ABSTRACT
The chapter begins with the stories Willis Barnstone tells about how religion tends to obscure not only the fact of translation but the languages and cultures mediated by translation, in order to protect a sacred history – and then begins to explore those movements of language and culture that are all too often suppressed by religion. Julian Jaynes next outlines his speculation about the right-brain ‘hallucinatory’ voices of the gods, and how they were first repeated verbatim in speech, then later carved into statues, and finally translated. The rest of the chapter consists of examples from Assyria, Egypt, Israel, China, and India. In Assyria, we learn that some of the poems that were eventually compiled as The Epic of Gilgamesh in Akkadian cuneiform were originally written in Sumerian in the early to mid-third millennium BCE and translated into Akkadian. In Egypt, we find a text titled The Complaints of Khakheperreseneb (ca. 2000 BCE), in which the author or narrator complains that the language of his Egyptian ancestors is tired and worn, and longs for an alien speech. In the Hebrew Bible, the Book of Proverbs contains a passage describing human speech as thought translated into words by God. The earliest mention of translation in China, from around 1000 BCE, describes the different names used for translators in various parts of China; there follows a reading of passages from the Daodejing. In India between the sixth and third centuries BCE, Brahmin scholars began to produce legal treatises on procedure called dharmashastras (dharma is sacred law); late in that period, these treatises began to be supplemented with arthrashastras (arthra means ‘useful’) containing rules for statecraft, military strategy, and economic policy. In one of the most famous the author reports that the sons of prostitutes were trained to be actors, and when they got married, their wives were to become fluent in foreign languages to be able to detect, delude, and murder foreign spies.
