substance; their relationship is purely grammatical. Saying something like, "the au jus comes with the sandwich," is like saying, "the with fries come with the burger."

In short, I'd say a pizzelle maker instead of the more correct pizzella maker, but I won't say, "give me a beef sandwich with its au jus."

Ditto with au gratin.

From Mourir to Mourez - How a New York Times Op-Ed Was Edited Overnight

On March 14, 2010, the Twitterverse went nuts over a New York Times Op-Ed piece titled, "It's My Party and You Have to Answer," by Rand Richards Cooper. Links to the article were tweeted and retweeted ad nauseum. The article must have struck a chord with people as it seemed everybody was talking about it.

In the article, Cooper bemoans the fact that people, including some of his friends, have failed to RSVP to his E-vites, thereby causing the host unnecessary inconvenience and anxiety. This, he opines, clearly shows not only "how hard the R.S.V.P. rubs against the grain of contemporary life," but also that in requesting commitment from people, "you are demanding a kind of navigation that Americans increasingly do not practice."

While the point of the article was taken and appreciated, my focus here has nothing to do with etiquette. Cooper suggests in the article that the standard R.S.V.P, which stands for "Répondez s'il vous plaît" ("Please respond") in French, is no longer effective. He proposes R.V.O.M as a more suitable and potentially more effective replacement. R.V.O.M., according to the article as it appeared online (and perhaps in the hard copy as well, though I can't verify) on March 14, 2010, stands for "Répondez Vite -- Ou Mourir!"

"For those friends of mine who plead a lack of high school French, allow me to translate. Respond Quickly, or Die!" says Cooper. Immediately, my mind went to the post I had recently written about how to use free online translators without making it so obvious that you do.

You see, 'répondez vite — ou mourir' is grammatically-incorrect French. The first verb, 'répondez,' is correctly in the 2nd person, plural/formal, imperative form. The second verb, 'mourir,' is supposed to be conjugated in the exact same manner. Unfortunately, it wasn't, and the infinitive, 'mourir,' appeared in the article. Instead of getting "respond quickly or die" as he intended, Cooper inadvertently wrote, while his friends "who plead a lack of high school French" looked on, "respond quickly or to die."

To say that it's an embarrassing mistake is a bit of an understatement, especially when you take into consideration that the article appeared in the newspaper of record and that the author clearly wanted to show his clever side.

This morning (March 16, 2010), as I was rereading the article online, I discovered, to my amusement, that the mistake was mysteriously corrected. What used to be "mourir" now reads "mourez," as it should have been all along. Somebody must have alerted the author's attention to such an obvious blooper -- the kind any high school French student could spot easily.

Even though the original text no longer exists and I have no proof that the mistake was really there at one point, luckily the phenomenon which happened to lost ancient texts is at work here. The original incorrect version of Cooper's French has been preserved in the form of a tweet here, a tweet there, a retweet here, a retweet there, a quote here, and a quote there. I'm not making this up, you see?

How could someone who knows enough to come up with 'répondez' have unwittingly written 'mourir' instead of 'mourez'? Call me crazy, but I have a hard time believing that it was simply a typographical error. Besides, I'm sure that article was read and proofread tons of times before it went to print. It seems deliberate. In other words, the mistake did not appear to be due to an oversight, but -- not to be harsh -- a lack of high school French -- precisely what the author says his friends plead.

The textual critic in me suspects the use of an online translator. The test on Babel Fish didn't confirm my theory as Babel Fish is smart enough to create the parallelism between the two imperatives and spits out "mourez" instead of "mourir."

The gotcha moment came when I entered the same text into Google Translate. When given the English, "respond quickly or die," Google Translate gives you, "répondre rapidement ou mourir" -- two infinitives. Google Translate does not recognize that "respond" and "die" in this context are used as imperatives and, therefore, treats both words as infinitives. The expression R.S.V.P is formulaic enough for anyone to know that the Google Translate result needs to be slightly altered from "répondre" to "répondez." The 2nd person, plural/formal, imperative form of "mourir" which is "mourez," on the other hand, isn't so common. (How many times do people say, "You/Y'all, die!"?)

The failure to see 'mourir' as wrong, to me, shows the inability to verify results derived from an online translator. I could be wrong, but I think I have a pretty good case here.

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Addendum

(Added March 17, 2010)

Well, what do you know? Words got out and Mr. Rand Richards Cooper, the author of the op-ed piece in the New York Times, wrote me an email message today (March 17, 2010) telling me that my online translator theory was not based on truth. Mr. Cooper's message was, as you will see, gracious and even a bit self-deprecating. What can I say? Rand Richards Cooper comes across as humble and very likable.

Printed with permission:

"Hi Leela:

I’m the guy who wrote the op-ed piece on RSVPing in the New York Times… Your nice theory notwithstanding, there was no online translation machine involved – just my own faulty, three-decades-old high school French, which (alas) used to be serviceable, and would not have committed that gaffe twenty years ago. But as the saying goes, tout lasse, tout passe, tout casse… (Or at least that’s how I remember it.)

Rand Richards Cooper"

To which I replied:

"Hello Mr. Cooper,

Thank you so very much for taking the time to write me. The gracious tone of your email made me regret my being presumptuous regarding my theory on how the gaffe came to be. Please do pardon an overzealous linguist.

Can I please have your permission to reprint the content of your email as an addendum to my post? That way, the five people who read that blog will have a more balanced view of the story.

Leela

P.S. I always RSVP. :)"

"Mais bien sûr!" was what he said. And all of us live happily ever after.