[B-Greek] Col 2,5

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Wed May 5 21:32:24 EDT 2004


At 2:24 PM -0700 5/5/04, Eddie Mishoe wrote:
>Carl:
>
>Here's the NET Bible on this:
>
>For though I am absent from you in body, I am present
>with you in spirit, rejoicing to see your morale and
>the firmness of your faith in Christ.
>
>"rejoicing to see" was actually what made me ask this
>question. The NET translators take these participles,
>I think, semantically different. If this cannot be
>derived from the Greek, how is it implicit? Better
>yet, what translation would you recommend?

Eddie, I think you're confusing an understanding of how the Greek text
works with the way one chooses to convert it into a target language such as
English. Yes, NET does give that version for the verse and conveys CAIRWN
KAI BLEPWN as "rejoicing to see"--but then, if you look at the translator's
note #9 in NET referenced for "rejoicing to see," it reads, "Grk 'rejoicing
and seeing'"--I take this to mean that the translator well understood the
Greek but chose to subordinate the second notion to the first in the
English. You seem to be thinking of translation as an exact reproduction of
the construction of the Greek in English whereas what good translations
generally aim at (in my judgment--this is not really a proper forum to
discuss translation philosophies) is carrying not the grammatical structure
but the meaning as understood from the Greek into the idiomatic formulation
that best expresses that meaning in the target language.

It may well be that this has been the source of earlier occasions of
difficulties, wherein you seemed to be trying to take clues about the
structure of the Greek from the structure of an English translation; unless
a translation is so literal as to be a word-for-word equivalent in the
target language of the structure of the Greek, that's not likely to be very
helpful--and if you do have that sort of wooden literalist translation,
it's likely to be in very unidiomatic English (or bad German, or whatever).


>--- "Carl W. Conrad" <cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu>
>wrote:
>> At 10:02 AM -0700 5/5/04, Eddie Mishoe wrote:
>> >EI GE KAI THi SARKI APEIMI ALLA TWi PNEUMATI SUN
>> hUMIN
>> >EIMI CAIRWN KAI BLEPWN hUMWN THN TAXIN KAI TO
>> STEREWMA
>> >THS EIS CRISTON PISTEWS hUMWN
>> >
>> >What are the options for understanding EIMI CAIRWN
>> KAI
>> >BLEPWN? Is it acceptable to understand one
>> participle
>> >functioning differently (semantically) than the
>> other
>> >even though they are connected by KAI?
>>
>> Why would you want to do that? Both CAIRWN and
>> BLEPWN ... THN TAXIN KAI TO
>> STEREWMA indicate what the writer is doing
>> while/when he is with his
>> correspondents in spirit. Perhaps I don't understand
>> the question; do you
>> perhaps mean that the sense may be, "rejoicing to
>> see ..."? I think that
>> may well be implicit but you can't derive it
>> directly from the Greek.
>> --
>>
>> Carl W. Conrad
>> Department of Classics, Washington University
>> (Emeritus)
>> 1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828)
>> 675-4243
>> cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
>> WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/
>
>
>
>
>
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-- 

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/



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