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.

What Different Animals Represent in Different Cultures

It happened last summer. On a Wednesday. In the afternoon.

I'd just relived my youth through an amazing lunch at Le Normandie at the Mandarin Oriental which was concluded with not just one, but two pieces of anything I wanted from the dessert cart. They were served in a pool of crème anglaise decorated with hibiscus flowers made of mango coulis. It was old-fashioned, nostalgic, delicious. And I was happy.

What does this have anything to do with anything? Why all the details?

Well, please allow me to include some gratuitous information for today isn't just any day; it marks the one-year anniversary of the day I published the first post on this site.

August 26th, 2009, which was the day I'd just been describing to you, was when I decided to write a blog about linguistics and intercultural communications. The decision was made after that glorious lunch, when I was in a car, right in the heart of Bangkok's business district, on Rama IV Road heading towards Wittayu Road.


On my way back home, the car came to a long stand-still at an intersection. See the little green dot in the satellite shot above? That's where it happened. On my left was Lumpini Park, Bangkok's equivalent of New York City's Central Park. As I was minding my own business, the driver, who had been completely quiet up to that point, blurted out, "Hia!"

I looked at him. Without any body gestures or anything at all to let me know what he was referring to, the guy repeated the same monosyllabic, "Hia!" -- only more loudly. My mind was scrambling to figure out to or about whom he was talking, but then there wasn't anyone else around. Me? (Gasp.) Hia? Really? Why?

Then he said it the third time while looking at me through the rear view mirror, thus confirming what I was afraid would be the case: the guy was really talking to me.

I need to explain to you first that when someone calls you a "hia" (เหี้ย), they mean you're an a--hole. This Thai word is one of the classic insults -- very vulgar ones -- which have been around for as long as I remember. The word was in vogue when my grandparents were little; it still is today.

Nobody had ever called me a hia to my face before. And I used to think that if it ever happened, I would be able to come up with a quick come-back since I'm usually pretty darn good at repartee. In this case, though, I was too busy being in shock.

"Huh?" was the result of all the wit and eloquence I could muster.


That's when my driver pointed to the left.

Through the wrought-iron gate surrounding the lush Lumpini Park, just meters away, I could see this dark green, scaly creature on a tree. Then the driver and I uttered the word in unison -- his fourth time and my first -- "hia!"

I whipped out my phone, took the picture above, and spent the remainder of the trip home concocting this blog in my mind.

Hia literally means monitor lizard. That's the primary meaning. Then, apparently, at some point in history, hia, the animal, became hia, the vile insult. How? Why? I have no clue.

My only guess is that people in the old days considered the presence of a monitor lizard in their immediate surrounding a bad thing. Bangkok, formerly dubbed "Venice of the East," used to have lots of canals and fewer roads and buildings. Sounds like a perfect place for these huge lizards who thrive in damp areas to me. Now, take into consideration that people in the old days had small animals (e.g. chickens, ducks) in the area underneath their homes to which these carnivorous creatures had easy access. When a hia is spotted around your home, it is definitely not an auspicious occasion. [Plus, not to offend lizard lovers, these things are ugly as heck. To be honest, right after I took that picture, I could feel the crème anglaise coming back up, hibiscus and all.]

An encounter with a monitor lizard, therefore, is considered by the superstitious as bad luck. Even an attempt in recent times to refer to a hia with the euphemistic, "tua nguen tua thong" (ตัวเงินตัวทอง), which roughly means "that which brings in good luck in the form of silver and gold," hasn't done much in erasing the negative connotation associated with this animal.

Re-branding fail.

Anyway, at least I came to understand that the driver was trying to get me to take a look at that huge monitor lizard -- a rare sight in the concrete jungle of Bangkok in modern times; he wasn't calling me a hia. Whew.



That got me thinking. Are there other animals that carry positive and negative connotations in the Thai culture?

Water buffaloes represent "stupidity" and sometimes "bull-headedness" in the Thai culture. The history of it is just as dubious as the history of how hia (animal) became hia (insult).

Hyperactive, unruly kids are often likened to monkeys. But this one is almost self-explanatory. Ditto with ants and bees which represent industriousness.

Do you know which one stumps me big time? Turtle.

Turtle (เต่า) -- it makes no sense to me either -- is slang for body odor. How did that happen? Don't ask me. Culture is a curious thing. Sometimes you can explain it; sometimes you just have to accept it without understanding it.

And until you come to accept that a turtle represents stinky armpits, you would never understand this most popular Thai TV commercial, which debuted almost a decade ago, about an orphaned little turtle looking for his mother or why the Thai people find this deodorant commercial so hysterically funny.

Don't Hurt Your Interpreter: Don't Build Contents on English

In my late teen years in Bangkok, my part-time gigs included, though were not limited to, teaching Thai on a one-on-one basis to expats living in Bangkok and serving as live interpreters for foreigners conducting businesses in Thailand. For the most part, I loved what I did. And earning some cash in the process certainly didn't hurt.

Teaching Thai to expats was fun and very educational. For the first time, I learned to approach my own native tongue with a perspective of an outsider thereby recognizing syntactical and semantic idiosyncrasies that most native speakers of Thai don't pause to think about, because the language comes so naturally to us. Most of my students were Bangkok-based NGO workers who came from all over the world, and I learned so much about many different cultures and languages during that time.

It took one bad apple for me to quit teaching Thai to expats for good. After a few weeks, it became increasingly clear to me that my 40-something, married, Swiss student was much more interested in having a girl sit next to him than actually learning any Thai. One fine afternoon, after being made an unwilling recipient of a firm and lingering pat on the butt, I decided I'd had enough.

But that part, though icky, didn't make me foam at the mouth. It wasn't a desirable situation, but it was manageable. I just walked out mid-lesson, never to return, with a Swiss handprint on my skirt but my dignity intact (I think).

What made me foam at the mouth was the interpreter job that repeatedly put me in a position where I really, really wanted to smack someone up the side of their head.

In a situation where an interpreter is needed, it is safe to assume that the speaker and the audience do not share a common language; otherwise simultaneous interpretation wouldn't be necessary. Sure, English has been the lingua franca for so long that it's hard to imagine anyone anywhere in the world not knowing at least some of it. But when you put a group of speakers of English as an additional language (SEALs) with varying degrees of exposure to English in one place, it's wise to assume the worst.

The American's fondness of building contents upon acrostics/acronyms and the semantic flexibility and spellings of English words is -- my good gawd -- astounding. Seriously, it needs to stop.

Consider the following:

• A supervisor: "The philosophy of our organization can be summed up in the word "LOVE" - Labor, Overtime (with no compensation), Vacation? Forget it, and Exploitation of the workers," Now tell me, how in sweet holy Hades can you interpret a speech like this -- live -- to an audience whose first language isn't English? Do you expect your interpreter to come up, on the friggin' spot, with a word for "LOVE" in a different language which comprises four letters that happen to serve as the initial letters for four words that convey the four points you try to make? Don't be that guy.
• A preacher: "To make this sermon easy to recall, I'd like you to remember the four Ws that jeopardize your spiritual life: wantonness, waggishness, wastefulness, and wegotism ..." Yeah, better pray your interpreter can find four words in the audience's language that all begin with the same letters and perfectly communicate your divine message.
• An inspirational speaker: "Remember, there's no I in TEAM." No kidding ...
• An art teacher: "You have to practice. Of course, painting is hard. That's why they put "pain" in there." Teacher, it's not painting that gives me pain; it's you.
  
• A politician: "War doesn't determine who is right; it determines who is left." I don't know ... but it sounds like you're declaring war with your interpreter and audience right about now.
• A first-time overseas traveler: "Knock, knock!" Somebody kill me now ...