Dance of the Said and the Unsaid - Translation/Interpretation

Dance of the Said and the Unsaid

This morning on Face Book I read an interesting piece on hermeneutics.  It was "The Interpreter" by Daniel Cohen, from the Feminism and Religion blog.  I saw something like this - that reading involves both the dark marks and the bed of light background they rest upon.  The idea is that the blank background is as important to decipher as are the black marks.  The dark printed words speak of what must be said and called attention to.  The light bed they are set on contains the context.  The givens.  Information so common to the reader it needn't be mentioned.  After interpreting the printed words of an ancient writing, it is just as important to understand what didn't need to be spelled out. 

I envisioned a dance of black and white.  Where together the spoken and the unspoken words begin to tell the whole story. And even where much of the context detail (once as familiar as the air first readers breathed) has been lost, awareness of that loss and the mystery of that common background must play its powerful part in translating and interpreting old teachings. There is power between the lines!

Link:  http://networkedblogs.com/CajX8

I posted this link on Face Book with the following comment:

Here is a story that made me think about the backgrounds of our ancient stories/lessons that were so familiar they didn't need to be spelled out.

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..."every text contains two messages, one formed by the ink and the other by the spaces left between the inked letters, the material included and that which was excluded, and that the message was never complete if only the first text was read."

...[what was excluded was] "so well-known to the people in whose times the texts were written that they were taken for granted by the writers, who therefore felt no need to mention them.  Yet it was only because of the work of the cattle-farmers that others had leisure to write texts. And so once again he had shown us that what the text does not contain is as important to a true interpretation as what is made explicit in it."

-JoMae
 9/15/12