Be a mermaid.

We drove out to Spring Green last night to catch the American Player's Theater production of Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya."

It was 90°, but the sun was setting and there was a breeze. There were also about 100 women waving fans for the entire 3 hours, even after it got dark and cooled down. Just the idea of the heat is hard to take if that's what's stuck in your head.

We got to our seats a half hour early, and I used my time well by reading the beginning of the play, in the translation I blogged about yesterday. It was $16 in the (air conditioned) gift shop.

The play has 8 characters — 4 male, 4 female — and it's good to know in advance how they all relate to each other. It's hard to put the pieces together on the fly, listening in real time to the actors, who, by the way, did a great job even as they were bundled in heavy costumes, often huddling inside blankets.

Uncle Vanya is only the uncle to one person

"In this new adaptation of Chekhov’s text by Nate Burger, Astrov calls himself a 'weirdo.'..."

"Burger has adapted the translated text with clarity and a sense of humor. I can’t recall ever hearing 'yada yada yada' in Chekhov before."

From "APT’s 'Uncle Vanya' drowns existential despair in vodka" (Capital Times).

APT = American Players Theater, in Spring Green, Wisconsin.

"The Communist Party believes in building enormous projects to boost the economy and burnish political prestige."

Dan Wang, author of "Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future," quoted in "China set to open world’s tallest bridge, expanding infrastructure push The Huajiang Grand Canyon Bridge can fit almost two Eiffel Towers under it and will be touted as evidence of China’s engineering prowess when it opens this month" (WaPo).

Last month, Premier Li Qiang stressed the need to “harness the exemplary and galvanizing role of megaprojects”....

Poor and inland provinces... have been the target of this effort as the central government has pushed a “strategic hinterland” strategy. Despite its isolation and relative poverty, Guizhou — roughly the size of Missouri — boasts an extensive infrastructure network, with 11 airports, tall bridges and new roads.

These megaprojects are “not bridges to nowhere,” [said Li Mingshui, a civil engineering professor at Southwest Jiaotong University in Chengdu]....

ADDED: Why is the unusual word "hinterland" used? It's a word I sometimes use but only jocosely. I call my own location (in Wisconsin) a "remote outpost" and l sometimes say things like "here in the hinterland." It's funny to me to see it in the bureaucratic, leadenly serious context. I know it's translation from Chinese, so that might explain the oddness of this usage.

I invited ChatGPT to engage with my observation, and it said:

"Elon's not shy" and the Japanese Prime Minister is not "trying to suck up."

The event was a meeting between President Trump and the Prime Minister of Japan, Shigeru Ishiba, but a reporter saw fit to exploit the occasion to provoke Trump about Musk: "Do you have a reaction into the new Time Magazine cover that has Elon Musk sitting behind your Resolute Desk?":

Trump says a simple "no" in a way that sounded to me like it meant what a stupid question. 

Then, after the translator conveys the question and short answer to the Japanese Prime Minister, Trump deadpans, "Is Time Magazine still in business? I didn't even know."

The translation ensues, and Trump gets to start again. Reponse #1 was the "no," response #2 was the joke, and response #3, was to praise Musk: "Elon is doing a great job. He's finding tremendous fraud and corruption and waste. You see it with the USAID, but you're going to see it even more so with other agencies and other parts of government. He's got a staff that's fantastic... [USAID is] a fraud... very little being put to good use. Every single line that I look at in terms of events and transactions is either corrupt or ridiculous, and we're going to be doing that throughout government and I think we're going to be very close to balancing budgets for the first time in many years...."

There's a follow-up question: "Will you put Elon Musk on the podium for us to ask him some questions?"

Trump: "Oh, sure. He's not shy. Elon's not shy."

As for Shigeru Ishiba... earlier he had appealed to Trump's ego.

"In Finland, swinging your arms and other unnecessary sudden hand gestures are quite commonly interpreted as a sign of aggression, which should be avoided unless you want to get your ass kicked."

Writes someone in Finland in a Reddit discussion, "Do Europeans ever use their hand[s] to make 'Air Quotes' in a conversation, for example, to express sarcasm or a euphemism?"

Someone in Slovakia says "If you can't express sarcasm or a euphemism by you voice and tone, you shouldn't be allowed to do it. (I haven't seen it here, but maybe somebody does it.)"

An American says: "I did it in Italy once, and my little Italian cousins absolutely lost it laughing so hard, bc they didn't know why I was wiggling my fingers around (which I understand would look very, very strange if you don't know the meaning)." 

Someone in Italy answers: "We don't do it in Italy. Some people may know what it means because of American movies and TV series."

I know the TV series! It's "Friends":

"We have languages coming into our country. We don’t have one instructor in our entire nation that can speak that language."

“These are languages — it’s the craziest thing — they have languages that nobody in this country has ever heard of. It’s a very horrible thing."

Said Trump, in his big speech at CPAC, quoted in "Trump warns of 'languages coming into our country' that 'nobody' has heard of/Trump's warnings about words add to a pattern of stoking fear around migrants coming into the United States."'

I was going to say the headline was deceptive and unfair because Trump didn't say these were languages nobody has heard of. Trump said there were languages that nobody in this country has ever heard of. Obviously, the people who are speaking this language have heard of it. They're not nobody.

But I see that Trump repeated his concern about foreign languages when he toured the southern border this past week, and he said "Nobody speaks them" and "These are languages that nobody ever heard of."

"'There is a big secret about sex,' wrote Leo Bersani in 1987. 'Most people don’t like it.' The same might be said of translation..."

"... which many readers secretly consider a necessary evil. Even the very best produces a lingering frustration, an irritable awareness that we didn’t get what we came for. If translation is like sex, it often leaves us with a case of epididymal hypertension, or, in the vernacular, blue balls. One of the worst things about a bad translation is that it’s unforgettable. The Pre-Raphaelite artist, designer, and utopian socialist William Morris took a run at Homer in 1887 and hit the wall hard. 'Tell me, O Muse, of the Shifty,” his translation of the Odyssey begins, “the man who wandered afar,/After the Holy Burg, Troy-town, he had wasted with war.'"

 
So begins "The Republic of Translation/Two new translations of poetry travel from ancient Sardinia to modern Paris" by Anahid Nersessian in The New York Review of Books. 

The utopian socialist sounds like a beatnik.

Nice cover:

"'El Polaco' is the second of Coetzee’s novels to appear in Spanish first, but he began privileging translations much earlier..."

"... in his career: in the past twenty years, he’s seen to it that many of his books be made available in Dutch before any other language. Fêted in Amsterdam in 2010, Coetzee expressed appreciation at being 'read in a language in which I feel myself to be a somewhat more humorous writer than in the original English.' 'Humorous' is far less commonly applied to his writing than adjectives like 'cold,' 'austere,' 'rigorous,' 'spare'; Martin Amis famously described his style as 'predicated on transmitting absolutely no pleasure.' But to his enthusiasts Coetzee transmits a great deal of pleasure—in his outwardly severe, circumscribed manner—and exhibits an abiding if vanishingly subtle sense of humor...."

Writes Colin Marshall in "J. M. Coetzee’s War Against Global English/What lies behind the celebrated South African writer’s decision to publish his latest novel in Spanish before making it available in English?" (The New Yorker).

But it's not all about humor. In fact, it seems more like that predication on absolutely no pleasure that Amis talked about: 

"It is a very good idea to have a good idea of what is going on in the world, but it is also a good idea to have a good idea of what is going on in the world."

I encountered this strange sentence on page 26 of this Kindle version of "In Praise of Shadows," by Junichiro Tanizaki. 

I bought this very short book — it's only $3.99 — after clicking through from "25 Best Japanese Books of All Time" (Japan Objects), which I was idly scanning, looking for something new to read. 

Why Should I Read This Book? Here is a unique examination of the art and aesthetics of Japan by one of its most beautiful writers.

Junichiro Tanizaki is the only author to appear on this list twice, only because his other book is fiction and here is a nonfiction essay. In under 100 pages, Tanizaki explores in deft detail what makes Japan’s artistic aesthetics so unique and important. Tanizaki valued - almost worshipped - beauty as it is seen and expressed by Japanese artists, and this essay gives us an insight into that beauty from a master writer. A unique and uniquely Japanese book.

Trusting the link (to Amazon), I put no thought into the translation. As soon as I started reading it, however, I could see that this was an absurdly hinky translation. I wondered whether there even was a human being who did the translation. No translator is mentioned. I was able to find copies of this book on line — free — that had named translators and sentences that seemed to have been filtered through a real human mind. 

Come with me, and I will make you fishers of the sun.

I wanted to get the text of the Jesus quote right so I could transform it for the post title. Of course, there are many translations of Matthew 4:19, but the one I wanted was "Come with me, and I will make you fishers of men."

I couldn't find it. Translations that ended with "I will make you fishers of men" began with "Follow me" or "Come ye after me." Translations that began with "Come with me" had clumsy endings: "Come with me! I will teach you how to bring in people instead of fish," "Come with me. The work I will give you will be to catch people,"  and — I am not kidding — "Come with me. I’ll make a new kind of fisherman out of you. I’ll show you how to catch men and women instead of perch and bass."

The most fascinating part of this research project came at the beginning, when I started to search "Come with me...." Google guessed that I wanted "Come with me, and you'll be in a world of pure imagination...."



As long as I'm googling, I search for Willy Wonka is like Jesus. Of course, people have talked about that on the internet. One answer:

Jesus is not like Willy Wonka. Our God is not a God who delights in keeping people in the dark, only to pull the rug out from under them in the last minute and deny them the rewards he promised. He is not a miser looking to withhold blessings on a technicality.

Instead, God delights in saving his people. Jesus says that he “came to seek and to save the lost” (Luke 19:10). That is why he came to earth, to save us from our sins. If he didn’t want to save us, he would not have come in the first place. Jesus is not a cheat. He is not a swindler. He is not an inhumane monster. Nothing could be further from the truth.

"When the English Twitter account for the French foreign ministry revealed Franck Riester’s new title of junior minister for trade and 'attractiveness'..."

"... it immediately elicited mocking online and questions about whether it had been mistranslated. In France, the term 'attractivité' is often used to refer to attracting investment. The French foreign ministry assured its followers it had looked up the definition of the word in English, but that did little to shut down the jokes and memes."

So... they've modified it to "economic attractiveness."

Politico reports.

I love the photograph of the (erstwhile) Minister for Attractiveness:



Such delicate hands! I myself am mesmerized.

"This makes the butterfly in my chest alive."

A comment submitted for the old post, "Please don’t give them those eyebrows that look like black electrical tape or they won’t get job":



I hit delete, of course, and yet I did not want to crush the butterfly. Fly, butterfly, fly.

This gets the "translation" tag. I don't know whether that phrase is a literal translation of a phrase that's idiomatic in another language or whether the English phrase "I've got butterflies in my stomach" has been translated into a foreign language into something that then literally translates back into English as "This makes the butterfly in my chest alive."

"The Trump era has been all about dissolving moral norms and waging vicious attacks. This has been an era of culture war, class warfare..."

"... and identity politics. It’s been an era in which call-out culture, reality TV melodrama and tribal grandstanding have overshadowed policymaking and the challenges of actually governing. The Buttigieg surge suggests that there are a lot of Democrats who want to say goodbye to all that. They don’t want to fight fire and divisiveness with more fire and divisiveness. They don’t want to fight white identity politics with another kind of identity politics. They are sick of the moral melodrama altogether. They just want a person who is more about governing than virtue-signaling, more about friendliness and basic decency than media circus and rhetorical war. Buttigieg’s secret is that he transcends many of the tensions that run through our society in a way that makes people on all sides feel comfortable.... Buttigieg’s policy positions are not all that different from the more identifiable leftist candidates. But he eschews grand ideological conflict."

Writes David Brooks in "Why You Love Mayor Pete/Buttigieg detaches progressive policy from the culture war" (NYT).

ADDED: A really interesting top-rated comment at the NYT, from Brad Malkovsky of South Bend (who may be this person):

A story has been making the rounds in South Bend since last week about Mayor Pete some time ago (just how long ago was not stated) showing up in the emergency ward in one of our local hospitals to help a Somali boy who had nearly hanged himself. The story is reported by an emergency physician. Neither the boy nor his mother spoke English. Pete had heard over the police scanner that an Arabic translator was needed. He showed up, knowing how dire the situation was, did the translating, and stayed with the boy and his mother for an hour, accompanying them right into the ICU. Only afterward, when pressed by the physician to reveal how long he had been working as a translator for the hospital, did Pete casually reveal that he was not in fact a translator but rather the mayor of South Bend. He then shook hands with the physician and quietly left. This is our Mayor Pete. He gets things done quietly and without drawing attention to himself. He is the grownup in the room.

Wow. It's called a "story," so I guess I have to say "if true..." So, if true, that's the most perfect political anecdote I've ever read.

"In moments between the wonder, awe and privilege of traveling through the world, I have been followed and harassed by men who assume I’m a sex worker, not a solo black female traveler simply trying to see a bit of the world."

Said Martha Mukaiwa (of Windhoek, Namibia, who has traveled to Thailand, Malaysia, Ghana, Indonesia, Germany, France, and Italy), quoted in "'Don’t Succumb to the Fear': Women Share Travel Safety Tips/No woman is responsible for harassment or any other violent act against her. But experienced travelers and government agencies show how to travel as safely as possible," a NYT article with this correction: "An earlier version of this article misquoted a woman who described her experiences being followed or harassed while traveling alone. She said she has been followed and harassed by men who assume she is 'a sex worker,' not 'a prostitute.'"

I wonder how that mistake happened. The quote expresses disrespect toward prostitutes, whether they are called prostitutes or not. The woman's attitude is how dare men assume I'm a prostitute. What's the switch to a euphemism supposed to do? The disrespect is still there, isn't it? It does say, I want to use the politically correct terms, but isn't that more about wanting to avoid the disrespect of the elite who will think you're not the right kind of person?

There I was tripping through the world with my wonder, awe and privilege, and men interfered with my fantasy by imagining that I was a woman who is working for a living. What's the problem? If "sex worker" means what correct-speakers act like it means, there is no problem! It's an insult only if you think of those women in the way that is expressed by the word "prostitute."

Perhaps that's what caused the transcription error, if it was in fact a transcription error. It's possible that the quote was accurate, post-publication criticism arose, and dignity was restored with the white lie "misquoted." It's also possible that it's a translation glitch, but English is the official language of Namibia.

"Still, as a readerly translation of the Bible, the King James is imperfect. Its archaisms aren’t always grand..."

"... sometimes they’re just dead weight. Its Christian bias, in theologically freighted words like 'soul,' can be a distraction. And some of its translations are simply incorrect, as we’ve learned thanks to advances in Near East philology and archaeology since the 19th century. The translators of the King James, though they were masters of English style, showed little interest or ability to represent the characteristic forms of ancient Hebrew, especially, as Alter has argued, in the poetic sections. If the King James demonstrates that the Hebrew Bible can be made an English masterpiece, it also proves that even a masterpiece of translation is never the final word."

From "After More Than Two Decades of Work, a New Hebrew Bible to Rival the King James/The pre-eminent scholar Robert Alter has finally finished his own translation" (NYT).

On the subject of rejecting the English word "soul" (to translate the Hebrew word "nefesh"):

Maybe I'm weird, but here's something you can do that might be fun.

Go to Goodreads and search for a book you really like, scroll down to "community reviews," and select the filter "1 star." You might get boring non-reviews, like "I hated this book so much that I can't even talk about why." I saw that on a book I loved. It doesn't matter which one.

But I was looking for reviews of the book I'm reading now — "Men Without Women" by Haruki Murakami — which I'm immensely enjoying, and I stumbled into the "1 star" filter. Someone who goes by "Jack" wrote:

This review didn't begin so negatively because I hate the author and the kind of person who's attracted to his style; on the contrary, I've read his entire oeuvre, more or less, and enjoyed a decent majority of his works. The criticisms of Murakami's style are well-known at this point: he has a bag of narrative or aesthetic tricks, and there isn't a single thing in one of his stories he hasn't repeated somewhere else....

He's a casual read, uncomplicated but mostly superficially pleasing, like the bland emotionless sexual encounters in 95% of everything he writes. There's only so many times one can read about a relatively handsome Japanese man, in his late-thirties or maybe middle-age, who likes jazz and cooking and being a milquetoast zombie at once content and uneasy with his vapid life, without thinking that maybe Murakami isn't writing about some aspect of the human condition, or the plight of men, or something like that: maybe he's just putting himself into every novel, adding a weird dream or two, a cat, some sort of mundane fantastical event that goes unexplained, and repeating until the publishers phone up and say it's time for him to make them more money.

I became interested in Murakami's writing as a teenager because I was a big manga and JRPG nerd, and wanted to continue obsessing over Japan while gaining some sort of literary foothold that put me above the unwashed nerdy masses. He was an easy read while channeling an ineffable sensibility, and he was big into Anglo-American culture so I could understand most of his references. I might reread The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle sometime down the line and discover that there's still a lot in Murakami's style I enjoy.

For the most part, I can only conclude I've outgrown him. He didn't change; I did. By that line of thinking, maybe I shouldn't be making a value judgment of his work, if I've just come to a change of taste, right? Well, no. His prose is clunky at best, profoundly meaningless at its most infuriating. This is still a pretty bad short story collection, but if you like it, you're in luck! You'll like everything Murakami's ever written right up until the moment you realise you hate him. 

Ha ha. That was well written, and I don't think it will hurt my enjoyment of Murakami's writing... until (I guess) the moment I realize I hate him.

Why am I reading that book? Is it because of the incels in the news or the men-without-women amongst the commenters of this blog? No. There were 2 things:

First, I read a Murakami book last September. As described in a post titled "A song about singing off key," I was clicking around aimlessly and happened onto "15 sights that make Tokyo so fascinating" (HuffPo), and #7 was the Murakami novel "Norwegian Wood" ("For millions of readers around the world who've never been to Japan, it's been a way for them to experience in some small way, Japan's capital of the past").

Second, a reader familiar with my "Gatsby project" emailed to say, "I’m reading Murakami’s 'What I talk about when I talk about running.' I came to one paragraph (see attached) which made me think of you and which you might enjoy."

Here's the paragraph:

One other project I’m involved in now is translating Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and things are going well. I’ve finished the first draft and am revising the second. I’m taking my time, going over each line carefully, and as I do so the translation gets smoother and I’m better able to render Fitzgerald’s prose into more natural Japanese. It’s a little strange, perhaps, to make this claim at such a late date, but Gatsby really is an outstanding novel. I never get tired of it, no matter how many times I read it. It’s the kind of literature that nourishes you as you read, and every time I do I’m struck by something new, and experience a fresh reaction to it. I find it amazing how such a young writer, only twenty-nine at the time, could grasp— so insightfully, so equitably, and so warmly— the realities of life. How was this possible? The more I think about it, and the more I read the novel, the more mysterious it all is.

I can't imagine translating Gatsby, because the sentences are so weird. Do you translate literally to preserve the weirdness, or do you make it sound natural and idiomatic so people won't say you don't know how to translate, or can you find similar ways to be weird that fit the translated-to language?

And if you're thinking of fighting my opinion that the Gatsby sentences are weird, please click on the "Gatsby project" link above. Each post is about exactly one sentence — such as "A tray of cocktails floated at us through the twilight, and we sat down at a table with the two girls in yellow and three men, each one introduced to us as Mr. Mumble."

When I heard about the Murakami translation of "Gatsby," my heart leapt but only for a half-second. I can't read Japanese! I almost studied Japanese long ago, and nothing prevents me from studying it or anything else even now. But it made me want to read Murakami again, and "Men Without Women" seemed to be the most recent fiction. I started in on that. After reading 5 of the 8 stories, I put the nonfiction "What I Talk About When I Talk About Running" in my Kindle too. Don't want to overload on fiction. And the 5th story was really great.

By the way — "Men Without Women" is also the title of a story collection by Ernest Hemingway. "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" is a story collection by Raymond Carver. And, obviously, "Norwegian Wood" is a Beatles song.

From the 5th story:

“Mr. Kino, you’re not the type who would willingly do something wrong. I know that very well. But there are times in this world when it’s not enough just not to do the wrong thing. Some people use that blank space as a kind of loophole. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

The White House says Trump's talk for sending the U.S. military to deal with "bad hombres down there" in Mexico was just "lighthearted."

AP reports through a White House official who "who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the details publicly."

The leaked transcript of the phone conversation had Trump saying:

"You have a bunch of bad hombres down there. You aren't doing enough to stop them. I think your military is scared. Our military isn't, so I just might send them down to take care of it."

The unnamed source says that was "part of a discussion about how the United States and Mexico could work collaboratively to combat drug cartels and other criminal elements, and make the border more secure." That conversation, we're told, was "pleasant and constructive."

How did this conversation get leaked? I can see the value to Trump. I invite you to entertain the idea that Trump wanted it leaked.

Wanted the conversation with the Australian prime minister leaked too, but I'll put that in a second post.

ADDED: On proofread, I don't like the word "just" in the post title. I don't think it could have been just lighthearted. Humor is also serious, especially in a situation like this. I can believe Trump was trying to loosen up President Nieto and create a man-to-man relationship through humor, humor relevant to the very real problems. We know that Trump has seriously said Mexico will want to help him with his border-security project as they understand the benefits to Mexico, especially in fighting criminal gangs that harm both countries at the border. The "lighthearted" statement gets at that problem and why Nieto should work with Trump.

Now, whoever leaked the transcript has cued up this very controversy, crime across the border with Mexico. The press must pick up this story, because the irresistible candy coating is Trump saying something bad again. But to digest that story, you've got to talk about the crime problem and how anyone other than Trump has a way to solve it. "I alone can fix it," Trump has said. And is it not true? Does anyone else have a way to fix it? Having swallowed the yummy Trump-said-something-bad story, the country will take a close look at Dr. Trump's Remedy.

Trump made us talk about that. I mean, whoever leaked that story is making us talk about that.

ALSO: Consider the special problem of using humor across a language barrier. How could Trump expect nuances of tone — from lighthearted to threatening — to pass through translation correctly? Maybe you think President Enrique Peña Nieto speaks English. I looked it up. He claims to speak English, but from what I've seen, he only speaks it very poorly, not well enough to communicate with any sophistication.

In 2014, on a visit to California to address the state legislature, he offered to speak only Spanish and with no translator, because "I believe that most of you speak Spanish."

MORE: I meant to say, in that last update, Trump, in his humor/"humor" used a Spanish word, "hombre." I have no idea how that felt to Spanish-speaking Nieto. To an American, it's reminiscent of old cowboy movies, and "hombre," even without the "bad," has a negative connotation. Beyond the old cowboy context, "hombre" sounds funny to us, but it wouldn't have automatic funniness to a native Spanish-speaker. Yet, if Nieto was listening to a translator, he wouldn't even know that Trump had used the Spanish word, would he?

IN THE COMMENTS: Quoting my, "I invite you to entertain the idea that Trump wanted it leaked," Balfegor says:

Ah, I see -- perhaps the White House official spoke on condition of anonymity because it was John Miller. 

"We are convinced that religion has no place in the political arena, that once religion injects itself into the political debate, the political debate becomes totalitarian."

Said Gerard Biard, the editor in chief of Charlie Hebdo, explaining the nature of the magazine's attacks on religion to Chuck Todd on "Meet the Press" yesterday.

The transcript from yesterday's show is not available, and the NBC website, with 2 article on the interview — here and here — has only a few quotes — the one I transcribed above, but another one that uses the word "totalitarian":

The editor told Todd that "religion should not be a political argument." He said if religion enters the "political arena, it becomes a totalitarian argument. Secularism protects us against this, secularism guarantees democracy and assures peace. Secularism allows all believers and not-believers to live in peace and that is what we defend."

Chuck Todd looks strangely confused during the interview, and both articles at the NBC website have an "Editor's Note," calling out the French-to-English interpreter for mistranslating "liberté de conscience" as "freedom of religion" instead of "freedom of thought" or "freedom of conscience." And he shifted to the panel discussion on the show, Todd said that much of the interview was "left on the cutting room floor." So, we need not only the usual show transcript, but a transcript of the whole interview, in both English and French.

Biard was saying something that is objectionable to many Americans and contrary to our free speech values. If you think you might not agree with me, remember that today we are celebrating the birthday of The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., whose most famous speech ended:

And when this happens, and when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual:

                Free at last! Free at last!

                Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!

Could that be translated or even mistranslated into secular language? That's what Biard wants people to do and insists must be done to avoid totalitarianism.

Did the Pope say "allow ourselves to be smitten" by the love of Jesus?

Last night's "Smitten by his love" post brought email from ddh:

Your suspicion that the Pope did not say "smitten" is correct. After an introductory paragraph in Portuguese, the Pope switched to his native Spanish and said, according to the Vatican:

Pero la Cruz invita también a dejarnos contagiar por este amor, nos enseña así a mirar siempre al otro con misericordia y amor, sobre todo a quien sufre, a quien tiene necesidad de ayuda, a quien espera una palabra, un gesto.

I translate this sentence as:

Does anyone in the Bible ever say "hello"?

It's all translation, if it's in English, and "hello" is a pretty recent English word. (The OED puts its earliest use in the year 1827.) I spent some time with the various translations at BibleGateway, and I found at least one that has "hello" — the Contemporary English Version, within which "hello" appears exactly twice:

Job 17:14 Then I could greet the grave as my father and say to the worms, “Hello, mother and sisters!”

Matthew 26:49 Judas walked right up to Jesus and said, “Hello, teacher.” Then Judas kissed him.

Great material! Job and Judas come across as a couple of darkly edgy comedians.

Why was I looking for "hello" in the Bible? I got caught up — after writing this post — in the meaning of "hail" in "Hail Mary." I was puzzling over whether or not there should be a comma between "hail" and "Mary," which I was reading to mean basically "Hello, Mary." But the Contemporary English Version of the Bible doesn't use "Hello, Mary" in the relevant verse (which is Luke 1:28). (It has: "The angel greeted Mary and said, 'You are truly blessed! The Lord is with you.'")

A common alternative word for "hail" in that verse is "rejoice." I'm also seeing "Greetings!" which seems pretty close to Hello. I thought about other uses of "hail." Meade — who grew up in West Lafayette, home of Purdue — brought up "Hail Purdue." That made me, an alumna of the University of Michigan, think of "Hail! to the victors valiant." And then there's "Hail to the Chief" and "Hail to thee, blithe spirit!" (beginning Shelley's "To a Skylark").

What does "hail" mean beyond "hello"?

"Heil Hitler" is translated as "Hail Hitler." It's not "Hello Hitler," which seems edgily absurd. You could sing it to the tune of "Hello, Dolly," which has a comma, I might note, unlike Hello Kitty.