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C h a p t e r 3 “The Meaning, Not the Name I Call”: Converting the Bible and Homer The Augustinian paradigm for conversion, inspired by the call of tolle lege, “Take up and read,” proposes an important connection between textual encounter and religious transformation, a connection that may already be suggested by—or perhaps read back into—Jesus’ explanation for his use of parables.1 Mark (revised in Matthew and strikingly absent in Luke) reports Jesus’ response to his disciples’ confusion over the Sower Parable: “Unto you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God: but unto them that are without, all these things are done in parables: that seeing they may see, and not perceive, and hearing they may hear, and not understand, lest at any time they should be converted, and their sins should be forgiven them” (Mark 4.11–12). Jesus distinguishes between the phenomenological experiences of sight and sound, on the one hand, and the epistemological experiences of perception and comprehension, on the other, distinctions that, I suggest, align with the gap that exists for readers of (or listeners to) a text in a language not their own. That is, the interpretation of the Sower Parable that follows in verses 13–20 serves the same function that the act of translation serves for those who encounter a strange tongue; both render an opaque utterance comprehensible. Indeed, that Jesus offers his explanation for the use of parables in this way signals that the dynamics of religious conversion are deeply entangled with the complexities of translation. Speaking in Greek, the Jesus of Mark (and Matthew) cites a passage from the Hebrew prophet Isaiah to elucidate his (Jesus’) use of apparently opaque parables: “And he said, Go, and tell this people, Hear ye indeed, but understand not; and see ye indeed, but perceive not. Make the heart of this people fat, and make their ears heavy, and shut their eyes, lest they see with their eyes and hear with “Meaning” 83 their ears, and understand with their heart, and convert, and be healed” (Is. 6.9–10). I have quoted the 1611 King James translations of both Mark (whose original is Greek) and Isaiah (whose original is Hebrew) to underscore Mark’s explicit citation of the verse from Isaiah and the homogenization of the two texts by means of the Septuagint’s rendering of Isaiah. As a means for understanding this chapter’s concern with the function of translation as a fiction of conversion, I want to begin with a closer consideration of the passage from Isaiah and its subsequent transmission and transformation. According to the King James Version, both Isaiah and Mark explicitly speak of conversion as the effect of successful perception and comprehension . In choosing the same word in both instances, the King James translators were following the precedent established in the Greek version of Mark, which describes this effect with the term epistreywsin so as to match the Septuagint’s choice of that same term for the verse in Isaiah, where the original Hebrew word is ‫שב‬. Long before any early modern English translations, the Vulgate had already rendered the passages in Isaiah and Mark with the same Latin term, converatur, and so it is hardly surprising to find the King James Version following suit. Earlier English translations, however, did not always use the same word in each instance. Miles Coverdale’s 1535 Old Testament (which was done mostly out of the Latin Vulgate and, to a lesser extent, Luther’s German version) translated the Isaiah passage with the term “conuert,” but the 1525 Tyndale New Testament (translated directly from the Greek) with which it was combined had used “tourne” for the passage in Mark. Taking its cue from the Coverdale Bible, the 1560 Geneva translation rendered Isaiah’s verse with “conuert” but transformed the passage in its Markan context into “turne.” These early modern translations appear not to have placed as much of a premium on the homogenization of the Old and New Testaments, which is striking given the consistency in the Vulgate and also in the 1395 Wycliff Middle English translations (where “conuertid” appears in both Isaiah and Mark, parallel to the Vulgate from which it was translated). Even in the apparently slight difference between “convert” and “turn,” and in the differing approaches taken by these medieval and early modern translations , we can begin to see a central tension between the homogenizing erasure of difference and the persistent heterogeneity...

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