Blind, but now I see

Last Saturday afternoon I got a call from the woman in charge of Scripture readers. She needed someone to read Sunday’s passage. I was playing on the worship team, but I’ll read Scripture at the drop of a hat. I’ll even do it cold, if need be. (There were some years when I was the go-to person for Pentacost Sunday because I can read all those place names without stumbling. It comes of being an academic who reads papers on arcane topics in front of sometimes hundreds of people and a linguist no less.)

Anyway, this Advent we’re going through John’s gospel to get his take on Incarnation. So my assignment was John 9:1-25. Yes, we’re all familiar with the story of the man blind from birth. The associate pastor, whose turn it was to preach, asked for the passage to stop with the punch line quoted in Amazing Grace — I was blind, but now I see. She used that line to make a very effective point about the power of testimony, as opposed to apologetics, to make God real, that is incarnate, to unbelievers.

But I had to read before she preached. I had a certain amount of trouble with one small section of the text, and my trouble is worth posting about.

Our pew Bibles are NRSV, so I had to read:

8The neighbors and those who had seen him before as a beggar began to ask, “Is this not the man who used to sit and beg?” 9Some were saying, “It is he.” Others were saying, “No, but it is someone like him.” He kept saying, “I am the man.”

Now, if you just look at the conversational parts, you notice that nobody talks like that anymore. The choice to say Is this not ...? is solely archaism for archaism’s sake. (I addressed that issue last Christmas.)

Then we come to

It is he.

Ouch! There’s no way to read such schoolmarm English with anything like a sensible intonation. Sure we read over such things in our silent Bible reading and don’t much notice. But try to say it out loud.

I can only say It is he half seriously, and then only with the stress on the he. The correct reading in the context of this passage would have to put the stress on the is. But

It IS he.

isn’t English. It sounds like fingernails on a chalkboard. To get a phrasing that fits the intonation you need to say

It IS him.

OK. But even that has a problem — and it isn’t that your overly strict high school English teacher from the days before corporal punishment was politically incorrect is going to appear out of your past and rap you across the knuckles for having an accusative in a copular clause.

If you ask the question

Isn’t that X?

The affirmative answer has to be

It IS.

So I don’t care if the Greek clause is οὗτός ἐστιν. Don’t translate the οὗτός. It isn’t English. You buy nothing but needless foreignness by insisting on the he/him.

Then we come to the next line in this conversation

No, but it is someone like him.

This time the issue is not naturalness but accuracy. What is being referred to is the way he looks as opposed to, say, the way he acts. Compare the two English sentences

John is like Bill.
John looks like Bill.

The former means that John acts like Bill in some respect; the latter means, well, John looks like Bill. Referential accuracy is at stake here. The translation must include the verb look to be an accurate translation, so you could render

No, but it is someone who looks like him.

But looking at the Greek this seems unnecessarily wordy. There are just five words οὐχί ἀλλὰ ὅμοιος αὐτῷ ἐστιν ἐκεῖνος. There is no reason not to translate into completely natural English.

No, he just looks like him.

Now we have something that is both a faithful and accurate translation and a natural English conversation.

Isn't that the man who used to sit and beg?
It is.
No, he just looks like him.

There is nothing in the Greek to suggest that the conversation was anything other than natural sounding to the original audience. For all the myriad ways in which Roman era Palestinian culture is foreign to the 21st century English speaking world, this isn’t one of them. Don’t make it seem foreign by translating

Is this not the man who used to sit and beg?
It is he.
No, but it is someone like him.

Now there is one more conversational piece in this passage. The formerly blind man responds

I am the man.

The Greek has ἐγώ εἰμι. I don't see man in here anywhere. You could argue that man is also missing in the very first line οὐχ οὗτός ἐστιν ὁ καθήμενος καὶ προσαιτῶν, and I was happy with that translation. But I’ll point out that the οὗτός ‘that[masc. sg.]’ in that context forces you to supply a noun in English. I was even tempted to say guy,

Isn't that the guy who used to sit and beg?

but that makes it a more casual style than I’m ready to argue for in this case. The problem with ἐγώ εἰμι is that the NRSV translators, looking for a faithful equivalent, are trying to preserve the I am.

At this point the linguists roll their collective eyes.

You see, clauses with the verb to be, a.k.a. copular clauses, serve essentially two functions. One is to assign some property or state or identify the class or category someone/something belongs to

He is tall.
He is sick.
That’s a dish.
She’s a doctor.

The other is to specify a connection of identity between two known entities.

Johnny Depp is Captain Jack Sparrow.
That’s my second cousin.

Now there is an interesting cross-linguistic point about the syntax of to be clauses which function to specify identity. Linguists call them specificational copular clauses. Languages are of two types with respect to specificational copular clauses depending on which way the agreement goes. So English has

It’s me.

But most of the other major European languages go the other way

Spanish : Soy yo. [lit. (it) am I]
German : Das bin ich. [lit. that am I]

Needless to say, Greek is in this second class. So the most faithful translation of ἐγώ εἰμι is

It’s me.

or maybe better in context here.

It IS me.

Adding the man is simply misunderstanding the construction. (There’s a lot of that going around under the guise of faithful equivalent translation.)

So what would be an accurate translation of this passage?

Something that contains the conversation given above. Something close to the NIV/TNIV.

8His neighbors and those who had formerly seen him begging asked, “Isn't this the same man who used to sit and beg?” 9Some claimed that he was. Others said, “No, he only looks like him.” But he himself insisted, “I am the man.” (NIV/TNIV)

But I would modify it slightly because I see no value in putting the middle line in indirect discourse, and the final line needs fixing as I just explained.

8His neighbors and those who had formerly seen him begging asked, “Isn't this the same man who used to sit and beg?” 9Some said “It is”. Others said, “No, he just looks like him.” But he himself insisted, “It is me.” (NIV/TNIV, modified)

Now, I have just taken you through a translation exercise. I’m applying the same principles of dynamic equivalence that I’ve been arguing for since the beginning. There is nothing theological at stake here. There is nothing literary about the passage. There aren’t any metaphors or allusions. The bulk of translation, at least NT translation, is like this. So I’m hesitant to relabel my translational approach from dynamic equivalent (DE) to literary equivalent (LE), because, in the last analysis, most of the questions that come up aren’t literary at all. Most of them are about recognizing the Greek for what it is, and making the English sound natural.

I think DE gets a bad rap because the popular view of it is that there are no rules, no constraints, and that the translator, who is thought to have no ear for good English, has free rein to interpret the Scripture however he/she wants.

Not true.

I hope that some who were blind to the value of DE will now see from this exercise that on all counts it is exactly the opposite.

*****

As an appendix I’ll give the passage in Greek and ESV. The reader can evaluate the quality of the ESV translation of this passage as an exercise.

8 οἱ οὖν γείτονες καὶ οἱ θεωροῦντες αὐτὸν τὸ πρότερον ὅτι προσαίτης ἦν ἔλεγον οὐχ οὗτός ἐστιν ὁ καθήμενος καὶ προσαιτῶν 9 ἄλλοι ἔλεγον ὅτι οὗτός ἐστιν ἄλλοι ἔλεγον οὐχί ἀλλὰ ὅμοιος αὐτῷ ἐστιν ἐκεῖνος ἔλεγεν ὅτι ἐγώ εἰμι

8The neighbors and those who had seen him before as a beggar were saying, “Is this not the man who used to sit and beg?” 9Some said, “It is he.” Others said, “No, but he is like him.” He kept saying, “I am the man.” (ESV)