Finding Michigan

Finding Michigan
just the way Jesus left it
will be remarkable:indeed
I should say I hope to find
happy families of sunsets; the song of
organstops, souls rising—rushing
into the Elysium of eternal,ecstatic golden
cornfields of memories of mountains
meandering melancholic Christmases, and
yes, I even expect to find my dreams

Finding my way home is not
such a simple thing, finding you isn't
either, and I guess finding love is hidden
more of all—even so(and most beautifully
or)I will come back to find
simple starlight, and
Something softer
than snow

Truth is

Truth is
not an idea, or
a memory, it is not
a creed, a prayer, and
it is not a person.

Truth is a house that builds
itself around us, it is
a fire that warms and sometimes
burns us.

Truth is a fine white linen
that wraps our bodies;
it is a fragrant mist of
pure ocean breeze, and it is
lightningbugs scintillating
the darkness of summernight.

even now, Truth is
touchingfollowing us, and we are
breathing in Truth, and (my Lord)
it is so very beautiful.

Magnificence

O joy! that in our embers

Is something that doth live,

That nature yet remembers

What was so fugitive!

The thought of our past years in me doth breed

Perpetual benediction: not indeed

For that which is most worthy to be blest—

Delight and liberty, the simple creed

Of childhood, whether busy or at rest,

With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast. 

(William Wordsworth)

Listening to the choirs at Westminster these past weeks been both comforting and disturbing. While hearing music, I have found myself fixated on two distinct ideas. The first is magnificence: I do not mean it in the colloquial sense (something exceedingly excellent or glorious, although in that sense the choirs here are indeed ‘magnificent'). But in a deeper ontological sense, the word comes from an ancient root which means to magnify, to make greater, or to elevate. I am fascinated by the suggestion that what we do when we sing together is something as miraculous as life itself: the formation of a thing that is at its very core generating a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. The second thought is that music is expressive of something abstract, something ineffable. I have been perplexed by the notion that while the linguistic and visual arts are often directly imitative of our experiences and environment, music is abstract—only imitative in a qualitative, emotive sense.

My mother wrote poetry in college. One of her poems begins with a shockingly angsty line: “the agonies of being are far greater than all else.” While this is a profoundly sad thought, it is a nevertheless resonant one—indeed, much of our existence is defined by a perpetual sorrow which daily accompanies us. The blissful joy of childhood has faded, and our most profoundly meaningful thoughts are nearly always our most deeply melancholic.

Yet! Just when these “agonies of being” are so great that it seems we will crumble or break, a Truth that lingers saves us in our most beautiful thoughts: breathing in the cool moisture after rain, watching in awe as strong hands spring from the earth, reaching out and grasping strands of the clear air, running down a hillside so fast your legs seem to move themselves, looking up at the blank sky until stars wheel out from dark cupboards, and staring into someone else's eyes and feeling so hopelessly full of joy at knowing you are both alive that just one lifetime full of music could never express it.

In these crushing moments, we magnify ourselves by singing together. The chorus (somehow!) contains enough magnificence to tell the impossible story of our overwhelming existence. In this expression, we are comforted: not by the affirmation of others whose spirits are invaded and redeemed by the sounds we create, not by the towering intellectual achievement of the order and proportion of tones and time, and not even by the pulsating, nourishing emotional catharsis that music evokes. No, the comfort and Truth of music is in the knowledge of beauty: the realization—the revelation, even—that the universe is indeed beautiful, that in the space surrounding our bodies and within the combination of our voices, there is something so much more beautiful than inescapable sadness. Music is not abstract, yet it is every bit as mysterious as language: it simultaneously exposes, imitates, and quenches the ineffable and excruciating beauty of life. The reason we sing is the same reason we look at the stars.

what I wouldn't give

oh, what wouldn't I give
to be back on that dark lawn
laid out on damp blankets
under the cold, dry stars,
wide-eyed until our corneas smart
from the stillness of night air.

what wouldn't I give
for those days, when the
greatest joy was knowledge, and
the greatest fear was darkness (say,
how little has changed!)
and everything was smaller.

listen to the since-years,
and while you listen, I'll tell you,
quite simply, exactly what I wouldn't give:

the joy of seeing you grow up,
the music of the latest night,
and the indescribable feeling of
being in love with this memory, and realizing
just how desperate(ly hopeful) we truly are.

every word

Say, for example
you were talking to someone,
you were looking at him,
you could hear him,
you could see him, and
when you thought about what he was saying,
as it would look written
on an imaginary page,

it (just for a moment) was as if
every letter was a sentence,
every syllable was a chapter of
every clause, which was a book in which
every phrase could be a library, and
every sentence could be the entire world.

Then, my love, hearing your
voice for less than a moment
could open the most beautiful flowergalaxy, and
it would be the whole universe
on your lips
without saying a single word.

These mornings

These mornings are different
sitting next to a coffee cup
and silently remarking how little
it reminds me of you

These mornings
are quiet-strange
they are not bright:they are pale
they are tiny choirs of dust
settling like pilgrims on the chair across the table

These mornings are wonderful—
like flinging onehundredthousandwildflowers
into the air and wondering(not knowing) if
they will ever return to earth

These mornings are not you,
because I have forgotten how much
I need to remember how
to forget you

ESV

Lately, I’ve become interested in the English Standard Version translation of the Bible. I was raised on the New International Version, which I do value for its highly readable syntactical structure, and because I like the fact that when it was published in 1978, it was a completely new translation, fresh from the Greek and Hebrew, and did not rely on traditional wordings from archaic translations like the KJV. The ESV (released in 2001) is even newer than the NIV, but unlike the NIV, it stands in a lineage of translations starting with the 1611 KJV. Unlike even the NKJV, which is merely a lexical update to the 1611 wordings, the ESV is the latest in a tradition of new editions of the KJV text, which with each revision (RV, NAS, RSV) have revisited the Greek and Hebrew, while evaluating the clarity of the text to modern English readers. In this way, the ESV is sort of distilled, and as an academic, I’m attracted to that kind of “edited” approach.

But I was still skeptical of any translation that followed in the tradition of the KJV, which was initially translated with some techniques that I find questionable, such as the use of the Latin Vulgate as a partial source (alongside the Greek and Hebrew), making it a sort of tertiary translation. But I was also skeptical of the NIV, which uses a kind of “idea for idea” (rather than “word for word”) translation philosophy that, while making sentences more colloquial, has huge potential for being influenced by the ideological bias of the translators. The ESV is more literal, and is thus less prone to bias, but lacks a certain stylistic candor that endears the NIV.

So, I decided to compare a few New Testament passages to each other, and to the original Greek, and was shocked by what I found. I largely chose passages at random, looking mainly at passages that came to mind as well-known or ones that have strongly traditional wording in English (the Lord’s Prayer, for example).

Take a look at Luke 1:46-55 (commonly called “Magnificat”). It is Mary’s reaction to the Annunciation. The opening phrase reads

 NIV: “my soul glorifies the Lord.” 

The traditional wording used in countless songs and recitations is

KJV: “my soul doth magnify the Lord,” 

which sounds quite archaic to someone unfamiliar with the tradition. A compromise is found with

ESV: “my soul magnifies the Lord.”

Now let’s look at the Greek. The phrase reads

“megalunei he psuche mou ton kurion,” 

which translates literally to “magnifying (is) the soul of me, the Lord." The word in question here is “megalunei,” which is translated as “magnifies” in the ESV tradition, but as “glorifies,” in the NIV, which means something decidedly different. Even more problematically, the word usually translated as “glorifies” in the NIV and other places is “doxasei” (or other forms of “dox-” where we get words like “doxology”). To me, both theologically and literarily speaking, to “magnify” means something very different than “glorify,” yet the NIV translators apparently chose not to say “magnify” because the precise meaning might seem ambiguous(?), but to me the ambiguity of what it means to allow one’s soul to “magnify the Lord” is part of what makes the passage beautiful, and theologically significant (what is Mary’s role as a Saint? What is it about her unique position in the gospel that magnifies God? These are important things to consider). 

Take another part of the Magnificat, where the lack of literal translation is more obviously problematic. v.51:

NIV: “he has scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts,” but 

ESV: “he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.” 

While the ESV (and likewise, the traditional KJV) mentions the word “heart,” the NIV translates this as “inmost.” The Greek word is “kardias,” where modern English inherits terms like “cardio,” which are (obviously) related to more than just “inmost” things. To re-word this is to move into paraphrase territory, which is my primary reason for shunning almost all other Bible translations (New Living Translation, Common English Bible, GOD’S WORD, The Message, need I say more?)

So far, I’ve been extremely satisfied with the way ESV approaches the marriage of literal and idiomatic translations. The general word-order and the words themselves seem quite well-chosen, and for parts that are exceptionally difficult to convert to clearly-worded English, the text is very well-footnoted, sometimes giving upwards of four or five alternate wordings depending on conflicting manuscripts or conflicting philosophies between members of the translation team. Most importantly, the plain presentation of the words leaves plenty of room for interpretation—to me, a hallmark of Biblical reading, and something which I fear I might unknowingly hinder when using NIV.