jmd
This reminds me of one of the philosophical classics of this ....err... last century, W. V. O. Quine's Word and Object (which someone, by the way, played on with New York Jewish accent by writing another titled Void and Object).
The opening of St John's ('In the beginning was the Word'), with that translation of 'Word' in the English and 'Verbe' in the French, gives such different sense of the text, from beholding the completed product with the nominalisation (noun) sense of the Word, as opposed to the very activity of the creative act of the Verbe (verb).
Another aspect of the translations is that, though both in the past tense, the 'was' of the English does not seem as gone-and-no-more than the 'étais' of the French, implying, it seems, even more of a process of change occuring...
It seems that, if one was to apply either sense of the text to the Mat, it would be the act implicit in the activity of the Verbe - the Word as sacred active and creative principle.
The opening of St John's ('In the beginning was the Word'), with that translation of 'Word' in the English and 'Verbe' in the French, gives such different sense of the text, from beholding the completed product with the nominalisation (noun) sense of the Word, as opposed to the very activity of the creative act of the Verbe (verb).
Another aspect of the translations is that, though both in the past tense, the 'was' of the English does not seem as gone-and-no-more than the 'étais' of the French, implying, it seems, even more of a process of change occuring...
It seems that, if one was to apply either sense of the text to the Mat, it would be the act implicit in the activity of the Verbe - the Word as sacred active and creative principle.