Just a thought...

Yea....I have neglected blogging and my favorite crew of people here for quite some while now. It has been quite a quagmire ...you know the kind, when you turn back to "real" academics after a long break and you find a big hole between you and the last page you left at, and then you start picking up lose threads and start darning up the hole in your attempt to build the bridge and get some sort of foothold back into the field . A lot was written, a lot theorized and a lot researched after the liberal humanism at which I had left, and have since been picking up again ; rolling in 'structural' maze on to 'deconstructing' and stepping over 'interpellation' and 'hegemonic' 'discursive practices' I have started to 'culturally materialize' into the ever vast postmodern era , which itself is again a transgressive resistance to specialized categories.

So I am somewhere which is actually nowhere (technically speaking). Now I won't elaborate on that one guys; if you need an elaboration, please go and read Baudrillard and about the fight that ensued between Lyotard and Habermas !

We has a lecture in our department today, that threw us back somewhere in 1611, where the visiting professor ( Prof. Gordon) from England was elaborating on the beauty of the rhythms and the monosyllabic simplicity of the authorized version of King James Bible. He read quite a few passages stressing the intonations with an up and down wavy movement of his delicate hands commenting upon ( for eg.) Ruth's address to her  mother in law ( telling us how he had it read at his wedding ceremony at the church some 49 years ago) etcetra etcetra! He said that King James's set of translators had worked very hard to 'beautify' the text, so as to make it recite able " down to the ploughmen and even the women" [ ! ]  so as to be easily understood and liked by one and all.

As far as I know about translation and translating, there is a process which Lawrence Venuti described as "domesticating and foreignization" which involves plucking up a meta narrative from its own cultural context and making it fit into the cultural context of the foreign language in which it gets translated to. Secondly, If a translation is beautiful it can never be faithful and vice versa.

In lieu of the above statement; I wonder if the King James authorized version has been as 'beautifully' translated as Prof. Gordon made it sound, how faithful had been that translation...