Lost in Translation
I was making my way through the backlog of reading that accumulates around the holidays when I happened on a review titled “Memory & Prayer” by Zach Czaia (December). The book under review is a collection of poems by Philip Metres, a Palestinian poet and activist. One poem in particular caught my attention. Titled “Remorse for Temperate Speech,” the poem is written in English but employs a scattering of Arabic words and phrases. The reviewer, who describes himself as “a predominately English-language reader,” turned to Google Translate to learn the meaning of the Arabic words that appear in the poem, one of which is وادي , the Arabic word for “valley” or “riverbed.” It is at this point that things begin to go wrong. The word, which in transliterated Arabic is wady, appears backwards in the review as yadaw, which makes no sense in Arabic. How to explain this confusion?
Arabic is written from right to left, but Google Translate read the word from left to right and came up with yadaw. When Google Translate was unable to make sense of the jumble of letters, the reviewer explains that he turned to an Arabic-speaking friend for help who connected the mistransliterated yadaw with yad, the Arabic word for “hand,” and somehow concluded that the word was associated with “healing, teaching, or curing,” but when used as a noun, means “in God’s hands all is well.” The initial confusion, compounded by the linguistic acrobatics that followed, was unnecessary. The meaning of wady as “river valley” perfectly fits the context of the poem: “You may find the wady (river valley) / where water flows…”
Joseph Phillip Amar
Professor of Arabic and Syriac Emeritus
The University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, Ind.
Confederation of the Damned
I and, I’m certain, many other “mature” readers, are grateful to Patricia Hampl (“Stalked,” November) for giving voice to those with the chronic back pain that all too often accompanies aging. You have to be a sufferer to understand its relentless presence in your life. Before falling prey myself, I felt sorry for those who were afflicted, but I never really understood how it seeps into every aspect of one’s existence. Now, I find it difficult to explain this to others. Hampl comes much closer to doing so. Every step in her journey mirrors mine, including the heightened sensitivity to the signs of pain in others. While this doesn’t directly diminish the pain, it makes it, and perhaps those of us with chronic back pain, more bearable.
John Cosgrove
Professor Emeritus, Fordham University
Lumberton, N.J.
Sculpture & Spirituality
Sharon Mesmer frames her review of Dana Delibovi’s new, bilingual translation of St. Teresa of Ávila’s poems (“Rapture in the Vernacular,” January) around the question, “What would the saint make of her male spectators?” Mesmer has in mind eight men sculpted in marble who occupy “theater boxes” on either side of the altarpiece The Ecstasy of St. Teresa in Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Cornaro Chapel. “The Cornaro men scrutinizing the scene,” Mesmer writes, are “ogling” Teresa, which taints Bernini’s portrayal of Teresa with a “shocking, voyeuristic element.” Mesmer’s mischaracterization of the scene blinds her to connections between the Cornaro Chapel’s powerful cataphatic theology and Teresa’s own compelling theology of the vernacular.
Irving Lavin reminds us that these sculptural representations of the Cornaro family witness to paths to faith. Two men in each box turn toward each other. On the left, they engage in logical disputation. On the right, attesting to experiential belief, one man follows another’s gestures as he points toward a relief of the Last Supper installed below and raises his other hand to emulate Christ rising and Teresa levitating. Seated in the left box, Cardinal Marco focuses on the prayer book he is holding while Doge Giovanni withdraws deeper into the box, perhaps alluding to his assent to his son’s elevation to cardinalcy. Leaning forward in the right box, Cardinal Federico looks toward the nave. Making eye contact with worshippers standing at the chapel crossing, he draws them forward. Only one of the eight men eyes Teresa. Is he ogling? He has removed his hat, a Eucharistic allusion confirmed by similar symbolism in Bernini’s Raimondi Chapel.
Mesmer suggests that Teresa’s “accessible” theology contrasts with that depicted in the Cornaro Chapel. But Bernini, too, was committed to accessibility, inspired, as was Teresa, by his reading of Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises. The Exercises invited people to “picture a scene” while praying, and popular conventions influenced by the Exercises enjoined the faithful to experience Christ’s passion mimetically. Teresa wrote that she “made pictures” in her mind as she prayed; these pictures informed her poetry and other writings. Bernini “made pictures” in the Cornaro Chapel, creating a spiritual language of gesture for worshippers to imitate. As their gazes traveled from the eight witnesses in the chapel boxes to Teresa, joined in nuptial ecstasy with her beloved, worshippers forged a powerful affective bond with the divine.
Martha Reineke
Professor of Religion Emeritus
University of Northern Iowa
Denver, Iowa
Necessary Coverage?
As a subscriber and supporter of Commonweal throughout my adult life, I must express my physical repulsion at seeing J. D. Vance’s face on the cover of the January 2025 issue. The man’s religious conversion is not my business. It is between him and his God. My business is the images in my home that show my ethics and morals. This magazine’s cover does not!
Melissa Cadwallader
Portland, Ore.
Open to Sinners
In his interview with Zechariah Mickel (“Toward a More Catholic Church,” January), Fr. Tomáš Halík advocates open Communion. Because canon laws say that only baptized Catholics in the state of grace (with few exceptions) may receive Communion, many priests get around that law and practice open Communion by citing a “serious pastoral reason” for doing so. This is the first time that I have seen open Communion somewhat advocated in a Catholic journal, even if only by quoting someone. The Church should get closer to Christ’s intention of instituting Communion and make being a sinner the only requisite for receiving it. We would then be following Christ’s mandate when he said in Mark 2:17: “I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”
Sharyn Fleming
North Huntingdon, Pa.
