Augustine's Interpretation

A striking point that stood out to me over the [very] long +30 pages of reading was St. Augustine's viewpoint on why writings are misunderstood and how they cannot maintain their full meaning through translation without knowledge of the history and context they origionated from. Due to the complexities of language, it is virtually impossible to maintain a perfect translation of one idea in one language to another. Augustine especially speaks of the ambiguities that occur through translation, both in literal words and cultural phrases, that strongly influence the misinterpretations of ideas and meanings.

This is esentially perfect as the psalms we read were most definitetly an interpretation, and not only that but an interpretation OF another interpretation. After studying the constant fluxuation in language over short periods of time (as in a few years) in my cultural anthropology class, it is no wonder the psalms' to this day give us a run for our money in attempting to make out their meanings (i can only imagine that the changes and fluxuations in language over the course of thousands of years could be slightly difficult to translate). As Augustine stresses the importance of knowing the languages, culture, and history of Greek and Hebrew in order to fully understand the divine scriptures, we made the feeble attempt that we could in class to get a brief history of the psalms in order to better our comprehension of a select number of psalms. I think its more important to have the meaning of a work translated as opposed to the words from another language, but then is it technically a 'translation'? This made me wonder what is more important: having word-to-word translation or meaning-to-meaning? ...because it is literally impossible to have both.