MetaCatholic

The blogabout boxing match on 1 Corinthians 9:27 continues. To the blogs referenced in yesterday’s post, you can now add (at least) David Ker now lingering in Better Bibles, ElShaddai Edwards, and that most perspicacious and pugnacious pugilist John Hobbins.

I repeat yesterday’s defensive block first. Despite everything everyone else is saying, I always called my rendition a paraphrase, not a translation. Take that into account.

Interestingly, David and John seem to take opposite sides on one key point. David thinks that

The reason this word [ὑπωπιάζω] gets used in such different contexts is that the word is a dead metaphor, or “semantically bleached” (I’ve always wanted to use that phrase on a blog). And further proof of this is that Paul collocates it with “body” which would really be strange: “I hit myself on the face my body.”

By contrast, John clearly wishes to translate it as a live metaphor, by a corresponding metaphor, though he doesn’t like the one of my original paraphrase. After toying with his son’s “bust my butt” he settles for “break my body”. The problem is that the former is as AmE as my “ponce” was BrE¹, and the latter, as far as I know, simply isn’t an English metaphor, nor does it seem to me vivid enough to become one.

Is it a live metaphor or a dead one? If we only had the use of it in Luke 18:5 we would, I think conclude that it was indeed pushing up the linguistic daisies, and nailed to the semantic perch. If we only had the use in 1 Cor 9:27, then I think, seeing it amidst all those other agonistic metaphors, we would think it was not so much pining for, but avidly looking forward to a frolic in the poetic fjords.² Even if it had become a dead metaphor, we would have to think there was at least the possibility of its metaphorical roots being raised from the dead by Pauline punning. So if we think, as I do, that in context it is probably impossible completely to ignore the metaphor implicit in its etymology, we may still want to argue for a far less precise English equivalent, since there are some grounds for thinking the metaphor is imbued by contextual and etymological pun rather than customary contemporary usage.

In which case we have now been give a wide range of metaphors to choose from in posts and comments. Of them, the one made so far that strikes me as the most common idiom is a variant on Peter Kirk’s suggestion in a comment. He suggested “I bust my gut” but I would say “I bust a gut” is more idiomatic. If one wishes for a less colourful yet still colloquial alternative, I would suggest “I push myself hard”: it loses the sense of bruising or breaking, but maintains the sense of hard competition, and given the argument above ought certainly to be an acceptable alternative metaphor.

Translating a metaphor remains a knotty problem. While I think it well worth the effort of finding equivalent metaphors that work naturally in the target language, I think there are also occasions when the original metaphor is so striking, we may legitimately translate it term for term. The English language has been immeasurably enriched by the willingness of Tyndale and the KJV among others to do just that.

1. for those not in the know, Am(erican) E(nglish) and Br(itish) E(nglish) [↩]
2. All references to Monty Python’s Dead Parrot Sketch [↩]