CORRESPONDENCE
CORRESPONDENCE Biblical Babel Chicago, 111 To the Editors: John T. Noonan, Jr. suspects, [Mar. 31] on the basis o mail received in response to his criticisms of various NAB...
...Translators can surely have a tin ear for the resonances of their mother tongue, as Ronald Knox (his own ear not always untinned) long ago pointed out in The Trials of a Translator...
...Mixing in the merely querulous and captious to elicit snickers from the gallery is helpful to no one, least of all to the hearers of the word...
...Banishing the NAB from the Lectionary meanwhile, as Noonan advocates, will solve nothing at all...
...He needed correction, but not by Augustine, who was certainly wrong in most of his presuppositions...
...REV...
...the latter's translation of the "gourd" of Jonah 4:6 as "ivy" has become proverbial...
...but surely even a traveler of little experience must associate with "inn"—if he really tries—a series of wayside hostelries every bit as commonplace and international to boot...
...But the Challoner-Rheims is in the first place not a translation of the Greek anyway, and in the second place in view of its successive transmogrifications at the hands of editors innocent of the biblical languages represents only somebody's idea of the quaint sort of language the good old Bible is supposed to speak...
...It is not in the RSV, not in the Jerusalem Bible, not in the New English Bible, not in the Good News Bible...
...31] on the basis o mail received in response to his criticisms of various NAB translation...
...The stereotyped egeneto de is the equivalent of a speaker's clearing his throat at the beginning of a new sentence...
...Noonan has been helpful in pointing out some of its real shortcomings...
...Who, may I ask, has decreed that the proper English of the egeneto de of Luke 2:6 is "And it came to pass...
...Like other modern versions, the NAB is in need of continual revision and will get it, and it is simply not true that "protest is useless if it is directed at the New American Bible as such...
...Jeremiah's Hebrew expression occurs also in Genesis 42:27, 43:21, Exodus 4:24, Joshua 4:3 and 4:8...
...Noonan does, it seems, have in mind some kind of Platonically archetypical English Bible which the translator need simply let speak for itself...
...BRUCE VAWTER, CM...
...Instead, "there was no room for them in the place where travelers lodge...
...Augustine and St...
...Would he not agree that "a place where travelers lodge" is about the best one could do with diversorium viatorum...
...Jerome over (of all things...
...Noonan is immediately put in mind of an American motelchain...
...Where it is, that it could be "done away with" by the "hardened will to mar and deface" for which the NAB translators are notorious, is in the old ChallonerRheims Version (unfortunately in this instance left uncorrected by the Confraternity revision of 1941...
...tha "there is a broad consensus ol educated Catholics that the Lectionarj will not do...
...Noonan to try out "ion" in these contexts to see how often it will fit...
...Translations of the Bible are never perfect...
...I suspect that there are, indeed, many educated Catholics along with the rest who would agree with Dr...
...Jerome, as it happens, was probably wrong in his translation...
...It is good to know thai the evidence does point to a broad rather than a narrow consensus...
...Anyone who thinks that some ideal Lectionary text of the Bible can be produced for the American church without reliance on much the same resources responsible for the NAB, has an unreal idea about what is involved in Bible translation...
...I would not want to defend the NAB or any other Bible translation in its entirety...
...Anyone who imagines that another existing English version could be substituted for it without provoking greater discontent than the NAB has been able io, does not know that version very well...
...The Jews had inns, Noonan insists, since "they are referred to as early as Jeremias 9:11...
...The reference is to Jeremiah 9:1 (Hebrew) or 9:2 (Vulgate), where Jerome translated melon orchini as diversorium viatorum...
...Noonan, all for fairly much the same reasons, some of which are sound and some simply wrong-headed...
...They need continual revision and therefore constructive criticism...
...It is not in the King James Version, that final arbiter of right Bible English...
...The clear and solemn note struck by Luke in his introduction, the storyteller's portentous pause has been eliminated as surplusage...
...Noonan is a good Latinist...
...Sheer blather...
...And now no inn, either, with all the warm thoughts evoked by inns at Christmas time...
...The controversy between St...
...I invite Dr...
...No room in the inn...
...The Lectionary needs revision, there seems to be no doubt...
...Yes, one has been reading Edwin Newman...
Vol. 105 • July 1978 • No. 13
