Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 25, 2025
No one has suggested the theory of "primordial germs" or "vital units," or come any nearer to it than Dr. Dwight did in suggesting "the seeds of an ancient vegetation." The great truth of the Bible genesis has been wholly overlooked by reason of a faulty translation in the first instance, as taken from the Masoretic renderings of the sixth century, and implicitly followed since.
Thorndyke took up the first sheet, and as he compared the constructed renderings with the literal translation, the ghost of a smile stole across his usually immovable countenance. "The meaning is certainly a little obscure," he observed, "though the reconstruction is highly ingenious; and, moreover, I think the Professor is probably right.
These twelve portraits by the Turner of corruption have a severe logic of their own which may pass for being classical. As diploma pieces they are incomparable, but as renderings of life they carry no sense of conviction. Mr. Hergesheimer's introduction is a more or less unsuccessful special plea.
A comparison of this and the preceding renderings with the original will show that while Talbot's is by far the more fiowing and imaginative, Sidnam's is on the whole rather more literal, except where he appears to have misunderstood the original. No other English translation, I believe, exists.
Sir Bulwer Lytton's renderings of a homoeopath and a water-cure specialist are open to the same charge, and could only have been successful in the hands of a master. There are at least two doctors in Balzac's novels. Rastignac, man of fashion and science, is drawn with the master's usual skill, but he is not a doctor. His art has no prominence.
My second reason for the answer I have given to the question is based on the accumulating experience we were acquiring in our ten years of labour, and our instinctive avoidance of renderings which in appearance might be precise, but did in reality exaggerate the plain meaning intended by the Greek that we were rendering.
The Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek reviews both the Bode and Mittelstedt renderings, together with Bode’s translation of Stevenson’s continuation, in the second volume of the Anhang to Volumes I-XII. The critique of Bode’s work defines, largely in the words of the book itself, the peculiar purpose and method of the Journey, and comments briefly but with frank enthusiasm on the various touching incidents of the narrative: “Nur ein von der Natur verwahrloseter bleibt dabei kalt und gleichgültig,” remarks the reviewer. The conception of Yorick’s personal character, which prevailed in Germany, obtained by a process of elimination and misunderstanding, is represented by this critic when he records without modifying his statement: “Various times Yorick shows himself as the most genuine foe of self-seeking, of immoral double entendre, and particularly of assumed seriousness, and he scourges them emphatically.” The review of the third and fourth parts contains a similar and perhaps even more significant passage illustrating the view of Yorick’s character held by those who did not know him and had the privilege of admiring him only in his writings and at a safe distance. “Yorick,” he says, “although he sometimes brings an event, so to speak, to the brink of an indecorous issue, manages to turn it at once with the greatest delicacy to a decorous termination. Or he leaves it incomplete under such circumstances that the reader is impressed by the rare delicacy of mind of the author, and can never suspect that such a man, who never allows a double entendre to enter his mind without a blush, has entertained an indecent idea.” This view is derived from a somewhat short-sighted reading of the Sentimental Journey: the obvious Sterne of Tristram Shandy, and the more insidiously concealed creator of the Journey could hardly be characterized discriminatingly by such a statement. Sterne’s cleverness consists not in suggesting his own innocence of imagination, but in the skill with which he assures his reader that he is master of the situation, and that no possible interpretation of the passage has escaped his intelligence. To the Mittelstedt translation is accorded in this review the distinction of being, in the rendering of certain passages, more correct than Bode’s. A
We must surely recognize that emotional language does not possess the precision of intellectual language; but in music it is the same as in any other idiom: there are those who do not understand at all; those who half understand and consequently always give wrong renderings; and those who understand well and in this last category there are grades as varying as the aptitude for perceiving the delicate and subtle shades of speech.
This Radical literato is slightly acquainted with four or five of the easier dialects of Europe, on the strength of which knowledge he would fain pass for a universal linguist, publishing translations of pieces originally written in various difficult languages; which translations, however, were either made by himself from literal renderings done for him into French or German, or had been made from the originals into English, by friendless young men, and then deformed by his alterations.
It is, indeed, reasonable that as long as we are persuaded that our English theory of the Bible, as a whole, is the right one, we should shrink from contact with investigations which, however ingenious in themselves, are based on what we know to be a false foundation. But there are some learned Germans whose orthodoxy would pass examination at Exeter Hall; and there are many subjects, such, for instance, as the present, on which all their able men are agreed in conclusions that cannot rationally give offence to any one. With the Book of Job, analytical criticism has only served to clear up the uncertainties which have hitherto always hung about it. It is now considered to be, beyond all doubt, a genuine Hebrew original, completed by its writer almost in the form in which it now remains to us. The questions on the authenticity of the Prologue and Epilogue, which once were thought important, have given way before a more sound conception of the dramatic unity of the entire poem; and the volumes before us contain merely an enquiry into its meaning, bringing, at the same time, all the resources of modern scholarship and historical and mythological research to bear upon the obscurity of separate passages. It is the most difficult of all the Hebrew compositions many words occurring in it, and many thoughts, not to be found elsewhere in the Bible. How difficult our translators found it may be seen by the number of words which they were obliged to insert in italics, and the doubtful renderings which they have suggested in the margin. One instance of this, in passing, we will notice in this place it will be familiar to every one as the passage quoted at the opening of the English burial service, and adduced as one of the doctrinal proofs of the resurrection of the body: 'I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that He shall stand at the latter day upon the earth; and though, after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh I shall see God. So this passage stands in the ordinary version. But the words in italics have nothing answering to them in the original they were all added by the translators[I] to fill out their interpretation; and for in my flesh, they tell us themselves in the margin that we may read (and, in fact, we ought to read, and must read) 'out of, or 'without' my flesh. It is but to write out the verses, omitting the conjectural additions, and making that one small but vital correction, to see how frail a support is there for so large a conclusion: 'I know that my Redeemer liveth, and shall stand at the latter
Word Of The Day
Others Looking