Former Czech President Vaclav Havel died yesterday at the age of 75 after a lengthy illness. A playwright by trade, his works would be banned in Czechoslovakia after the Prague Spring in 1968. This would not deter his political activity. In 1977, Havel was one of the founders of the Czech dissident group Charter 77. This would result in Havel being imprisoned by the Communist regime on multiple occasions. He spent nearly half the 1980s held in confinement. In 1989, Havel led the non-violent Velvet Revolution which resulted in the fall of communism and in him becoming President of Czechoslovakia. Havel would reluctantly oversee the break up of Czechoslovakia in 1993 remaining President of the Czech Republic until 2003. Havel’s political inclinations were far more social democratic than conservative. But Havel was held in high esteem by the likes of Margaret Thatcher. Lord Powell, who served as Thatcher’s Private Secretary from 1983 to 1990, wrote in The Daily Telegraph , “She took to him because he was articulate and shared her views on communism and in particular her moral views of communism.” Indeed, when Havel visited Thatcher at 10 Downing Street in March 1990 she paid him the highest of tributes . “During the darkest years of Stalinist oppression, you were an inspiration to your people,” said Thatcher, “In your plays, you exposed and
Congress is scheduled to end the year this week with a flurry of legislating, suprises, new spending and deal making. Conservatives need to watch Washington, D.C. this week to see how many bills pass in the waning hours of this session of Congress that spend more of your tax dollars. The battle over the extension of the payroll tax will play out this week in the Congress. A massive megabus spending package should be voted upon in the House and Senate this week, because the government runs out of Continuing Resolution cash and authority this Friday. This will be a week full of last minute sweet heart deals for lobbyist and special interests. The Senate starts the week with a very controversial nomination. At 4:30 pm today, the Senate will vote on the nominations of Norman Eisen to be Ambassador to the Czech Republic and Mari Carmen Aponte to be Ambassador to El Salvador. The Aponte nomination is very controversial because of her radical past. Daniel Horowitz writes that the “ GOP Must Block Maria del Carmen Aponte ” because of her relationship to a Cuban spy years ago. Last August, stymied by Jim DeMint’s Senate hold, Obama used a recess appointment to name Maria del Carmen Aponte ambassador to El Salvador. She was originally selected as ambassador to the Dominican Republic during the Clinton administration, but she withdrew her name after refusing to take a polygraph test concerning her relationship with Cuban spy, Roberto Tamayo. Nonetheless, radical rejects of the Clinton administration are the very people whom Obama loves to recycle. Aponte’s recess appointment expires at the end of the year, and the Senate may vote on her permanent appointment as early as Monday afternoon. After a vote on Aponte, according to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), “the Senate expects to consider the following additional items next week: additional nominations, remaining appropriations bills, balanced budget amendments, and payroll tax, unemployment insurance, Medicare reimbursement, tax extenders, all of which are set to expire at the end of the year.” Expect a flurry of bills to pass this week in the Senate. The Senate is expected to a vote on a strong Balanced Budget Amendment (BBA) to the Constitution this week. The strong BBA forces a supermajority vote for tax increases and sets government spending at 18% of the economic output of the United States. The House dropped the ball of the BBA and forced a failed vote on a weakened BBA without protections against tax increases and a spending limit provision. Human Events likes the Senate version of the BBA. In the Senate, all the Republican senators have signed onto Senate Joint Res. 10, the Hatch-Lee Balanced Budget Amendment. This is a strong bill. It protects the taxpayers with supermajorities for tax increases, forbids courts from ordering tax increases in the case of an imbalance and holds revenues to 18% of Gross Domestic Product. The House has a packed schedule for the week. Eight suspension votes are scheduled for today, including five postal bills ( S.384 ; H.R. 3220 ; H.R. 3246 ; H.R. 2158 ; and, H.R. 2767 ), H.R. 2845 (a pipeline safety bill), H.R. 2668 (Border Patrol naming bill for deceased agent Brian Terry), and H.R. 1264 (courthouse naming bill). The remainder of the week is set aside for the legislation wrapping up business for the year. Remaining bills in the House referenced on House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s (R-VA) web site are the following: H.R. 3421 – Fallen Heroes of 9/11 Act (Sponsored by Rep. Bill Shuster / Financial Services Committee) H.R. 886 – United States Marshals Service 225th Anniversary Commemorative Coin Act (Sponsored by Rep. Steve Womack / Financial Services Committee) H.R. 1905 – Iran Threat Reduction Act of 2011 (Sponsored by Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen / Foreign Affairs Committee) H.R. 2105 – Iran, North Korea, and Syria Nonproliferation Reform and Modernization Act of 2011 (Sponsored by Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen / Foreign Affairs Committee) H.Res. 306 – Urging the Republic of Turkey to Safeguard Its Christian Heritage and to Return Confiscated Church Properties (Sponsored by Rep. Ed Royce / Foreign Affairs Committee) H.Res. 376 – Calling for the repatriation of POW/MIAs and abductees from the Korean War (Sponsored by Rep. Charlie Rangel / Foreign Affairs Committee) H.R. 2719 – Rattlesnake Mountain Public Access Act of 2011 (Sponsored by Rep. Doc Hastings / Natural Resources Committee) H.R. 443 – To provide for the conveyance of certain property from the United States to the Maniilaq Association located in Kotzebue, Alaska (Sponsored by Rep. Don Young / Natural Resources Committee) S. 278 – Sugar Loaf Fire Protection District Land Exchange Act (Sponsored by Sen. Mark Udall / Natural Resources Committee) H.R. 313 – Drug Trafficking Safe Harbor Elimination Act of 2011 (Sponsored by Rep. Lamar Smith / Judiciary Committee) The House version of the payroll tax cut is out and it would legislatively provide a permit for the Keystone XL Pipeline ( H.R. 3630 ). Remaining items are a megabus spending bill and a defense authorization bill.
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This Week in Washington – December 12, 2011
Obama reportedly horrified. PRAGUE (AP) — They’re the Czech Republic’s fourth-largest political party, but the hardline Communists could soon be outlawed if the center-right government has its way. It’s more than two decades since communism collapsed here, but the survivors and ideological heirs to the party that ruled from 1948 until the “Velvet Revolution” of 1989 are under increasing political pressure. Petr Necas’ government has taken the first step toward a possible ban by asking the Interior Ministry to work on a legal complaint to make it happen. A study commissioned by a Senate committee compiled numerous complaints from lawmakers about their conduct. The party, which is vehemently opposed to NATO, brands opponents “terrorists” and maintains friendly ties with the ruling Communists in Cuba, China and North Korea. Unlike most other communist parties in the region that have joined the left-wing mainstream, the Czech party has maintained its hardline stance. Supporters of the ban say it is a direct successor of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, whose members killed more than 240 political prisoners while thousands of other opponents died in prisons.
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Czech Republic Considers Banning Communist Party…
PARIS — Not having stopped here other than for a change of planes in nearly a year, I was delighted by the invitation to try out British Air’s Open Skies, a boutique flight to Paris that leaves from New York or Washington with only 85 passengers. The kindness of my hosts came just at the right time, as Mr. Pleszczynski and I had been discussing the French Open — the Championnats Internationaux de France , as they have been known since 1925 — and a few other items on the radar screen concerning this dear and old country, eldest daughter of the Church presently embroiled in a couple of savage wars of peace in Africa and engaged in a soul-searching debate regarding the proper limits on the press with regard to the private lives of public officials. At the tournament, the only debates took place on this legendary site’s famous red clay, with most of the top players advancing through the first round yesterday and the day before, Sunday. The weather is perfect under the clear azure skies that my friends assure me have been the norm since the beginning of spring, turning even the gloomiest souls into dreamers, though raising concerns about drought. The stadium itself, designed like one of those classical French gardens that make you think the world is rational, is so agreeable and well-organized that visitors turn happy — and courteous — even as they approach the gates on the avenue Gordon-Bennett, named for the founder of the New York Herald , also the Paris paper of the same name (many streets in Paris’ western quarters are named after Americans). It is hard to imagine that Roland-Garros, named for an aviation pioneer and World War I ace, was in competition last year with other locations to continue hosting this classic event in the tennis universe. Of the other four tournaments in the tennis grand slam circuit, only the All-England, held at Wimbledon near London, has never considered moving: the Australian and U.S. championships have, by contrast, seen changes in their locations. These have been on balance happy moves. Although Flushing Meadows represented a sharp departure from Forest Hills with its classic handsome layout, its clay and grass courts, its class, you must allow, I suppose, that the huge season-ending event in U.S. tennis needs the space and the big-time environment its new digs provided. There were good reasons to move the Internationaux away from Paris’s west side to a proposed new sports complex in a northern suburb. There was space there for a state-of-the-art stadium and facilities that other sports could use, for training as well as competition. French educational authorities as well as private athletic clubs are willing and often quite dynamic, but when you talk to the individuals involved you usually hear a note of apology for the second and even third tier levels of French amateur and professional athletics, with the possible exception of solo sailing and fencing. If you build it they will learn, I suppose that was the argument. However, this is far from a sure thing, and the excellent athletes here (and on American basketball courts) who grew up in makeshift sports programs in eastern and central Europe underscore an observation someone made on the plane, money does not make champions, coaches and teachers do. Not to get romantic about this, and I am sure good facilities cannot hurt, other things being equal, but anyway the French tennis federation opted to keep the tournament at its location near the Porte d’Auteuil, which is just at the edge of the Bois de Boulogne in a neighborhood of sports stadiums, including the famous Parc des Princes football field, where the Lille club played an important game last Saturday, necessitating a major mobilization of gendarmes in full riot gear in anticipation of post-game fan exuberance, which fortunately stayed rational, as these things go, possibly because sufficient minds were concentrated by the highly visible police presence. The expansion and redesign of Roland-Garros, scheduled for completion in 2016, calls for using nearby space to lay out some additional courts for both competitive play and training programs. A retractable roof will be fitted over the center court, whose bleachers already seats as many, about 10,000, as other major tennis stadiums. It is a risky gamble to change the character of a tradition-bound sport in a radical way, and this includes the environment in which it is identified. With all due respect for the capital’s northern suburbs, they are not the venerable and expensive old west side with its wooded areas and tracks-and-field and vast elegant sun-lit apartments in handsome old seven-story buildings. There would not be the old racetrack across the street with its fin-de-siècle architectural motifs. There would not be the nostalgic small poets’ garden tucked away next door to the tennis stadium where children play and old men read verses inscribed on stones. It made sense in every way to build on what they already had. Roland-Garros has been improved upon several times since its original design, done in great haste to allow the famous Four Musketeers of French tennis to defend their Davis Cup against the revenge-seeking Americans, at the time still led by the legendary Bill Tilden, who remains a contender in the perennial game of “greatest of all time.” This was back in 1928, and they (I mean the Mousquetaires) , won behind their own legendary champion, the crafty René Lacoste, known as the crocodile for the way he moved. Some tennis powers, as well as municipal bigs and ordinary citizens, question whether the proposed innovations can be successfully completed and worry about their cost, but those questions could be raised about a new venue as well. ME PERSONALLY, I WAS DELIGHTED for the innovation in my travel habits provided by my Open Skies hosts. Lately I have been traveling in African army cargo planes and broken down trucks, so the opportunity to see how the other half gets from A to B was welcome. Let me tell you, if you are an athlete — and I am, I say this purely as an objective fact not as a boast, the leading over-the-hill tennis player on Washington’s entire east side, which means I can beat Mr. Tyrrell, especially if we play after discussing critical questions relating to Republican Party politics over a few martinis — traveling on Open Skies is the ticket. They keep you in perfect comfort and get you on and off the plane and into Paris in record time. I have never spent less time getting out of an airplane and to my final destination, not that I am always sure what that is. They have the good sense to fly into Orly airport on the city’s southern outskirts and scarcely a quarter hour to the river, whereas the appalling Charles-de-Gaulle wasteland is way over in some distant zone to the northeast from which you cannot reach Paris in less than an hour. The seats are fantastic. Of course, my standard of recent comparison is benches in a Tupolev flying over an African desert (superb American-trained pilot, soldiers and their families, some with barnyard animals, but hey, I have also been in steerage). Seriously, this is the way to go. You can stretch your legs, you can have a drink — or several — you can read, you can speak to an elegant stewardess in any language you want, you can quote either Shakespeare or Corneille and she gets it, you can eat, you can not eat, you lean over and discuss restaurants and museums and sporting news with a fellow passenger who turns out to know more than you do instead of talking for eight hours about currencies and tips, or you can stay by yourself and enjoy the magic of moving through the clouds. How blessed we are! How foolish to let our human sins undermine all the wonderful gifts our God-given brains have made for us! Why cannot the Arabs get their acts together? Hah? I ask you. Not a single Arab competitor in high-level tennis. Well, the Russians have got there, several of them, at least among the women, have a clear shot at reaching the final next week, and look where they were just a few years ago. Freedom will out, my friends, and tennis is the index of its progress. After all — look at Rafael Nadal. This child of the New Democratic Spain — admittedly wracked by unseemly disturbances over the weekend, which threaten to cause real trouble down the road — this young man (24) from the Balearic Islands, was inconceivable during the years of the dictatorship. They had great players in Manuel Santana and Andres Gimeno, but not the explosion of talent across all fields, not just sports, which he epitomizes. I admit I am of those who sometimes asks whether Don Francisco got a bad rap, or at least an exaggerated rap, and whether the new Spain gets too wide a berth from American Deweyites (“the solution to the problems of democracy is more democracy”), but freedom, freedom — it is their country, let them deal with it. In the meantime, they have produced some fantastically good tennis players. One of whom is David Ferrer, who advanced easily to the second round. Rafa Nadal will try to equal the mighty Bjorn Borg’s record six victories here. The unexpected is always possible, but the man who may stop him is likely to be either Roger Federer or Novak Djokovic, who are in the same bracket and therefore will meet but for an upset. They both started out easily yesterday with straight set victories, although Feliciano Lopez forced Federer to a tie-break in the third. The only surprise on the men’s side, actually, was the comeback from two sets down by a 31-year old French qualifier, Stéphane Robert, over the Czech Thomas Berdych in a thriller whose final set (where there is no tie-break) went to 9-7. The Americans are not shining, with the graceful and fierce Williams sisters out of the running due to health problems and our teenage star Melanie Oudin already overwhelmed by the defending champion Francesca Schiavone. The men are represented by an attractive but weak field relative to what we usually send here, Isner, Querrey, Fish. The French have Gasquet and Monfils, maybe Simon, Tsonga, Bennetteau, while their Michael Llorda is already out. Perhaps the countries that sent the finest players of their time to Roland-Garros in its infancy, will be doing so again when all the renovations are finished in about four years’ time. It will be a gorgeous stadium then. But then it always was.
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We’ll Always Have Tennis — in Paris
The 400th anniversary of the King James Bible has received only muted celebrations in the English-speaking world, and no celebrations at all elsewhere. This book, which shaped the syntax, the imagery, and the wisdom of everyday discourse among speakers of English, and which has probably been more frequently quoted than any other source, including the Greek and Hebrew originals, is now receding behind the screen on which our ephemeral messages are scribbled. But the history of the English Bible is of great importance to us today, since it reminds us that our civilization is built upon translations. The Septuagint, the Vulgate, the Wulfila Bible (the fourth-century translation into the Gothic language), the Wycliffe Bible, and the translations of early reformers — the Czech Králice Bible, Luther’s Bible, the Geneva Bible, and the seminal translation by William Tyndale on which the King James translation is ultimately based — all these have brought with them profound and far-reaching changes in the social, political, and religious lives of ordinary people in Christian Europe. Every new translation has offered a promise of power to some and a threat to the power of others. A society governed by a privileged class of priests and clerks, whose authority derives from a text that only they can read, will be suspicious of translations of that text, and inclined to forbid them. Wycliffe survived only because he was protected by the powerful John of Gaunt, and Tyndale was burned at the stake in Bruges. Still, by the time of King James I versions of the Bible in English were available in every church, and it was no longer a threat to any vested interest to authorize a new and complete translation. How lucky we English-speakers were, that this translation should have been made in the wake of the Elizabethan dramatists, at a time when the English language was at its most muscular and taut, when it could be applied to matters both earthly and heavenly and at once give a fully imagined account of them, gripped in what Gerard Manley Hopkins was to call the “native thew and sinew” of the English tongue. All subsequent translations, set beside this version, are on a downhill path toward banality, and by the time of the New English Bible (completed 1970) it is fair to say that the immediacy and urgency of the King James Bible had been more or less dissolved in watery literal-mindedness. It is not just the literary merits of the King James Bible that recommend it, however. This was the Bible that the Pilgrim Fathers brought with them across the Atlantic, that the Methodist riders took around the farmsteads and cabins of rural America, the Bible that the merchant adventurers carried to India, Australia, and Africa, the Bible that provided the texts of Handel’s oratorios and which inspired the hymns of Isaac Watts and Charles Wesley. It is the Bible that was planted in the depths of the English-speaking soul during the crucial centuries when the sphere of English-speaking freedom was formed. I doubt that you can understand the motives of the early settlers of America without it. It gave them the names of their towns and villages, the names of their children, the maxims of their daily life and the routines and rituals of their sparse forms of enjoyment. They fought and cursed, made love and sermons, in the language of the King James Bible, and everywhere about us we see the difference that this has made. Ask yourself how it came about that a suburb of Washington, D.C. should bear the beautiful Hebrew name of Bethesda and you will unearth a history that is dependent at almost every point on the King James Bible and its immediate sources in Tyndale and Myles Coverdale. BUT THERE ARE OTHER and equally interesting ideas suggested by the history of biblical translation. When Christendom was first shaping itself from within the Roman Empire it was by means of the Vulgate, St. Jerome’s Latin version of the sacred texts. Those early Christians did not doubt that their most authoritative text, the one which contained the most direct messages yet received from God to man, had been translated from other languages, spoken by other people, in whom God had, for reasons of His own, chosen to confide. A kind of openness to the world and to other ways of life was the natural consequence of this. And this openness has characterized the Christian religion ever since. I may be wrong, but it does seem to me that this marks out an important cultural difference between Christian civilization and Islam. Ever since the 11th-century triumph of the Asharite school of Islam it has been orthodox to believe that the Koran cannot be translated, that the surahs were literally spoken, as we find them, to the Prophet, and that any attempt to represent their meaning in another language would falsify God’s word. Versions of the Koran in other languages are therefore routinely described as “interpretations.” A devout Muslim may learn to recite the Koran in Arabic without knowing, except in rough outline, what it means. And it is only Arabic speakers, who today form less than 20 percent of Muslims, who know what nonsense it is to say that this text cannot be translated. Of course, something is lost in translation — in particular the taut, breathless syntax of the original, and the poetic rhythms of the rhyming prose. But then, something is lost in every translation. And as our Bible teaches us, something may also be gained, and the gain may be more than the loss. It is perhaps true of St. John’s Gospel that the Greek original is inferior to Tyndale as literature. But the reader of Tyndale will discover exactly what the writer of the Gospel intended to say. The official non-translatability of the Koran has had important political consequences. The mullahs and ayatollahs have been able to assert a kind of monopoly over the sacred text, to withhold it and themselves from public scrutiny, and thereby to establish theocratic forms of government in which they hold power in God’s name. The downgrading of secular authority and secular law, the claim to absolute and incorrigible justification, follow from this as a matter of course. This is what we have seen in Iran and will no doubt see in Egypt should the Muslim Brotherhood finally fulfill its ambition of ruling that country, its Christian minority included, according to the shari’ah . The translatability of the Bible has had equally far-reaching political consequences. When the nation-states of Europe began to emerge after the Reformation, it was partly because people were beginning to see that law and language are far more reliable criteria of political loyalty than dynasty and religion, since law and language are instruments of peace, whereas dynasties and religions are always at war. The translations of the Bible brought the Christian religion to heel, contained it within the borders of the linguistic community, and overcame the medieval orthodoxy that, in matters of religion, the real authorities were situated elsewhere and outside the kingdom. They helped to domesticate the religious impulse and who can doubt, looking back at the wars of religion, that Europeans needed, at the time, to identify themselves in some other and more peaceful way than the way of faith? TRANSLATION OPENS THE WAY to a new kind of scholarship. Granted that the texts we hold sacred originated in Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, and Greek, what do we know about the people who first wrote them down, and how can we be sure what they meant by the words they wrote? During the late 18th century this question gave rise to the science of biblical hermeneutics, which led the universities of Europe toward a new kind of skepticism. It became clear that the ancient texts belonged to specific social and political contexts, and that they were not necessarily aimed at the whole of humanity. People began to assign precise dates to them, to draw a map of Jewish history, and to distinguish which parts of the Gospels told the authentic story of Christ’s mission, and which were later fabrications. This scholarship has made it difficult to think of the Bible as God’s word — that is to say, as the word spoken to prophets and others by God. At best the Bible consists of words inspired by God, words which might have been marred and distorted in the process of recording them, and in which the element of inspiration and the element of fabrication might be hard to unravel. (Think of the bloodthirsty book of Joshua, for instance, and the story of Rahab, about whom the best can be said is that she was a whore: did God have a hand in that ?) It is impossible that the Bible should now have, for the educated Christian, the kind of authority that the Koran has for the Muslim. The Bible is a text to be discussed and interrogated, whose message does not remain entirely the same from generation to generation, but which responds to the changing circumstances of those who consult it. And one proof of its inspired nature is that it always does respond, that it offers thoughts, arguments, words, and guidance in all the changing scenes of life — including the changing scenes of our species-life. We can no longer point to the Bible as the final authority in any disputed question. But the Bible is as much a help to us as ever it was to the Pilgrim Fathers. It has persuaded us to take responsibility for our actions, and not to bequeath our problems to humorless old men in beards who pretend that only they know how to read the sacred text. That makes it the more sad that the King James Bible, which raised us to a higher level of seriousness, should have slipped behind the screen, taking with it so much of the English-speaking soul.
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Translating the Word
