Biblical Sirens: Isaiah 43, 20

The fourth appearance of sirens in the Septuagint is particularly interesting for us, I think:

Behold I will do a new thing;
now it shall become visible:
I will even make a way in the wilderness
and rivers in the desert.
Then shall the beasts of the field praise me
the sirens and the daughters of the ostriches,
because I give waters in the wilderness.

It's the combination of the sirens and the river that struck me particularly! The river here is a blessing (as it is in Gilfillan's quotation from Isaiah - well, actually, it's used there to figure the peace that would have followed from obedience to God's commandments). And this river waters the wilderness which is home to the sirens.

Biblical Sirens: Isaiah 34, 13

The Sirens appear a third time in Isaiah 34, 13. Here, as usual, is Rahner's translation:

Thorns grow up in their cities
and in their strong places.
It will be a dwelling-place for sirens
and a fold for ostriches.

Like the last one, this text comes from a prophecy of destruction - in this case, the destruction of Edom. Again, the Vulgate does not mention Sirens at all:

et orientur in domibus eius spinae et urticae et paliurus in munitionibus eius et erit cubile draconum et pascua strutionum

And the King James version has this:

And thorns shall come up in her palaces, nettles and brambles in the fortresses thereof: and it shall be an habitation of dragons, and a court for owls.

And the Greek phrase is:

Personally, I'm finding these images of destroyed cities interesting - but wait till you see the next passage! :o)

Biblical Sirens: Isaiah 13, 21-22

The second mention of Sirens in the Septuagint is in the book of Isaiah (13, 21-22) and Rahner translates it like this:

Now beasts make their homes there
and an empty echo is heard in the houses.
Sirens have their habitation there
and demons dance.
Ass-centaurs dwell there
and hedgehogs breed in the halls.

This comes from a passage of prophecy in which Isaiah describes the destruction of Babylon by the Medes - this is Babylon after its ruin. Again, other versions are interesting. The Vulgate has:

sed requiescent ibi bestiae et replebuntur domus eorum draconibus et habitabunt ibi strutiones et pilosi saltabunt ibi et respondebunt ibi ululae in aedibus eius et sirenae in delubris voluptatis

According to Rahner, this is the only passage in the Latin text that mentions Sirens (sirenae). He says: 'with one exception all these passages in Jerome avoid the Greek mistranslation, so that the Bible hardly brought the Roman Christian into direct contact with the Siren myth at all'. The King James version has:

But wild beasts of the desert shall lie there; and their houses shall be full of doleful creatures; and owls shall dwell there, and satyrs shall dance there. And the wild beasts of the islands shall cry in their desolate houses, and dragons in their pleasant palaces: and her time is near to come, and her days shall not be prolonged.

The relevant phrase in Greek is:

And, of course, we've talked about Isaiah before, again in connection with Gilfillan's visit to Itasca. (It was a passage from Isaiah that Gilfillan took as his text for the first sermon to be preached at the source of the Mississippi.)

Biblical Sirens: Job 30, 29-30

So, the first passage in the Septuagint to mention Sirens is in the book of Job (30, 29-30). This is Rahner's version of the text:

I am a brother to sirens
and a companion of ostriches.
My skin is black and falleth from me
and my bones are burned with heat.

Here Job is lamenting the afflictions he has suffered and the terms he uses suggest that his estrangement from God is a figurative exile in the desert. I notice that in the King James translation, we have 'a brother to owls', and in the Latin Vulgate, 'frater ... draconum'. The relevant phrase in Greek is:

I've mentioned Job on this blog before. It was when Gilfillan was writing about the shape of Lake Itasca and suggesting that it was an image of the Trinity, written into the heart of the North American continent. The quotation he uses comes from Job 19, 24 and my post is here.

Sirens in the Bible (oh yes!)

Having discussed the dual nature of the Sirens in Greek mythology, Hugo Rahner goes on to talk about the use of the word seirēnes in the Septuagint:

The reason why the symbolism developed around these figures continued for so long a period of time to be a living influence was that, when reading the Scriptures in his own tongue, the Greek Christian could find certain words there which acted as entry ports through which the imagery of profane mythology merged with the Christian interpretation of the Bible.

The Alexandrine translators who produced the Septuagint found six places in the ancient Hebrew books where there was a mention of mysterious beasts referred to as tannîm and benôt and ya'anâh, terms which mean literally "jackals" or "hen ostriches". They render these words by the
Greek Seirēnes (Sirens). What inspired this gross but most interesting mistranslation in the minds of these Hellenistic translators is a mystery which has hitherto remained unsolved. The result, however, is plain enough: for over a thousand years Greek Christians read the word "Sirens" in the passages concerned, and the association of ideas connected with these mystical beings, so universally familiar in the folk-lore of antiquity, was sufficiently strong to arouse in the Christian Greek much the same horror that these deadly creatures had inspired in pagan forerunners and contemporaries.

So, where do these mentions of Sirens appear? More on that later, but - by way of preview - we need to look at the books of Job, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Micah.

joseph gilfillan

Just did a little research on the Joseph A. Gilfillan whose sermon is commemorated in Itasca State Park and who you mention here. Between 1873 and 1908 he also served as a missionary but to the Ojibwe rather than the Dakota. He apparently learned the Ojibwe language and was particularly interested in place names, publishing a paper on the subject with the title 'Minnesota Geographical Names Derived from the Chippewa Language'. (I gather that the standard work on Minnesota place names is Minnesota Place Names: A Geographical Encyclopedia by Warren Upham.) The Minnesota Historical Society, who - I have to say - seem incredibly active, own an archive of his papers which includes all kinds of material on the language of the Ojibwe. I really may have to go through all this stuff at some point!

There are many layers of irony in play here, I think!

The Bible in Dakota

Just another detail: an important goal for Gideon and Samuel Pond was to translate the Bible into Dakota. What's interesting, though, is that the first portion of the text that they published - in 1842 - was the story of Joseph, which explains how the Israelites came to be in exile in Egypt. I have no idea why they chose that particular story.

comments

I tried to comment on your last two posts, but they disappear into thin air, so I'm going to just write a new post and hope for the best!

regarding the images from the train station, I really like them: I like the washed out color combined with the really clear and clean typography, which makes me feel I ought to be able to read what the signs say, even though I don't know those alphabets...

regarding collections and mistranslation (two posts ago), I'm thinking how an alphabet is itself a collection, of how part of the strangeness of Chinese for anyone not literate in Chinese is the character system, which is not an alphabet in the way Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew, etc. are. what other character systems are there than Chinese? or is everything else currently in use an actual alphabet? how are archaic writing systems different from Chinese, hieroglyphs, etc? I don't know anything at all about this stuff, and I'm curious if you can give me a bit of an overview...

xoxox

Xu Bing

Doing a bit of spring cleaning this morning, I came across a xerox of an article about the visual artist Xu Bing, whose work I followed especially in the mid-90's and need to catch up with now. The article is called "Meaninglessness and Confrontation in Xu Bing's Art", it's by Gao Minglu, but I don't know where it was published 'cause the xerox doesn't tell me.

Here's Gao Minglu's description of a project called ABC...

In San Diego in 1991 Xu exhibited a set of ceramic sculptures resembling pieces of moveable type. The words on the tops of the blocks were Chinese characters that, if read aloud, sound like the English alphabet. Used to approximate English sounds, the words are supposed to be meaningless. Chinese characters, however, bear their meaning in their forms, and the words Xu chose echo with painful or absurd semantic resonances. Often, when foreign words are transliterated in Chinese, the original meaning will be transformed in the new cultural background; one cannot but think that the work expresses the discomfort of an adult forced to learn a new language, who brings to simple linguistic facts a complicated cultural baggage.

And this is Xu Bing's own statement from his website:

The theme of this work is the awkwardness encountered in linguistic exchange between different cultures. It is comprised of thirty-eight ceramic cubes that represent a sort of transliteration from the twenty-six letters of the Roman alphabet to Chinese characters. The characters that have been chosen are such that, when pronounced, render sounds equivalent to the English letter they represent. The Chinese characters are caved on the upper face of the each ceramic block in the form of a printer's stamp and the Roman letter is printed on the side of the block. For example, the English letter 'A' is rendered by the Chinese 'ai', which means sadness. 'B' is rendered 'bi', which means land on the other side, on the other shore. Some letters need two or three Chinese characters to 'transliterate'. For example, 'W' is rendered 'da', 'bu', 'liu' which means big, cloth and six. This activity may begin with a becoming logic, but ultimately it leaves its subject, transliterated language, virtually meaningless and almost ridiculous.

I will most likely be writing a piece during the timeframe of our Archives of Exile collaboration that's a setting of poems from Ezra Pound's Cathay, the famous mistranslations of ancient Chinese poetry. My reading list for researching that project includes these two books by Yunte Huang:

Transpacific Displacement: Ethnography, Translation, and Intertextual Travel in Twentieth-Century American Literature

Shi: A Radical Reading of Chinese Poetry

My plan is to write the piece for four Chinese instruments and string quartet, and either two singers or a bi-lingual singer, not sure yet. the text will be some conflation of Pound's Cathay poems, the original poems, and various mis-translations back and forth between the languages.

If you remember, when we originally talked about the Archives of Exile project, I said that perhaps other projects I'm working on may want to be part of our AoE project. This Cathay project might be one of them... or not, depending on how the other explorations we're doing end up taking shape! I'm just putting everything I'm thinking about here in the blog, and we'll see how it wants to shape up...

if this stuff turns you on, definitely let me know!