THE DEVIOUS EMPLOYEES
Noonan, John T Jr.
THE DEVIOUS EMPLOYEES JOHN T. NOONAN, JR. The Confraternity version: twiddle.twaddle and smarrny pap The unjust steward of the Gospel of Luke has now become, in the standard text copyrighted...
...Ergo, it is assumed, he will be incapable of accepting the term "steward" as it is used in another social context...
...So when Stephen Spender in 1934 speaks of striving "to relate the public passion to my private life," the public passion is politics and his private life is his life as a lyric poet, Lyrics and politics don't easily mix...
...Ergo, 28 October 1977:682 a phrase traditionally difhcult for preachers must be eliminated...
...In the process of course he cuts the verbal and logical tie to the parable...
...The religious educators and ecclesiastical bureaucrats who have put the seal of approval on this translation have preferred smarmy pap to the rhythms of Jesus...
...They also found chaos in the world about them: at home poverty and depressed wages, millions out of BERNARD MCCABE teaches in the English Department of Tu/ts University in Massachusetts...
...Not for him the dull repetition of the same term...
...In the same line he uses "devious," leaving him without a connection with verse 10 where the "manona tes adikias" becomes "this world's goods...
...No, he will characterize all property as "this world's goods," using a blank and inexact paraphrase to replace a fierce denunciation...
...Combined with "owner" and "employee," the image that comes to mind is credit with the business...
...a question very earnestly echoed again and again by the young writers who grouped themselves around him: Stephen Spender, Cecil Day Lewis, Louis MacNeice, and in his own way, Christopher Isherwood...
...The Confraternity version: twiddle.twaddle and smarrny pap The unjust steward of the Gospel of Luke has now become, in the standard text copyrighted by the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine and carried in American missals and leaflets, "the devious employee...
...The unjust steward in Christian moral teaching is a figure of the Christian who fails to use rightly the property entrusted to him...
...THE DEVIOUS EMPLOYEES JOHN T. NOONAN, JR...
...The group's inclination, as disinherited liberals, was to the Left...
...For a decade the church in the United States has put up with inferior English in the translation of the Bible in the Mass...
...Earlier, the translator has rendered the word as "manager...
...So politics were on everybody's doorstep, public commitment seemed unavoidable, and extremist positions beckoned...
...The imperfection of the translation, as we already have seen, arises in part from the translator's poor grasp of English...
...We ourselves are being impoverished, cut off from our churchly and literary inheritance, and subjected to mealy-mouthed clich6s in place of the pure milk of the Gospels...
...As an adjective for the steward's conduct, it is not inappropriate: ~ As a characterization of the man, as a faithful translation of the Gospel, it does not do the job...
...In all of these supercilious judgments there is a snobbery, an elitism, which in the guise of kindness patronizes and offends...
...They should start afresh to seek the sound and sense of the Bible and have its words truthfully translated into English...
...A sense of the law of libel coupled with an unwillingness to take a moral stand inclines the daily paper to use caution and to employ circumlocution...
...The American layman does not ordinarily use "mammon" in speaking of the rich...
...The third fault of the tranflation is its deliberate destruction of the verbal pattern of the parable...
...It is inaccurate...
...Devious" itself is no better...
...He has forgotten the echo that the Greek has of the word for the Lord...
...To put in its place at the parable's end the vague impersonal word "employee" is to abandon the conception of the central figure in the story...
...Lost, too, is the resonance of the term which permits Thomas Aquinas to say analogically on John 6:5 "By mammon there may be understood the devil, who rules over riches and is as if he were his own god...
...Only someone whose ear has been formed by reading the newspapers would use a fudge-phrase like "devious" where the Gospel says "wicked...
...Ergo, the American layman will want pigskins in his reading of the Gospel...
...crying in the wilderness...
...The exact term is "steward," a word which catches nicely the familial nature of the domestic administrator's role...
...To keep their self-respect in revolutionary timesm"to be saved"-they must produce poems (everyone save Isherwood was a poet) that could also be acceptable as modes of political action...
...If he did not want to be colloquial, why did he not stick to the text and translate simply, "I know what I shall do...
...The truly devious eraployees, the truly unjust stewards are those who have substituted their own twiddle-twaddle for the language of the Lord or of Luke...
...Striving to be colloquial, he translates the steward's reflection to himself on his course of action by the words, "I have it...
...There are four things wrong with the translation here...
...The phrase is used to translate "ton oikonomon tes adikias" in Luke 16:8...
...He eliminates another by using the rich6 "when I am let go" for the original's "when I am removed from stewardship...
...he has forgotten that prudence, not enterprise, is one of the cardinal virtues...
...Who are stewards...
...It ranks with earlier efforts of the American school of translation, where a woman lost "a dime" and rejoiced with her neighbors when she found it, and John became a herald (Harold...
...But I would wager that at least every third Sunday the Confraternity translation contains gross deficiencies, and I am aware almost every Sunday of some palpable deficiency in the English of the translation...
...His wrongfulness is picked up in an association of ideas with wrongful "mamona" or wealth...
...In verse 10 Jesus tells his listeners to make friends of the 'mamona te,s adikias...
...The term translated is "adikias" meaning literally "of unrighteousness...
...He is told in verse 3 to render an account of his "oikonomias" or stewardship, for he can no longer "oikonomein" or be a steward...
...I have concentrated on the deficiencies in 9 verses of the Confraternity translation read on the 25th Sunday in Ordinary Time...
...Our children are being robbed of a precious English heritage and are being denied a true translation of the Word of God...
...There is a movement from the story to the moral, which the repetition of "adikias" effects...
...he is unjust...
...The cut is not only inflicted on the Gospel, but on the tradition of the church and on the tradition of English literature...
...Of course the press will call something that is dishonest "controversial" and something that is wrongful "devious...
...So in the thirties most young intellectuals found in their personal inheritance a "chaos of values" (Auden's words...
...He uses "manager" twice at the start...
...Efficacy on the Left was claimed most effectively by the Communist Party, and all the Auden Generation became at one time or another party-members or felCommonweal: 683...
...sense of himselfJa bland, harmless, well-meaning soul, who shrinks from offending anyone by calling riches "the mammon of iniquity," as the phrase used tO be translated, or even from following Jesus and speaking of "wrongful wealth," or "wicked wealth" or "sinful wealth" or "unjust wealth...
...It is his acts as a steward that are the sinews of the parable...
...The American layman is used to seeing many synonyms: it is the way sportswriters write, using "pigskin" instead of repeating "football...
...He has forgotten that the parable itself is about giving Commonweal: 681 credit in a financial sense...
...abroad fascist takeovers in Italy and Germany, Stalinism in Russia...
...He has taken his line from an Horatio Alger story...
...The American layman is not familiar with a servile or feudal society...
...They have defaulted...
...He is the author o/Contraception (Harvard U. Press...
...He substitutes "service" for "stewardship"' in verse 3 and eliminates one repetition by using an "it...
...The steward is an unrighteous man, the parable teller says...
...How much longer are we to be patient...
...The term for "steward" or "stewardship" is thus used six times in eight lines, the term "adikias" twice in three lines...
...It has been used by authors as different as Bishop Latimer, Washington Irving and John Keble (see OxJord English Dictionary at "Mammon...
...If the translator wanted truly colloquial English, he should have written, "I've got it...
...This term itself is scarcely exact...
...Our translator, however, has been far cleverer than the evangelist...
...It loosens the connections between the different parts of the parable which the original phrase maintained...
...Only someone steeped in the cliches of bureaucracy would care to use "employee" where a more precise term exists...
...Our translator need only have added that this employee did not forfeit his Social Security by his deviant behavior...
...Of course bureaucrats like to think of the mass of men they manage as employees...
...But Jesus and his reporters did not go about characterizing Herod's conduct as "controversial" and wicked behavior as "devious...
...Much of this work has been tainted by a subtle sense of superiority on the translator's part...
...The "oikonomos" is introduced in verse I of chapter 16...
...The translation is inaccurate because the man involved is not any "employee...
...How does Thomas sound if we say God first established angels and then men as His employees...
...Why should its root in the Gospel be uprooted...
...The postwar twenties, when they were all at Oxford or Cambridge--half-wishing they had been in the War and had proved themselves---was a period of shock, a shock recorded variously by their immediate elders in such works as Kangaroo, Journeys End, Goodbye To All That, Antic Hay, The Waste Land..In the twenties, too, Nietsche, Freud, and Marx, all subverters of the old order, had at last all made their mark in England...
...Even more fundamentally the personification of wealth as a master is destroyed...
...Striving to be modern, he has the master "give credit" where the text has "praise...
...Striving to be modern, the translator has made "o kyrios," or master, of verse 8 an "owner...
...work...
...He is an "oikonomos" or one responsible for the management of a household...
...The American bishops should take this translation, condemn it and ban it from the churches...
...Above all, another Great War was on the way, and everybody knew it...
...The students of biblical languages and ancient manuscripts who have contributed to our modem plight have evidently never listened to English...
...The line beggars satire...
...JOHN T. NOONAN, JR., i$ a member o/the faculty o! the University o/ Cali/ornio School o/ Law, at Berkeley...
...anti-fascist positions came naturally to rejectors of history's recent nightmareh though the shift from pacifism to militancy was a harsh one to make--and some form of Marxist analysis seemed the most fluent method of banishing monopoly capitalism, imperialism, armaments manufacturers and the ills they brought with them: colonialism, war, poverty...
...But "manager" at least identifies a figure of authority...
...The deficiencies are palpable and gross...
...He really means, "What shall the artist do to be saved...
...asks Thomas Aquinas commenting on this parable, and he answers that God first established angels and then men as His stewards or as His dispensers (Sermon 6:3...
...he meets stewards today only in clubs, ships, planes, or railroad dining cars...
...In this final, climactic betrayal of the Gospel's sense the translator gives us a real...
...There is an exemplification of injustice in his behavior which illustrates the meaning of injustice as applied to worldly property...
...The repetition knits the parable together...
...his colloquial usage jars the mind as it follows an example of the other sense...
...These were the central figures in what Samuel Hyncs calls The Auden Generation (Viking, $12.95...
...The sound repeated is not only mnemonic...
...It does note denote wicked...
...Now the word "devious" may mean "shifty," "tricky," "unscrupulous," and even "unfair...
...They had been Edwardian children, born just too late to participate in the First World War, th~ great catastrophe that shook the liberal rationalist tradition of Spender's background as much as it shook the Christian orthodox tradition of Auden and Isherwood...
...They are fresh in my mind because I heard this version read only yesterday...
...There has been no improvement...
...It is emphatic in focusing on the steward...
...It is unfaithful to the traditions of our church and of our language...
...Topicality or expediency both sharpened and limited their work...
...asks Auden in 1934...
...The matter is too important to be left to the technicians...
...In verse 8 the master praises the "oikonomon tes adikias" for acting prudently...
...Striving to he modern, he has the master commend the employee for "being enterprising," where the Greek had "phronimos opoinesen"--"acting prudently...
...In verse 4 he decides what to do when removed from his "okonomias...
...As verse 3 continues, the "oikonomos" says to himself that his master is going to take away his "oikonomian...
...The verse, as translated, becomes: The owner then gave his devious employee credit for being enterprising...
...It is part of the English tongue...
...Turning the genitive into English, one may translate "unrighteous," or "wicked" or "sinful" or "unjust...
...As for "mammon,"the deepest cut effected by the translator is the reference to the Gospel of Matthew 6:24 "You cannot serve God and mammon...
...For seven years the Lectionary of the Confraternity has been in existence and held sway...
...THE ISHERWOOD GENERATION BERNARD McCABE Auden and the Edwardian children "What shall the self-conscious man do to be saved...
...indeed it is worse...
...But politics became the subject of their verse and the counterclaims of art and political action the subject of their critical debate...
...In societies where persons are in charge of households on behalf of their masters they are not managers in the 'sense that we think of a "plant manager" or "store manager...
...As for the use of the term in English, it is as old as Langland (Piers Plowman, a text, 9, 81...
...In such an atmosphere these writers needed to see their art as something more than art...
...The verbal concordance is severed...
...It betrays a poor sense of English...
Vol. 104 • October 1977 • No. 22
