‘Could a rule be given from without, poetry would cease to be poetry, and sink into a mechanical art. It would be μóρφωσις, not ποίησις. The rules of the IMAGINATION are themselves the very powers of growth and production. The words to which they are reducible, present only the outlines and external appearance of the fruit. A deceptive counterfeit of the superficial form and colours may be elaborated; but the marble peach feels cold and heavy, and children only put it to their mouths.’ [Coleridge, Biographia ch. 18]

‘ποίησις’ (poiēsis) means ‘a making, a creation, a production’ and is used of poetry in Aristotle and Plato. ‘μóρφωσις’ (morphōsis) in essence means the same thing: ‘a shaping, a bringing into shape.’ But Coleridge has in mind the New Testament use of the word as ‘semblance’ or ‘outward appearance’, which the KJV translates as ‘form’: ‘An instructor of the foolish, a teacher of babes, which hast the form [μóρφωσις] of knowledge and of the truth in the law’ [Romans 2:20]; ‘Having a form [μóρφωσις] of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away’ [2 Timothy 3:5]. I trust that's clear.

There is much more on Coleridge at my other, Coleridgean blog.

Tuesday 17 July 2018

Google Translate's Version of Genesis ch. 1's Hebrew.




1: 1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth

1: 2 And the land was dull, and darkness and darkness were upon the face of the abyss, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the water.

1: 3 And God said, Let there be light, and there will be light

1: 4 And God saw the light, for it was good, and God separated between the light and the darkness.

1: 5 And God called on the light of day, and the darkness was called night, and there was evening, and there was morning one day.

1: : 6 And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters;

1: 7 And God made the firmament, and made a distinction between the waters which were under the firmament, and the waters that were above the firmament, and so it was.

1: 8 And God called heaven heaven, and there was evening, and there was morning.

1: 9 And God said, Let the water under the heaven be gathered to one place, and the land shall appear, and it shall be so.

1:10 And God called the land dry, and to the waters of the waters he called, and God saw that it was good.

1:11 And God said, Let the earth grow on the grass, Grass that sows seed, A tree of fruit, Make fruit for his wine, which they sow on the land, and it is so.

1:12 And the earth brought forth grass, grass that sowed seed into its kind, and a tree that made fruit, which they sown in its kind, and God saw that it was good.

1:13 And it was evening, and there was morning morning.

1:14 And God said, Let there be light in the firmament of the heaven, to distinguish between the day and the night, and be for the dead, and the seasons, and the days, and the years.

1:15 And they became a den in the firmament of heaven, to shine upon the earth, and it was so.

1:16 And God made the two great lights, the greater light to rule the day, and the little light to rule the night, and the stars.

1:17 And God put them in the firmament of heaven to shine upon the earth.

1:18 And for instance by day and by night, and to distinguish between light and darkness, and God saw that it was good.

1:19 And there was evening, and there was morning, Wednesday.

1:20 And God said, The waters shall flow forth, that a living soul shall flow, and a bird shall fly upon the earth upon the firmament of heaven.

1:21 And God created their great things, and all the living souls that were thirsty, which the water desired for their kind, and every winged bird of its kind, and God saw that it was good.

1:22 And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the water with the days, and the birds shall multiply in the land.

1:23 And there was evening, and there was morning, Thursday.

1:24 And God said, Let the earth bring forth a living soul, a kind of beast, and a herd, and make a land for its kind, and it shall be.

1:25 And God made the beast of the land for her kind, and the cattle for her own kind, and all the sheaf of the earth for its kind, and God saw that it was good.

1:26 And God said, Let us become a man in our image as our figure, and go down in the fish of the sea, and in the birds of the heavens, and in the cattle, and in all the earth,

1:27 And God created man in his image in the image of God;

1:28 And God blessed them; and God said to them, Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the land, and conquer it, and go down in the fish of the sea, and in the bird of the heavens

1:29 And God said, Behold, I have given you all the seed of seed, which is on the face of all the earth, and all the tree wherein is the fruit of a tree;

1:30 And to every beast of the earth, and to all the birds of the air, and to every rosette on the ground, wherewith a living soul liveth every herb of grass, to eat it, and it shall be so.

1:31 And God saw all that He had done, and behold, it was very good, and it was evening, and there was morning, the sixth day.

4 comments:

  1. So: I was curious as to what would happen if I took Biblical Hebrew and put it through Google Translate. So I took the Hebrew from here, ran it through the software, and above is the result. It’s less garbled than I thought it might be, but that makes sense really: Google doesn’t translate foreign text in any substantive way, it scans the internet for existing translations of words, phrases, grammatical constructions and so on, triages the results and posts them. The English comes with the specific instruction to ‘improve’ the translation if you can, which data the Google Translate algorithm will then feed into its own loop. Clearly lots of people have posted online versions of the first few Hebrew verses of Genesis, which means that here the machine comes up with quite a familiar approximation of many of these verses. Some interesting things emerge, nonetheless: the Hebrew for ‘Wednesday’ is evidently just ‘fourth day’, and I quite like the Ashbery-esque slightly-out-of kilter quality and repetitiveness of some of this. ‘1:13 And it was evening, and there was morning morning’ is particularly good.

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    1. And actually, reading this again, some of it is manifestly an improvement. ‘And the land was dull, and darkness and darkness were upon the face of the abyss’, is rather brilliant; ‘And they became a den in the firmament of heaven’ is nicely odd, and I just love: ‘And to every beast of the earth, and to all the birds of the air, and to every rosette on the ground, wherewith a living soul liveth’.

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  2. After reading this, I suspect that the Hebrew Bible must be part of the original stuff the algorithim absorbed (or however these self learning language processors work, I am sadly ignorant.) There are too many grammatical anomalies in this passage that it translates smoothly, most glaringly the first word, which is a well known issue. Very, very interesting though.

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  3. I particularly like 1:11 - it seems about to turn into a counting rhyme or one of those additive folk songs (the grass and the seed of the grass, the seed and the tree from the seed...).

    'Firmament' is interesting - it's notoriously a word that everyone knows, but knows only from Genesis 1. Was the Hebrew original also a hapax logomenon?

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