Translation & Interpretation

The Real Meaning of Genre: Some Thoughts & a Cautionary Tale

There are those writers-especially writers of books telling the rest of us how to read this or that kind of material (i.e., genre)-and that without knowing the genre of a work we can't "truly" understand or appreciate it, and are in fact prone to misinterpret it. This has become almost a dictum of biblical interpretation, especially in the Psalter, where numerous books on the hermeneutics [interpretation] of the psalms warn that the first step in understanding a psalm is to determine its genre.

Introduction: Translation is no slight task, and those who pursue it vocationally deserve our most heartfelt thanks and admiration. Translators are often challenged by verses of Scripture that contain, e.g., textual difficulties, terms with an uncertain lexical value, or ambiguous syntax. Nonetheless, the translator must produce a version of even the most ambiguous and difficult verse; that is his or her responsibility.

Many of the proverbs proper-those following Pr 10.1a-are difficult to translate. Gnomic compression, syntactic ambiguity, lexemes with uncertain semantic load, opaque metaphors, and cultural distance challenge even the best translators. These difficulties, however, are often invisible due to the translational tradition(s) within which the translator works-the traditional or "received" translation often determines renderings, whether or not the translator realizes this influence.

Irrealis in Esther

Narrational irrealis-negative statements telling us the readers what did not happen-is integral to the story contained in the book of Esther. Without telling us what didn't happen, the author would not have been able to tell us what did.

The real point of this paper, and my reason for writing and reading it, was to look at a tiny, apparently insignificant, aspect of biblical stories, and to ask how that kind of information functions within a particular biblical story. I believe that it also demonstrates (as I discovered, not as I intended) that attention to detail can help us read more fully. I was quite surprised to discover that the plot of the book of Esther is largely propelled by negation (both Mordecai's refusal to honour Haman and Esther's ethnic anonymity), so that Mordecai appears as both villain and hero. His refusal to honour Haman threatened his entire race, and led to the deaths of many hundreds of people.

What didn't happen caused what did. Without telling us what didn't happen, the author would not have been able to tell the story.

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Introduction: Whether the story be oral or written, the story-teller largely controls and determines the story that he or she tells. Other factors may well intrude into the details of the story, such as the audience's expectations, and (at least according to some contemporary authors) the feeling that the characters are "taking over" the story, but by and large, authors shape their story so that it says just what they intend.

Readers therefore expect a careful author to tell the story in a way that suggests how they should read or understand it. This is true whether or not those "clues" are intentional. Since no linguistic choices are unmotivated (Longacre) every aspect of a story is significant, and none can be changed without changing the story, however slightly.

When a footnote says that "names and details have been changed to protect the innocent", readers know better than to expect a verbatim account of events or accurate descriptions of persons. They still expect, nonetheless, that the author has told the story as accurately as possible-that is, as proximate to the truth-yet in a way that would make it difficult for them to reconstruct precisely what happened, or at least who said or did what to whom.