From: Carl W. Conrad (cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu)
Date: Wed Dec 20 1995 - 07:47:29 EST
At 11:38 PM 12/12/95, Mark Penner wrote:
>A quick translation question--
>
>Mark 7:24 we read ANASTAS APHLQEN. NAS and others have "arose and went
>away." How important is the "arose" here? In Hebrew (QUM), I often
>don't translate it at all, or sometimes its more like "decided to." Is
>it the same in Greek? (Wish I knew Aramaic!) In Japanese Signs, it seems
>superfluous here. Am I missing something? I'm all for dynamic
>equivalence, but I want to make sure it really is equivalent.
I've always assumed this,"got up and left" was a Semitism, as you are
suggesting, but although I have tried on this list to argue the case that
Mark does not write Greek as a native user of the language, but some whose
opinions I respect have held otherwise. Perhaps this is a matter of the way
a culture thinks (whether or not Greek was a first or second language):
where you spend the night is a place of residence, and pitching a tent and
striking a tent are parts of the process of stopping overnight and moving
on in the morning, and so are noted in the way one thinks and the idiom one
speaks. This is just a speculation, but somebody on the list ought to know
more about this sort of thing.
>And while I'm on the topic, what about EUQUS in Mark? If it really is
>superfluous, why do so many English versions have "immediately" so
>often?
Doesn't every commentary comment on this? I think it IS important to
Mark--and here I'll go again off on one of these speculative tangents. I
tend to think of Mark's narrative style as cinematographic and to associate
his extraordinary predilection for the present tense in narration with this
deliberately "cinematographic" presentation. I see the recurrent EUQUS as
related to this, as underscoring the jerkiness of transitions from one
vivid episode to another. Regardless of how one feels about the Jesus
Seminar, there's a wonderful RE-PRESENTATION of the impact of Marcan
narrative in Daryl Schmidt's JS translation of Mark into the idiom of
late-20th-century colloquial American English which people serious about
Mark ought to look at; I really think it's a masterful version that brings
Mark to life.
Mark's question about Mark (re-markable?) bears upon a larger stylistic
issue that for many years fed the fires of Homeric criticism since Parry's
discoveries about oral poetry in the 20's: to what extent is the
"e'pithe`te traditionnelle" a meaningless place-filler in oral style (what
I'm talking about, if anyone is unfamiliar with it, is the way a particular
adjective is regularly associated with a particular noun, proper or
otherwise, e.g. POLUMHTIS with ODUSSEUS, or hRODODAKTULOS with HWS). Parry
argued that the oral poet never really consciously thought of "many-wiled"
or "rosy-fingered" when he came to speak of Odysseus or dawn breaking; more
recent critics feel that however this stylistic feature may have arisen in
dacytlic-hexameter verse, it became out of necessity a virtue--and that it
ought ALWAYS to be retained in translation. I do think so myself, and I'm
inclined to think we should keep such things as ANASTAS and EUQUS in
translation: ANASTAS APHLQEN, "he got up and left" or EUQUS DE ERXETAI PROS
AUTON, "and right away comes to him a paralytic ..."
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University
One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO, USA 63130
(314) 935-4018
cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu OR cwc@oui.com
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/
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