“I quite agree with you," said the Duchess; “and the moral of that is—‘Be what you would seem to be’—or, if you’d like it put more simply—‘Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.’”
From Reader #4
Try as Anthony Cekada may to hoodwink the reading public, his ill written, inattentive, and error-laden samizdat misadventure will never, in the eyes of the knowing, resemble serious scholarship. The fellow plainly cannot follow the most elementary principles and practices of scholarly method and only troubles himself to appear learned. He’s probably playing the odds in hopes that educated, independent people won’t read Work of Human Hands anyway, so he didn’t waste his time asking his betters to help him do it right. Hitherto the Reader has distinguished between the appearance and the reality of Father’s "erudition,” so today we’ll examine how he flouts basic academic standards. Two blunders of citation on a single page (p. 166) should be enough to make the point—otherwise it might appear as though the Reader were beating an imaginary long-dead horse.
A fundamental canon of academic documentation teaches that a translation of a translation will not normally satisfy the demands of scholarly accuracy. In other words, if, for the sake of the learned reader’s reference, you supply in your notes the foreign-language source behind the translation given in the body of your text, you are obliged to supply the quoted passage in the original language in which the author wrote. However, in footnotes 22 and 23, Fr. Cekada provides not the Greek originals for Origen and St. Gregory of Nyssa, but the synoptic Latin translation from Migne’s Patrologia Græca. Although this sometime “seminary teacher” is Greek-less (and without sacred Semitic languages, to boot), he could easily have satisfied academic standards by printing with proper attribution an acceptable published English translation from the original Greek. But then, he might have appeared otherwise less erudite than he hoped others would imagine him to have been.
Let’s move on, however, from this amateur’s (and poseur’s) oversight to a far more serious breach of principled academic praxis. Since the purpose of citing the original language is to enable the educated consumer to judge the accuracy of the translation, the Reader—who incidentally has studied at the graduate level Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic as well as Latin and modern languages—accepted Anthony Cekada’s surely unintended invitation to scrutinize his text.
A comparison of the Latin in footnote 23 with the given translation assured the Reader that the English version was not very likely based on the Latin. The main reason for the morally certain conjecture is that the Latin translation reads ex qua ejecti sumus (“from which we have been cast out” or “driven out” or “banished”) while the Greek original has ἧς ἐκπεπτώκαμεν (“from which we have fallen”). Since the English translation in the text reads “from which we have fallen,” it isn’t rocket science to suppose the English version has the Greek original, not the Latin translation, behind it. Furthermore, given that Anthony Cekada is no Grecian and at best a barely mediocre Latinist, it’s easy to suspect that the translation was lifted from elsewhere.
What’s that? Did we hear some creatures lisp in a slurred, Southwestern twang, “Literary license from a ‘facile wit’”? Yes, we thought they’d say that, so we investigated. Here’s what Anthony Cekada printed:
our first homeland is in the East; I mean our sojourn in paradise from which we have fallen, for God planted a paradise in Eden towards the East.
And here’s the version that we found in The Lord’s Prayer, The Beatitudes, translated by Hilda C. Graef (Ancient Christian Writers Series, no. 18. Mahwah: The Paulist Press, 1954):
our first homeland is in the East; I mean our sojourn in Paradise from which we have fallen, for God planted a paradise in Eden towards the East.*
The passages are identical except for one difference in capitalization and the italicization of the verse from Genesis 2.8.
Are these verbatim texts a mere coincidence? Do we again hear a member of Father’s mouth-breathing claque snarl a guttural protest that great minds think alike? Hogwash! (as Anthony Cekada might well write [p. 137]). At all events, “sojourn” isn’t the first meaning that comes readily to mind for the Latin habitatione (“residence”) or the Greek διαγωγῆς (“manner” or “way of life”). While sojourn is a particularly happy rendering in the context, its choice here is, we must say, inspired, i.e., the result of formal linguistic training and innate talent. (Sorry, Anthony.)
No, we all recognize a violation of academic writing guidelines when we see one. As Dr. Miguel Roig, an authority on research integrity, puts it, “An ethical writer ALWAYS acknowledges the contributions of others and the source of his/her ideas.”**Bottom line: Reject this slovenly imitation of the labors of the academy, otherwise you might appear to have been had.
Feast of St. William
*Editor’s Note: Every Doubting Thomas in cyberspace should see the Google Books preview (scroll to pp. 76-77 ):
**http://facpub.stjohns.edu/~roigm/plagiarism/List%20of%20ethical%20writing%20guidelines.html
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