Oral Reading Interpretation Quotes

Furthermore, Professor Uzzi-Tuzii had begun his oral translation as if he were not quite sure he could make the words hang together, going back over every sentence to iron out the syntactical creases, manipulating the phrases until they were not completely rumpled, smoothing them, clipping them, stopping at every word to illustrate its idiomatic uses and its commutations, accompanying himself with inclusive gestures as if inviting you to be content with approximate equivalents, breaking off to state grammatical rules, etymological derivations, quoting the classics. but just when you are convinced that for the professor philology and erudition mean more than what the story is telling, you realize the opposite is true: that academic envelope serves only to protect everything the story says and does not say, an inner afflatus always on the verge of being dispersed at contact with the air, the echo of a vanished knowledge revealed in the penumbra and in tacit allusions. Torn between the necessity to interject glosses on multiple meanings of the text and the awareness that all interpretation is a use of violence and caprice against a text, the professor, when faced by the most complicated passages, could find no better way of aiding comprehension than to read them in the original, The pronunciation of that unknown language, deduced from theoretical rules, not transmitted by the hearing of voices with their individual accents, not marked by the traces of use that shapes and transforms, acquired the absoluteness of sounds that expect no reply, like the song of the last bird of an extinct species or the strident roar of a just-invented jet plane that shatters the sky on its first test flight. Then, little by little, something started moving and flowing between the sentences of this distraught recitation,. The prose of the novel had got the better of the uncertainties of the voice; it had become fluent, transparent, continuous; Uzzi-Tuzii swam in it like a fish, accompanying himself with gestures (he held his hands open like flippers), with the movement of his lips (which allowed the words to emerge like little air bubbles), with his gaze (his eyes scoured the page like a fish's eyes scouring the seabed, but also like the eyes of an aquarium visitor as he follows a fish's movement's in an illuminated tank).

That's a good point. But, some flexibility, some openness... I mean, imagine Virginia Woolf coming for treatment. She's deeply depressed, suicidal. Let's say I'm a neo-Freudian psychotherapist, she even liked Freud so there, and I'm offering her smart neo-Freudian comments. But they don't stick, somehow. What I do doesn't work, she gets even more depressed, even more suicidal. She's about to end her life. So tell me: how arrogant would it be not to try anything that might work? How would I not say to myself: 'Okay, for some reason, the interpretations about her early sexual life and the fact that she's stuck in the oral stage - they don't seem to work, she keeps getting worse... Let's try something else.' Maybe she's more of an intersubjective type, a relationship type, a moment-to-moment person. Or maybe, I should do something like this: 'Virginia, I know that Tuesdays are really tough. God damn these Tuesday mornings... Why don't you go visit your sister, you like her daughter, don't you? Play with her a little... Read her a book, I don't know. Just don't be home by yourself.

Secondly, [in your study of the Bible,] you should meditate, that is, not only in your heart, but also externally, by actually repeating and comparing oral speech and literal words of the book, reading and rereading them with diligent attention and reflection, so that you may see what the Holy Spirit means by them. And take care that you do not grow weary or think that you have done enough when you have read, heard, and spoken them once or twice, and that you have complete understanding. You will never be a particularly good theologian if you do that, for you will be like untimely fruit which falls to the ground before it is half ripe. Thus you see in this same Psalm [119] how David constantly boasts that he will talk, meditate, speak, sing, hear, read, by day and night and always, about nothing except God’s Word and commandments. For God will not give you his Spirit without the external Word; so take your cue from that. His command to write, preach, read, hear, sing, speak, etc., outwardly was not given in vain.6

Because the Bible is God’s message, it has eternal relevance; it speaks to all humankind, in every age and in every culture. Because it is the word of God, we must listen — and obey. But because God chose to speak his word through human words in history, every book in the Bible also has historical particularity; each document is conditioned by the language, time, and culture in which it was originally written (and in some cases also by the oral history it had before it was written down). Interpretation of the Bible is demanded by the “tension” that exists between its eternal relevance and its historical particularity.

When reading the New Testament, it's important to recognize that Jesus never disregarded the written law, the Hebrew scriptures. When he rejected a teaching, it was always a teaching of the oral law, the extrabiblical rules and interpretations of the rabbis.