Translating Philippians 1:9-11

Philippians 1:3-11 is one of the Lectionary passages this week, and so I read through it this morning during my devotional time in Greek.  Now Paul is good at long sentences.  I remember the embarrassment once working with a Greek student who was translating this passage in his second year.  He was doing OK in literal terms, but I was suggesting how he might make the English clearer.  Well, pride goes before a fall, and I had hardly begun to do my “freer” translation when the moorings came completely loose and I got totally tangled up.  It took three or four tries before the result was coherent, and it still wasn’t that great.

It’s not that I’m not well acquainted with the passage.  It is even one of those I have recorded for myself on CD so I can listen while driving.  But you wouldn’t have known it from my English that day.  The problem is that you can either translate one of Paul’s long Greek sentences into a harder to understand long English one, or you can try to keep the right sense in the transitions using shorter sentences.

This morning, after reading, I looked it up in the NLT, and then compared that first to the NRSV and then the CEV.  I’m going to put the NRSV first, as it’s most equivalent in a formal sense, then comment on what I noticed.  Also, before anyone decides I’m beating up on one translation or another, I have a high regard for all three of these translations in the appropriate context.

I think both the NLT and the CEV have some difficulty keeping the relationships between the concepts clear. Obviously, how well one thinks each translation did at that task will depend on how one things those elements are related in Greek.

So let me say how I hear this when I read it in Greek.  Paul starts from the point of love, but he is not merely saying that he wants love to grow in quantity.  He’s praying that their love will be filled with knowledge and insight.  When love is filled with knowledge and insight, one can discern what is most important, which leads in turn to pure and blameless living.  That in turn brings brings forth the fruit of righteousness, bring honor to Jesus, who brought all this forth in any case.

Now I can find that in the NRSV, though I do acknowledge that many modern readers will have a hard time holding that long of a sentence together, so the readers may not benefit from it.  (Communication is not accomplished unless the recipient actually receives the message!)  The NLT, however, seems to me to make the growth in knowledge and understanding coordinate with, rather than part of, the growth of love.  Then “determining what is best” is the reason Paul wants them to grow in love.  I must note that I prefer the NLT’s “what really matters,” though I acknowledge the Greek will support either rendering.

I think the CEV does a better job coordinating the growth of love and the knowledge and insight, but there the translation “make the right choices” seems to lose some of the nuance of the message.  Both the CEV and the NLT break what seems to me to be a tightly linked chain.

Now I may be too picky here, and as I acknowledged at the start, I find it impossible to satisfy myself with a translation of this passage, along with a number of other long sentences from Paul.  I find elements to commend in all three translations, along with those I have questioned.