On the Matsu Shore (poem)

Is this a sound

of water or of wind,

day or night that wakens me,

wants me here

waiting with the wind,

watching over water?

How many centuries,

how many me’s are gathered

in this moment yet to go,

yet to know the we, the way

from all of here to more of here,

ever more of here,

hearing with the sea,

wondering the wind...

--Lloyd Haft

at Qinbi, Beigan, Matsu

February 2, 2015

early morning

Tips for Tired Translators

(1) Yours is one of the most thankless professions in the world You are being paid – if we can even use the word ‘paid’ for the disgusting pittance you are undoubtedly getting – to help somebody else earn money and become famous. Accept it! Publishers will always think of you, if they think of you at all, as a sort of glorified typist. As for authors, take comfort in the words of an Italian sinologist friend of mine who said: ‘The nice thing about translating Ancient Chinese poetry is that the authors are already dead!’

(2) Try to avoid translating authors who know more than five words of your own native language. They will always think they have found mistakes in your translation, and want you to change your text accordingly.

(3) If you can’t see what the damned text MEANS, take a deep breath and just translate what it SAYS. An obscure original has the right to an obscure translation.

(4) Don’t break your back trying to make the original sound better than it is. We are not in business to teach people to write decently.

(5) If you are an American, never expect that one single European, never one single one of them in your lifetime or in all eternity, will ever think you know anything at all about a language called ‘English.’

(6) Don’t assume that just because a word is in the dictionary, it must be wrong.

Lloyd Haft

January 2015

Justin Stone's Chinese Name

Justin Stone's Chinese Name

(Scraps from a Sinological Scrapbook 漢齋閒情異誌, fragment 26)

Fundamentals of T’ai Chi Ch’uan, by Wen-Shan Huang who was Justin Stone’s teacher, contains a preface by Justin Stone – just as Stone’s T’ai Chi Chih!, published at about the same time (1974), not only includes a foreword by Huang but is dedicated to him as a ‘friend and teacher.’ Huang’s book, unlike Stone’s brief manual, is an imposing tome, 559 pages in all, more like a reference book for a lifetime. Probably nobody ever read it at one sitting.

       It took me forty years to get around to the Appendices at the back, which are in Chinese. (By that time I had at least a reasonable knowledge of Chinese, though I still had to ask my wife what certain key phrases meant...)

       In the third Appendix, where Huang lists some acknowledgments, he calls Justin Stone by a Chinese name, adding the English name in parentheses. The Chinese name is Shi Dong 石東, the two characters meaning ‘stone’ and ‘east’ respectively. Shi is an existing Chinese family name, and Dong is a plausible first name.  If we rearrange the characters to put the first and last names in the usual Western order (‘Dong Shi’), they mean ‘Oriental Stone’ or ‘Eastern Stone.’ Very appropriate, given Justin’s intense study and assimilation of Oriental meanings and values.

       I have no way of knowing whether it was Wen-Shan Huang himself who gave Justin this name, but it is a reasonable guess. Western students of Chinese things often receive a name from their Chinese teacher. (I did.) And there is a technical detail of ‘Shi Dong’ which adds to my suspicion that Teacher Huang himself gave this name to Teacher Stone. In giving names to foreigners, the Chinese like to select Chinese syllables which are not only meaningful but more or less resemble the original sound of the person’s name. In Southern Chinese speech, ‘Shi Dong’ would likely be pronounced ‘Si Dong,’ or if pronounced very fast – as is usual – ‘S-dong.’ To Chinese ears that would sound very close to ‘Stone.’ And Wen-Shan Huang was of South Chinese origin.

       I don’t know if Justin actually used this Chinese name much. (Incidentally, in the older spelling common in those days, 'Shi Dong’ would have been ‘Shih Tung.’) But maybe there are other students out there who, like me, have been curious as to what his Chinese name might be. If somebody does know of another attested  Chinese name for Justin Stone, please do let me know!

Lloyd Haft

January 2015

If I Had to Edit the Bible

...there’d be some changes made. I would start by entirely omitting the Old Testament. I think two thousand years of trying to construe patriarchalism as spirituality has been enough. Look what it has done for us, or done to us...

       But then. The New. To begin with, I would delete practically all of the first two Gospels. I would make an exception for Chapters Five, Six, and Seven of Matthew so as to get the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, and the Lord’s Prayer. (And why is the Lord’s Prayer so specifically important? My reference on this is a line from the philosopher Max Scheler: ‘God was not a father till Jesus called him one.’)

Of Luke’s Gospel, I would keep the beginning and the end, those being the sections which emphasize the primary role of women in the Salvation process.

Of John, the most or the only philosophical gospel, I would need to make a more extensive selection. It would certainly include the beginning of the first Chapter – but not without retranslating the all-important first sentence.

The traditional version, so well known that it is used and misused in all sorts of totally secular writings and contexts, is ‘In the beginning was the word.’ I do not have a scholar’s or even a good knowledge of  Greek, but I have studied this passage sufficiently to know that ‘word’ here is way wrong. It is one of the most influentially misleading translations ever made. Whatever exactly the Greek logos means here – and it can have many meanings – it certainly cannot be just ‘word’ in anything like the ordinary sense.[1]

My own version of that passage, the so-called Prologue, is this:

In the beginning was the sense

and the sense was of God,

bespeaking God from ever.

All things have become of that;

nothing not of that becomes.

And the sense is alive:

its life is the light of the human,

breaking the hold that the darkness would have had.

The true light comes into the world

with every one of us,

comes upon its world

that was not aware before:

the sense becoming human,

dwelling where we are.

Going on with John, I would maintain Chapters 15 and 17. By doing so, I would preserve the key passages about the relativity or transcendability of the human person – its ability to morph and merge, hence transcend, in resonance with another person or persons.

       But there are other chapters of John that I would also include – 4, 6, 8, 13, and 18, so as to include Jesus’ famous (or infamous) predicateless ‘I am’ sayings. I wonder if I could resist the temptation to retranslate them so as to sound even more as if they applied not only to Jesus but to every one of us who says ‘I am.’

       But then it would seem strange to exclude the other ‘I am’ sayings, so I suppose I would have to add Chapters 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 16, and 19. And would it then make much sense, having put in 16 of the 21 chapters of John, to leave out the other five? So, I guess I would maintain all of John.

       If you are now wondering ‘if you substantially leave out three of the four Gospels, why do you still call it The New Testament at all?’...I’ll just tell you the answer straight out. I do not believe the essential import of the New Testament really comes out in the so-called ‘story of Jesus’ or Synoptic Gospels (i.e. the first three). For me, it is in what comes after: in parts of John, in that thrilling and I think quite believable story we call the Acts of the Apostles, and in the superb, ever-haunting, humanly plausible Letters of Paul.

       I know that in many people’s minds, Paul is the great perverter (or great pervert – ‘didn’t he have something against sex?’) – the one who distorted a supposedly pure-and-pristine ‘real’ Christianity into an alien philosophy. To me, he is the one who made Christianity worth more than passing attention, more than the world’s so-manieth system of unworkable moral pronouncements based on myth-like stories of a bygone Wonder Worker. Paul brings up the side that was lacking in the Gospels: the inner and experiential dimension, the notion of a personal and psychological growth. Above all, he points us to a sophisticated notion of ‘body’ such that the mere individual ‘body of this death’ is subsumed in the surviving, still-growing Body of Christ in which we all, even now, participate. (If you don’t believe this, read 1 Corinthians, Ephesians, and the one in which it is all ‘colossally’ expanded to include the cosmos – Colossians.)

       But what about the question of ‘authenticity’: whether the historical Paul of Tarsus was really the one who wrote the texts attributed to him? I say: ignore this. If you don’t, you will lose the glories of the Epistle to the Hebrews, including its Chapter Eleven, the so-called Faith Chapter, in which we are urged to carry on regardless, since even the great champions of faith in the Old Testament never really lived to see their faith fulfilled.

       Faith is not a matter of fulfilment. It is about a sense in living. The living of a sense. A sense that is known in the living of it.

--Lloyd Haft

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[1] Obviously I am not the first person in history to think this. Erasmus, in one of his own versions, treated it as the Latin sermo, meaning something like ‘conversation’ or ‘discourse.’ Many Chinese versions use Dao 道 which in the first instance suggests not so much a ‘word’ as an overall ‘way’ or ‘principle’ or ‘guiding view’ of something. The modern Dutch translator Pieter Oussoren makes it not ‘word’ but ‘speaking.’ The 20^th-century Dutch theologian Miskotte once wrote ‘word is a happening between persons.’

On Ongoing Presence

These days I miss, but am also very aware of the continuing presence of, my Spiritual Advisor. (She departed this physical frame about three years ago at the age of 78.) She was a non-resident or external member (the technical term is ‘oblate’) of a Benedictine monastic organization. Her monastic name was Mary Magdalene. In what follows I will call her Madeleine.

        Before her retirement, in worldly life Madeleine had been active in the world of education as a counselor, administratrix, and textbook editor. She was successful and well known in that world. All this fitted in well with her brand of spirituality, which I would say was of the Active Service rather than the Contemplative type. (Since my own natural bent is incurably the opposite, we sometimes had to work at translating our spiritual experiences into each other’s terms.)

She was tremendously critical of the official Catholic hierarchy and was not afraid to confront even high ‘prelates’ face-to-face. On one occasion, she was talking to one of our notoriously conservative Dutch bishops while both were looking at an Eastern Orthodox icon of the Crucifixion. This type of icon shows the crucified Christ flanked by his mother Mary and St. John the Evangelist, who is traditionally also called ‘the disciple whom Jesus loved.’[1] Madeleine said to the bishop: ‘You don’t like this one, do you? The ones closest to Jesus are a woman and a homosexual.’

        She once told me she believed Jesus himself had been bisexual. She was proud of the legends associated with her monastic namesake, the original Mary Magdalene, which say that she had been a prostitute. In general, she took a bread-and-butter rather than an exalted view of sexuality. I remember once when I ‘confessed’ to her that in my own prayers I much more often addressed myself to Mary than to Jesus, she said: ‘Well that’s just natural, after all, you’re a man and Mary is a woman!’

        But as far as I know, this matter-of-factness never implied anything outside the straight-and-narrow in Madeleine’s private life. She was a married woman and had vowed to interpret the traditional monastic vow of chastity as commitment to a ‘special’ relationship with her own husband. I think she was one of those people who are perceptively open to all manner of erotic potentials without falling into the trap of thinking they must be put into physical practice at any cost. Personally, I also thoroughly support both clauses of this traditional Pauline attitude (1 Corinthians 6:12) that all things are allowable but not all are expedient.

        The same practicality applied in her approach to etheric and mysterious and invisible things. She believed in them, hoped for them (isn’t that really the same?), and had no problem with her own role in making them actual. Regarding the human personality’s survival of bodily death, she told me frankly that while out driving her car, she often talked out loud to her long-deceased father. And as for the existence of God, to me her classic statement was ‘I just plain want God to exist!’

        Like many people in my church, at home she was liable to pray while standing in front of an icon on the wall. I can still see her (I never saw it objectively) getting up in the morning, feeling as she put it ‘amazed to be still alive,’ pouring her first cup from the automatic coffeemaker, stepping with that cup of coffee in her hand right up to the nearest icon, and greeting the Presence at the beginning of a new day.

--Lloyd Haft

October 2014

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[1] The Bible passages used to support this association, whether or not they are historically valid, are John 19:26, 20:2, 21:7 and 21:20.

What My Religion Is

My religion is not a system of beliefs. It is a collection of practices.

The practices include (occasionally) attending mass, taking communion, prayer, reverencing images of the Mother of God, and abstaining (or trying to abstain) from certain behaviors which I think to be, at least for me, immoral.

The practices are not props or self-suggestive devices intended to reinforce or strengthen beliefs or ideas. They are not intended to (supposedly) ‘improve’ or ‘perfect’ me as a person, a member of society, or whatever. They are an autonomous area of experience to which I voluntarily subject myself because I don’t seem well able to do without it.

The practices do not lead to increased subjective certainty. They very definitely do conduce to an increased subjective acceptance of uncertainty.

--Lloyd Haft

September 2014

Ader nabij (gedicht)

Wie het veel om zich heen hoort, gaat al

in de dood geloven,

waant zich al nabij,

na nog, bij nog hen

die al ontvloden,

taal noch teken boden

waar de laatste roep ontsprong.

--Lloyd Haft