Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Nested Quotes

The beginning of Chapter 27 of the Book of Jeremiah has five layers of nested quotes!

The Douay just does it all with colons:
In the beginning of the reign of Joakim the son of Josias king of Juda, this word came to Jeremias from the Lord, saying: Thus saith the Lord to me: Make thee bands, and chains: and thou shalt put them on thy neck. And thou shalt send them to the king of Edom, and to the king of Moab, and to the king of the children of Ammon, and to the king of Tyre, and to the king of Sidon: by the hand of the messengers that are come to Jerusalem to Sedecias the king of Juda. And thou shalt command them to speak to their masters: Thus saith the Lord of hosts the God of Israel: Thus shall you say to your masters: I made the earth, and the men, and the beasts that are upon the face of the earth, by my great power, and by my stretched out arm: and I have given it to whom it seemed good in my eyes.
But if you actually tried to put in the quotation marks (the rule usually suggested is to alternate single and double quotes in such nestings), it would look something like:
In the beginning of the reign of Joakim the son of Josias king of Juda, this word came to Jeremias from the Lord, [Jeremias] saying, "Thus saith the Lord to me, 'Make thee bands, and chains and thou shalt put them on thy neck. And thou shalt send them to the king of Edom, and to the king of Moab, and to the king of the children of Ammon, and to the king of Tyre, and to the king of Sidon, by the hand of the messengers that are come to Jerusalem to Sedecias the king of Juda. And thou shalt command them to speak to their masters [by saying,] "Thus saith the Lord of hosts the God of Israel, 'Thus shall you say to your masters, "I made the earth, and the men, and the beasts that are upon the face of the earth, by my great power, and by my stretched out arm: and I have given it to whom it seemed good in my eyes." ' " ' "
So, in other words, Jeremiah says that God said that Jeremiah should say to the messengers that God says that they [the messengers] should say to their masters [the kings] that God is great.

And, frankly, if we're being realistic, the messengers would probably have to introduce God's statement to their masters by saying, "Thus saith the Lord of hosts the God of Israel, 'I made the earth...' " Though for some reason that attribution is not made explicit in the series of quotes. So it ends up looking like the messengers are to say to their masters, "I made the earth..." without explaining to the masters who "I" is! But surely God isn't telling the messengers to claim that they made the earth!

I suppose at that point God just assumed the messengers would explain the path of transmission to the kings ("Jeremiah said that God said that Jeremiah was supposed to tell me [the messenger] that God said to tell you [the king] that God said, 'I made the earth...' ") It's a bit strange though, even so, given that God seems to be very careful to explicitly instruct Jeremiah himself to attribute quotes to Him (by including the "Thus saith the Lord" as part of what He instructs Jeremiah to say), but then seems to just trust that the messengers will give the correct attribution without needing to have it explicitly included in the message Jeremiah tells them to relay to the kings. Maybe Jeremiah was obsessive-compulsive about stuff like that but the messengers weren't? (An ironic joke given the obsessive nature of this analysis...)

I added a couple clarification in brackets just because the Douay formats it a bit oddly at a couple places. More modern translations simplify things a bit by getting rid of the outer-most layer. That first rather confusing floating "saying" is removed, and "Thus saith the Lord to me:" is made simply a separate sentence, the one that properly introduces the first layer of quotation (instead of already being within a quotation).

However, this requires treating the first line as either a sort of heading added later to Jeremiah's testimony about the message he received (in which case, the whole thing becomes a sort of block-quote anyway). Or else it requires assuming that the whole chapter is narrated by Jeremiah from the start rather than being introduced by a sentence which indicates that Jeremiah is the speaker of the rest (which rather awkwardly would mean that he is speaking in the third-person in that first sentence.)

So, the point is, treating this complicated nested series of quotations has been a confusing task for translators and editors. And so I think it is a good thing that I put the whole excerpt as a block-quote instead of adding a layer to the confusion by trying to regularly quote it!

No comments: