Interpretatio quaerens intellectum – ‘Translation seeking understanding’

Introduction

This essay is a personal reflection on my experience as a translator and series editor for Greek and Hebrew in the now almost finished translation project Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works English (DBWE). ¹ The purpose of these reflections is not so much to examine the details of the often painstaking work and dedication required for all the translators and editors of the project. Rather – as a scholar eminently interested in the intersection of theology, philosophy and biblical studies – I am attempting to make intelligible my experience of translating Bonhoeffer as a distinctly hermeneutic engagement – a hermeneutical journey as it were – and this in three distinct but interrelated levels. First, the translation of words; second, the translation of ideas, concepts, paragraphs, sections and so on; and third – and most important to me – the translation of the author as a person.

Translation as hermeneutics

The deepest insight from my participation in the DBWE project is that translation is foremost a hermeneutical task. Indeed, the Greek word that means ‘to translate’ is nothing else but the verb hermēneuein, based on the stem from which we derive the word ‘hermeneutics’. There are several instances in the NT in which hermēneuein ² or its cognate methermēneuein ³ are used in the sense of ‘translating’ and this always means to clarify specific words or phrases. Already in the NT, we find a strong correlation between the task of translation and that of hermeneutics. Indeed, to repeat, translation is essentially a hermeneutical task. ⁴

Translation of words

The beginning of my hermeneutical journey with Bonhoeffer started before I became one of the translators of his work. As a student of theology in Tübingen I had all too often heard of Bonhoeffer, but had not in any way started to study his thought. In order to fill this gap in my theological education I started reading Bonhoeffer in German – in order to understand his theology and life. In other words, given the compelling witness of his life, I was open-minded toward the possibility that this encounter would actually lead to intellectual clarification and existential shifts that may leave irrevocable traces in my own life. In retrospect, this proved to be the case.

The start of this journey was marked by my rather innocent review of DBWE volume 5 (Life Together), volume 2 (Act and Being) and volume 4 (Discipleship). When I pointed out dozens of morphological and diacritical mistakes in the Greek (now corrected in the reprints) in Discipleship, I was recruited to participate in the editorial board, as both translator and the lone Greek expert. I had stepped into the hermeneutical circle on the most basic level of translation and soon realized that I had entered what constitutes the initial and most basic level of translation: the translation of words.

On this basic level, translation means making intelligible the smallest units of speech – in linguistic terms, the morphemes – in a process that moves from source language to receptor language. No translator can avoid this basic task. It is the first step in the process of the transformation of meaning from one language to another one. The ideal here is synonymy in meaning, namely, that the meaning of words is synonymous in the original and receptor language. In many cases this works well: the expression Wort Gottes can be translated as Word of God, Gebet as prayer, Kirche as church and so on.

However, synonymy on the word level is not always successful. A good example to illustrate this point is the use of the German adjective ‘evangelisch’. Theological translators of German have typically translated this word as ‘evangelical’. A prime example is Karl Barth’s book, Evangelical Theology – An Introduction. ⁵ On the surface, it may seem like a proper translation, but a closer examination of this rendering reveals that it is actually problematic; this brings us to our second point.

Translation of concepts

As the translation of the adjective ‘evangelisch’ indicates, the meaning of words is usually embedded in the larger meaning of a phrase, expression, concept, idea and cultural milieu. In order to translate the broader meaning of a concept or expression accurately, the translator must understand the intellectual and cultural nuances of both the original and the receptor language. This is crucial for a dynamic rendering of the original language.

This point can be illustrated again with the rendering of the German adjective ‘evangelisch’. First, there seems to be synonymy between ‘evangelisch’ and its translation as ‘evangelical’. The translator of Barth’s book understood the terms in this manner. This is problematic in that German does have another word for ‘evangelical’ that expresses synonymy, namely, the word ‘evangelikal’. We can see already that a literal, synonymous translation poses a problem here. Second, the problem of synonymy was clearly perceived, and adequately dealt with, by the translators and editors of the DBWE. In short, given the largely American readership of DBWE, the adjective ‘evangelisch’ is not identical with the American understanding of ‘evangelical’. Evangelicalism stands for a certain theological understanding within the wide spectrum of Protestant churches and denominations in the United States and other English-speaking countries. In contrast, Bonhoeffer employed the adjective ‘evangelisch’ in the sense of ‘Protestant’ as distinct from the (Roman) Catholic Church. ⁶ In this sense, a more accurate translation of Barth’s book would have been: Protestant Theology – An Introduction.

The broader and deeper the intellectual horizon and cultural context of the source language, the greater will be the challenge for the translator. Anyone who has attempted to read Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time and claims to understand this philosophical opus on a first reading is hardly telling the truth. Indeed, the very concept of truth as alētheia, alēthes, translated as the ‘unhiding’ or ‘disclosing’ of the logos ⁷ requires from the translator the mastery of German and Greek and that the reader should be steeped in the Greek philosophical traditions. As even these two examples (Barth and Heidegger) demonstrate, translation must go beyond word synonymy and consider the intellectual and cultural nuances and usages of specific words and concepts. In terms of the hermeneutical task, conceptual dynamic equivalence is arguably the most decisive criterion for a successful translation on the level of concept and discourse.

Translation of the author

For my own hermeneutical journey, the third level is by far the most significant one. At the risk of oversimplifying, I would like to suggest that the aim of all translation must be ‘understanding’. In other words, the ultimate hermeneutical task of translation is to bring to light the thought of an author. ⁸ Another possible way to express this third level of translation is to recall Anselm of Canterbury’s definition of theology. We have all heard the famous words fides quaerens intellectum, ‘faith seeking understanding’. For the sake of these reflections, I would like to rescript these words as interpretatio quaerens intellectum, ‘translation seeking understanding’. In Anselm’s view, faith is the given. Faith comes before understanding and leads to a person’s deeper theological understanding of the content and coherence of that which is believed. In a similar way, I suggest, translation comes before understanding; indeed, understanding is the ultimate objective of translation. We rely on a good translation in order to understand the thought and ideas of its author.

At this point it is possible to interject and argue that this third level (the translation of the author) has little, perhaps nothing to do, with the task of translation proper. I admit that on the surface it may seem so, but I will argue to the contrary that this third step is not just a kind of a ‘bonus’ of translation, but the very heart of it. Let me make my case in three steps.

As I worked away on my section of Bonhoeffer in DBWE 15, a question occurred to me repeatedly: why do we need to translate Bonhoeffer in the first place? In short, it is because we want Bonhoeffer’s thought to be known and understood. Ideally this happens when we read him in German, but it also happens by translating his thought. In other words, the mastery of another language is like a window into another world. Other languages are not merely saying in other words what our own language says; rather, another language is another way of thinking, another way of perceiving the world, another vehicle of expressing a fundamental world-view. Translation of words and concepts – as accurate as it may be – is only partially able to translate the deeper structures of implicit world-views in other languages. Said negatively, translation has an implied hermeneutical boundary that cannot be overstepped. The intellectual world-view implicit in the source language can never be fully retrieved in the receptor language. This fact may be illustrated with two examples. First: as a teacher of biblical Greek I get sometimes introduced as a Greek scholar, as if Greek were my scholarly identity. This is not the case. I teach and use Greek only as the tool that makes possible a deeper reading of the biblical and philosophical texts. I understand mastery of Greek not as an end by itself but as the beginning of the path to understanding. Greek will reveal nuances in the biblical text that English translations typically fail to articulate. ⁹ Second: the mastery of another language in the service of translation can also be compared to scaffolding used in the construction of a building. Language is like scaffolding: it is used as the instrument to build understanding. The aim of language is understanding, in the same way that the purpose of scaffolding is to facilitate the construction of the building. Once finished, scaffolding is removed and we only see the house; analogously, once translation is completed, we treasure the understanding of the author that resulted from it. Let me briefly return to the question that I asked earlier: why translation in the first place? We can confidently maintain that it is a good thing indeed to provide a scholarly translation of Bonhoeffer’s works. This cannot mean, however, that the scholar has now a licence to neglect reading Bonhoeffer in the original, in the same way that a biblical scholar cannot neglect Hebrew and Greek just because there are so many translations of the Bible available.

However, for the sake of our discussion, let us make a distinction between his life and his theology. His life came to a momentous conclusion in prison and ultimately at the gallows in Flossenbürg. But did his theology equally come to a momentous conclusion in prison? Is his prison theology indeed the grand finale of his intellectual achievement and his theological magnum opus? My intention is to raise this question rather than attempt an answer.

In 2010, Martin E. Marty wrote an intriguing book, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison: A Biography. ¹¹ If we would know next to nothing of Bonhoeffer’s life – in other words, if we would be ignorant of the Sitz im Leben that makes his life and his theology so attractive to many Christians – then, I think, Marty is quite correct in his assessment of Letters and Papers from Prison: ‘No publisher would have seen a potentially attractive book in the letters or his other various jottings, musings, and poems written in prison.’ ¹² The point is (almost) beyond argument: we ascribe significance to Bonhoeffer’s prison theology because we associate it with his person, but not because we encounter a grand theological synthesis of his earlier theological thinking.

But Marty also points to another rather bewildering phenomenon of Letters and Papers from Prison. In short, it is the bizarre history of interpretation. Perhaps no other work of Bonhoeffer has been claimed in such contradictory terms. How could it be that East German communists, Evangelicals, mainline liberal Protestants, God-is-dead theologians and Catholics all alike stake out claims that make Bonhoeffer one of them? That they cannot all be right in their ideological interpretations stands to basic hermeneutical reason. Again, my intention is to raise this dilemma rather than to answer it.

Then there is Karl Barth. Arguably for Bonhoeffer there was no other contemporary theologian as important a theological Gesprächspartner as Barth. The two of them exchanged numerous letters and had at least six face-to-face encounters. After Bonhoeffer’s death and shortly after the publication of the first edition of Letters and Papers from Prison, there was an exchange of letters between Barth and a pastor, Walter Herrenbrück. The latter explicitly asked Barth to respond to the ideas expressed in Letters and Papers from Prison; Barth did so in great detail in a letter in 1952. Barth remarks that Bonhoeffer’s letters are ‘one deep sting’ and one cannot read them without getting the impression that ‘there is something’ in them. Nonetheless, Barth characterizes Bonhoeffer as an ‘impulsive, visionary thinker’ who proposed ideas (in Discipleship, in his teaching on the mandates) and then pulled back and would probably have said things differently in a later context. ‘Now he has left us alone with his enigmatic statements in his letters. In many ways he indicated that he had a hunch, but he did not know how the story would be completed.’ In more than one way Barth continues, Bonhoeffer did not leave us anything that ‘was concrete in his own eyes’. There may be no deeper meaning (Tiefsinn) to the enigmatic statements because he himself did not yet find such a deeper theological coherence. ‘Ohne ihn selbst fragen zu können, werden wir uns damit abfinden müssen, etwas verwirrt zurückzubleiben.’ ¹³ A few years later, in 1963, Barth once again cautioned that he did not simply want to do what is done so often: to systematize the ideas of the late Bonhoeffer. ¹⁴

Finally, let us hear Bonhoeffer himself. On four occasions he comments in his prison letters on his theological ideas. ‘What might surprise or perhaps even worry you,’ he writes to his friend Bethge, ‘would be my theological thoughts and where they are leading, and here is where I miss you really very much. I don’t know anyone else with whom I can talk about them and arrive at some clarity.’ ¹⁵ The day before the failed attempt on Hitler’s life, Bonhoeffer appeals to Bethge again. In relation to the world-come-of age ideas, he says, ‘forgive me, this is all still put terribly clumsily and badly; I am very aware of this. But perhaps you are just the one to help me again to clarify and simplify it.’ ¹⁶ Finally, after the conspiracy, at the end of the outline for a planned book, he summarizes: ‘All this is put very roughly and only outlined. But I am eager to attempt for once to express certain things simply and clearly … I hope in doing so I can be of some service for the future of the church.’ ¹⁷

Given Bonhoeffer’s comments to Bethge, it seems to me that we cannot ignore his own repeated caution that he has not yet achieved clarity on these theological matters. For the moment, my own reading of Letters and Papers from Prison is to take these theological ideas as signposts on Bonhoeffer’s much longer theological journey. I do not think that we are yet – perhaps never – in a position to take the prison letters as the pinnacle of Bonhoeffer’s theology or as the starting point from which we assess retrospectively his earlier theology. More research needs to be done, especially in the extensive corpus of lectures in the Finkenwalde period and the relation between this period and to the ideas of the prison theology.

Conclusion

These remarks are mere personal reflections on how my engagement in translating Bonhoeffer has deepened my interest and perspective on his theology and life. Participating in the work of DBWE has been an unusually rewarding experience. On the one hand, I count it a privilege to bring Bonhoeffer to a wider English readership. On the other hand, my work on DBWE 15 has opened up a new vista of interest in his theology – namely, the hundreds of pages in volumes 14 and 15 – that, in my view, still need to be examined, first, on their own terms, and, second, in relation to the early and later Bonhoeffer. This work will be for me another station on the journey of hermeneutics, the attempt to understand Bonhoeffer more deeply and faithfully.