Wednesday, November 11, 2015

The Punctuation of Life

Today I was reading Aviya Kushner's book, The Grammar of God, when I was hit by a rather small thing that I think makes a rather big difference. She was talking about periods. Full stops. Ends of sentences. This paragraph is full of them.

Specifically, she was talking about the way English Bible translations tend to render Genesis 1:1 and 1:2 as separate entities. "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and void." Period. Full stop. While Jewish translations, echoing longstanding midrash on the Hebrew, sometimes connect the two verses: "When God began to create heaven and earth--the earth being unformed and void, with darkness over the surface of the deep and a wind from God sweeping over the water--God said, "Let there be light"; and there was light" (Jewish Publication Society translation).

This is fascinating for purposes of understanding how grammatical constructs influence our ideas about God, and I commend Kushner's book to everybody's attention for that reason, but there is another reason I am intrigued by this, namely: How we imagine rests and breaks is part and parcel of how we live.

Some people live lives that are run-on sentences, continually moving on to the next thing, never spending more than a comma here or there. Others live from one period to the next; in short, purposeful bursts. I imagine what we consider busy lives to be like this. Every idea must be succinct and, above all, certain. There is no time for waste. So I think it's no surprise that some of the most American of biblical translations start, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." Period.

Creation? Done. Orderly. Simple.

I see a lot of fruitless arguments between those who live run-on sentence lives and those who live period lives. For all their effort, they might as well be speaking Hebrew and English back and forth. And it's not as straightforward as suggesting that some people want to keep things simple and others want to dig deeper, because this is not so much about the depth of understanding as it is the culture in which that understanding is lived. A person can know a great deal and prefer to use that depth to come to a full stop conclusion; another is very happy combining ideas into a nexus that seems, to the full-stop person, unnecessarily vague.

The trick doesn't seem to be so much choosing between the two as it is acknowledging that the two exist and figuring out how to meet one another in translation.

I have more thoughts on this, but I have to get back to reading. Maybe another day.

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