trailing history
and lifetimes
of experience.
His agenda,
still unknown,
is his own.
Text and image © 2019 by Donald C. Traxler.
Tuesday, May 14, 2019
The Alter-ego
The alter-ego came unbidden,
trailing history
and lifetimes
of experience.
His agenda,
still unknown,
is his own.
Text and image © 2019 by Donald C. Traxler.
trailing history
and lifetimes
of experience.
His agenda,
still unknown,
is his own.
Text and image © 2019 by Donald C. Traxler.
ᎡᏆ-ᎠᏓᏅᏙ / The Great Spirit
ᎡᏆ-ᎠᏓᏅᏙ ᎨᏒᎠᏎ ᎨᏳ,
ᎤᎸᏌᏓ, ᎠᎴ ᎥᎴᏂᏙᎲ,
ᎠᏎᏃ ᎡᏆ-ᎠᏓᏅᏙ
Ꮭ ᎪᏪᎶᏓᏎ ᎪᏪᎵᏗᏁ.
The Great Spirit is love,
light, and life,
but the Great Spirit
does not write books.
Text and image © 2019 by Donald C. Traxler ꮨᏺꭽꮅ.
ᎤᎸᏌᏓ, ᎠᎴ ᎥᎴᏂᏙᎲ,
ᎠᏎᏃ ᎡᏆ-ᎠᏓᏅᏙ
Ꮭ ᎪᏪᎶᏓᏎ ᎪᏪᎵᏗᏁ.
The Great Spirit is love,
light, and life,
but the Great Spirit
does not write books.
Text and image © 2019 by Donald C. Traxler ꮨᏺꭽꮅ.
Monday, May 13, 2019
61,000 Blog Visits, and Real Life
My wife, Sandy, and I recently changed not only houses, but countries and continents. It's enough to make anybody's head spin, and we are no exceptions to that. The best-adjusted member of the family is probably our sweet dog, Betty.
I am still drinking yerba mate, with mate cup and bombilla (having found a brand "para nerviosos" in Hollywood, Florida), but we are not in Uruguay anymore.
When we arrived here, I had not been in the United States for six years. This is not our first time living in the southeastern part of the US, but it is our first time living in Florida. I'll try to give a few of my impressions, below.
The first three people who spoke to me in Miami, spoke to me in Spanish. Some days later, when we picked Betty up from the airline cargo terminal, I also found Spanish to be the most effective way to communicate. But that was south Florida; we are now in central Florida, which is much more "white-bread."
My first impression was of excessive materialism. We are currently staying in the "canals," where almost everyone has a boat. But most do not keep them in the water. Almost every house has an electric boat lift that can lift 10,000 pounds. That may be due to the threat of hurricanes, I don't know. The owners of this rental house have about ten of everything, never just one. They are nice people, who have allowed us to stay here with Betty (not a small dog), and I don't mean to be judgmental--I'm just telling it the way it is.
There is far too little ethnic diversity in this community, at least for my taste, being originally from California. The area is popular with Midwestern "snowbirds," so in some ways it's like a little piece of the Midwest.
I'm a person who loves bookstores, and the other day we went to Books-a-Million, in Port Richey. I was looking for Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary, by Robert Alter (street date December 2018). This is probably the most significant Bible translation in a hundred years. Books-a-Million had more Bibles than I had ever seen in one store, and yet they did not have this one. I asked a rather zoftig young woman with plentiful tattoos about it. She looked it up on the computer, and then rather curtly told me, "It's not something that we carry," not even offering to order it for me. This didn't give me a good feeling. Since I was already in the store, I checked out their Newsstand section. I had never seen so many gun magazines, and magazines apparently about extreme bodybuilding. In front of these magazines there had been a pile of a 2018 book that tried to show the human side of Hitler: only one copy was left. The whole experience left me in a dark mood, and I won't be in a hurry to repeat it. I ended up ordering the book (or rather, the three-volume set) from Target.
On Saturday night, Sandy and I went to Skinny's Bar and Grill, about as full of local color (and good food) as you can get. On Saturday nights they have live music, starting at 6:30 and ending at 10:00 (at the neighbors' request). This was a pleasant change, since such places usually start the music when we are already in bed. I was happy to see only one MAGA hat at the outdoor bar, the only one we've seen so far. I think the bloom is off that particular rose. The band was good, and very entertaining.
Other than that, the weather has been mostly sunny. We are in a Constitutional crisis, but I have high hopes.
Text and image © 2019 by Donald C. Traxler.
I am still drinking yerba mate, with mate cup and bombilla (having found a brand "para nerviosos" in Hollywood, Florida), but we are not in Uruguay anymore.
When we arrived here, I had not been in the United States for six years. This is not our first time living in the southeastern part of the US, but it is our first time living in Florida. I'll try to give a few of my impressions, below.
The first three people who spoke to me in Miami, spoke to me in Spanish. Some days later, when we picked Betty up from the airline cargo terminal, I also found Spanish to be the most effective way to communicate. But that was south Florida; we are now in central Florida, which is much more "white-bread."
My first impression was of excessive materialism. We are currently staying in the "canals," where almost everyone has a boat. But most do not keep them in the water. Almost every house has an electric boat lift that can lift 10,000 pounds. That may be due to the threat of hurricanes, I don't know. The owners of this rental house have about ten of everything, never just one. They are nice people, who have allowed us to stay here with Betty (not a small dog), and I don't mean to be judgmental--I'm just telling it the way it is.
There is far too little ethnic diversity in this community, at least for my taste, being originally from California. The area is popular with Midwestern "snowbirds," so in some ways it's like a little piece of the Midwest.
I'm a person who loves bookstores, and the other day we went to Books-a-Million, in Port Richey. I was looking for Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary, by Robert Alter (street date December 2018). This is probably the most significant Bible translation in a hundred years. Books-a-Million had more Bibles than I had ever seen in one store, and yet they did not have this one. I asked a rather zoftig young woman with plentiful tattoos about it. She looked it up on the computer, and then rather curtly told me, "It's not something that we carry," not even offering to order it for me. This didn't give me a good feeling. Since I was already in the store, I checked out their Newsstand section. I had never seen so many gun magazines, and magazines apparently about extreme bodybuilding. In front of these magazines there had been a pile of a 2018 book that tried to show the human side of Hitler: only one copy was left. The whole experience left me in a dark mood, and I won't be in a hurry to repeat it. I ended up ordering the book (or rather, the three-volume set) from Target.
On Saturday night, Sandy and I went to Skinny's Bar and Grill, about as full of local color (and good food) as you can get. On Saturday nights they have live music, starting at 6:30 and ending at 10:00 (at the neighbors' request). This was a pleasant change, since such places usually start the music when we are already in bed. I was happy to see only one MAGA hat at the outdoor bar, the only one we've seen so far. I think the bloom is off that particular rose. The band was good, and very entertaining.
Other than that, the weather has been mostly sunny. We are in a Constitutional crisis, but I have high hopes.
Text and image © 2019 by Donald C. Traxler.
Sunday, May 12, 2019
A New Translation of the Hebrew Bible
As explained in the review linked below, Robert Alter (of the University of California at Berkeley) devoted twenty-one years of his life to this new translation of the Hebrew Bible. I have ordered it, and will soon have it in my hands. I have high hopes for it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/20/magazine/hebrew-bible-translation.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/20/magazine/hebrew-bible-translation.html
Saturday, May 11, 2019
More on Mistranslations of the Bible.
In the course of moving from one continent to another, I had to let go a lot of very good books. One of those that I could not carry was my JPS Tanakh (Hebrew Bible), but it was the compact edition, and the type was too small for these old eyes. Yesterday, in a thrift store, I found one that I like better, and can more easily read. It is the Jerusalem Bible published by Koren Publishers in 1962. [Not to be confused with the better known Jerusalem Bible published in 1966 by Darton, Longman and Todd, which was a Catholic translation, an outgrowth of La bible de Jérusalem (1956).] In that same thrift store I also found a very handsome KJV, and a nice NIV, among other things.
Last night, before going to bed, I opened the KJV at random, to 1 Samuel, and was reading the story of King Saul's pursuit of David with intent to kill him. It's a really good story, told by a storyteller who thoroughly knew his craft. I was soon hooked. Then I came to this, 1 Samuel 20.41, speaking of David and Jonathan: ". . . David arose out of a place toward the south, and fell on his face to the ground, and bowed himself three times; and they kissed one another, and wept one with another, until David exceeded."
What did this mean? "To exceed" is a transitive verb. He exceeded what? The passage could easily be sexual. Did David "come?" I looked the passage up in my wonderful, newly-acquired Hebrew Bible. The English is the same, obviously borrowed from the KJV, but the original Hebrew says:
עַד־דָּוִד הְִגְדִיל
"ad-dovid higdiyl." This means "until David became great (or large). To put it in crude terms, while kissing Jonathan, David got a "boner."
Not totally trusting myself, I reviewed the relevant Biblical Hebrew grammar: the form is the Hiph'il of the stative verb גָדַל, and it means "he became great (or large, or big)." In modern English, "he got big."
The implications of this are obvious. David, who was responsible for much of what was beautiful in the Jewish culture of his time, including most of the Psalms, was either gay or bi. Based on the Hebrew words, I don't see any way around it. Nor do I have any problem with it, but there are those who do.
The world of David's time was less fastidious about such things than we tend to be. Homosexuality was a commonplace in that world, and widely accepted. I couldn't let the matter lie, so I picked up the NIV, and read ". . . but David wept more." This is clearly a mistranslation, since the Hebrew words do not mention weeping.
This morning I dug my Vulgata out of the suitcase and read: ". . . et osculantes alterutrum fleverunt pariter David autem amplius" (. . . and kissing each other, they wept equally, but David more.) What kind of sense does this make, "equally. . . but more?" It is well known that the translators of the KJV tried to be faithful to the Hebrew, and were also influenced by the Vulgate. Jerome, the translator of the Vulgate claimed to base his work on the Hebrew, but actually relied more upon the first Jewish translation into Greek, the Septuagint. It is clear that they were all dancing around the original Hebrew words, which were a bit too much for them.
[to be continued]
Text © 2019 by Donald C. Traxler.
Last night, before going to bed, I opened the KJV at random, to 1 Samuel, and was reading the story of King Saul's pursuit of David with intent to kill him. It's a really good story, told by a storyteller who thoroughly knew his craft. I was soon hooked. Then I came to this, 1 Samuel 20.41, speaking of David and Jonathan: ". . . David arose out of a place toward the south, and fell on his face to the ground, and bowed himself three times; and they kissed one another, and wept one with another, until David exceeded."
What did this mean? "To exceed" is a transitive verb. He exceeded what? The passage could easily be sexual. Did David "come?" I looked the passage up in my wonderful, newly-acquired Hebrew Bible. The English is the same, obviously borrowed from the KJV, but the original Hebrew says:
עַד־דָּוִד הְִגְדִיל
"ad-dovid higdiyl." This means "until David became great (or large). To put it in crude terms, while kissing Jonathan, David got a "boner."
Not totally trusting myself, I reviewed the relevant Biblical Hebrew grammar: the form is the Hiph'il of the stative verb גָדַל, and it means "he became great (or large, or big)." In modern English, "he got big."
The implications of this are obvious. David, who was responsible for much of what was beautiful in the Jewish culture of his time, including most of the Psalms, was either gay or bi. Based on the Hebrew words, I don't see any way around it. Nor do I have any problem with it, but there are those who do.
The world of David's time was less fastidious about such things than we tend to be. Homosexuality was a commonplace in that world, and widely accepted. I couldn't let the matter lie, so I picked up the NIV, and read ". . . but David wept more." This is clearly a mistranslation, since the Hebrew words do not mention weeping.
This morning I dug my Vulgata out of the suitcase and read: ". . . et osculantes alterutrum fleverunt pariter David autem amplius" (. . . and kissing each other, they wept equally, but David more.) What kind of sense does this make, "equally. . . but more?" It is well known that the translators of the KJV tried to be faithful to the Hebrew, and were also influenced by the Vulgate. Jerome, the translator of the Vulgate claimed to base his work on the Hebrew, but actually relied more upon the first Jewish translation into Greek, the Septuagint. It is clear that they were all dancing around the original Hebrew words, which were a bit too much for them.
[to be continued]
Text © 2019 by Donald C. Traxler.
In the Eyes of the False / ᎠᎦᏙᎵᏗ ᎭᏫᎾ ᎦᎶᏄᎮᏛ ᎥᎿᎢ
In the eyes of the false, a lover of truth is dangerous, but a lover of truth and beauty is considered an eccentric artist.
ᎠᎦᏙᎵᏗ ᎭᏫᎾ ᎦᎶᏄᎮᏛ ᎥᎿᎢ, ᎤᏓᎨᏳᎯ ᏚᏳᎪᏛ ᎥᎿᎢ ᎨᏒᎠᏎ ᎦᏂᏰᎬ, ᎠᏎᏃ ᎤᏓᎨᏳᎯ ᏚᏳᎪᏛ ᎠᎴ ᎤᏬᏚ ᎨᏒᎠᏎ ᎠᎦᏎᏍᏙᏗᏔ ᎦᎸᏙᎳᎨᏍᏗ ᎤᎸᏃᏘᏍᎩ ᏗᏟᎶᏍᏔᏅᏍᎩ.
Text and image © 2019 by Donald C. Traxler ꮨᏺꭽꮅ.
ᎠᎦᏙᎵᏗ ᎭᏫᎾ ᎦᎶᏄᎮᏛ ᎥᎿᎢ, ᎤᏓᎨᏳᎯ ᏚᏳᎪᏛ ᎥᎿᎢ ᎨᏒᎠᏎ ᎦᏂᏰᎬ, ᎠᏎᏃ ᎤᏓᎨᏳᎯ ᏚᏳᎪᏛ ᎠᎴ ᎤᏬᏚ ᎨᏒᎠᏎ ᎠᎦᏎᏍᏙᏗᏔ ᎦᎸᏙᎳᎨᏍᏗ ᎤᎸᏃᏘᏍᎩ ᏗᏟᎶᏍᏔᏅᏍᎩ.
Text and image © 2019 by Donald C. Traxler ꮨᏺꭽꮅ.
Friday, May 10, 2019
Udugi Translation of a Meme
I saw this on Diaspora (posted by Morgonas and re-shared by Tony Langmach):
"All the power you will ever need is already within you."
I happen to agree with this statement. Here's how it would go in Udugi:
ᏂᎦᏛ ᎤᎳᏂᎬᎬ Ꮎ ᏂᎯ ᎢᏳᏊ ᎤᏚᎳᏙᏎ ᎨᏒᎠᏎ ᎦᏳᎳ ᏂᎯ ᎭᏫᏂᏗᏢ.
Image © 2019 by Donald C. Traxler ꮨᏺꭽꮅ.
"All the power you will ever need is already within you."
I happen to agree with this statement. Here's how it would go in Udugi:
ᏂᎦᏛ ᎤᎳᏂᎬᎬ Ꮎ ᏂᎯ ᎢᏳᏊ ᎤᏚᎳᏙᏎ ᎨᏒᎠᏎ ᎦᏳᎳ ᏂᎯ ᎭᏫᏂᏗᏢ.
Image © 2019 by Donald C. Traxler ꮨᏺꭽꮅ.