To Translate the Ocean
Some thoughts from a North Carolina beach
As I stood on the North Carolinian coast, toes sinking into wet sand, I stared out at the horizon. Wave after wave crashed in as they have since time immemorial, always landing, crashing, receding and then doing it again.
Standing there, it’s no wonder that the ancients used the ocean as a metaphor for the infinite. In a lot of ways, they were correct.
In the age of GPS, the suggestion of any body of water as infinite feels quaint or even dangerously ignorant. But I challenge anyone to sit in the waves, their feet crusted with sand and salt water dripping from their nose and not understand why many once considered the sea as a perfect metaphor for infinity.
But metaphors change as culture does. These days we use outer space as a metaphor for the infinite.
You can see this in the wording of worship songs separated by two centuries:
In 1850, hymnist William Rees wrote: “Here is love, vast as the ocean.”
In 2017, three hymnists from Hillsong wrote: “And as You speak, a hundred billion galaxies are born.”
To the modern ear, “a hundred billion galaxies” conveys the idea of size better than an ocean, but will it five thousand years from now?
I wonder.
No work of literature remains from five thousand years ago, so I’ll go out on a limb and say none of what we’re writing now will remain five thousand years from now.
Indeed, many of us can’t follow the metaphors of Shakespeare a mere four hundred years ago, and few of us can understand the cultural references of 1940’s literature.
As a military brat who grew up in British high schools, I found C.S. Lewis’ language pretty accessible, and I happily suggested his book to all of my friends, but many of them just couldn’t follow Lewis’ old-fashioned language.
So what is to be done?
Well, they needed a translator.
Really, we all need a translator at some point. And that translator is YOU.
You may not agree that you’re a translator, because like me you only speak your mother tongue. So how can you be a translator?
Because writing is translation.
Waves crash over and over in the exact same way, but there are always new kids visiting these ancient waves for the very first time.
Stories and metaphors are more ancient than literature, but each generation of storytellers translates the old stories into the current metaphors.
Writers must be translators because old metaphors lose their power to communicate. In fact, the stories of only a few generations ago have started to become opaque to us. This will always happen.
In my podcast Bammerhab, I frequently go back to the Greek of the New Testament. That seems pretty fancy, elite and inaccessible, right? No, not really.
In Paul’s era, he was writing in street talk. His vocab was simple Greek, not the elevated stuff of academia, but the basic Greek of the docks, markets and the barracks.
If any translation of the New Testament feels inaccessible and elevated, then it is missing a vital aspect of the original Greek. It may be translating the words, but not the meaning. In fact, Paul himself wrote:
“If you speak to people in words they don’t understand, how will they know what you are saying? You might as well be talking to empty space.” (1 Cor. 14:9 - NLV)
In the same way, Shakespeare spoke the simple English of his era, the language of butchers, bakers and candlestick makers. Elevated elite English was reserved to authors like Kit Marlowe from Cambridge.
Shakespeare translated the fancy Greek of Plutarch’s Lives into the bawdy, stabby and violent Julius Caesar. He was less concerned about historical accuracy and more concerned about the crowds losing interest or making too much noise in the cheap seats of the Globe.
As an English major and an MFA grad I can assure you, much of what seems impenetrable to us readers isn’t so because we’re not bright enough. It’s because the book was written to be incomprehensible on purpose for reasons of pretentiousness.
My wife and I have a category of books we call “MFA reads” because they’re bleak, elitist, and once properly understood, really quite shallow. But they’re meant to demonstrate profundity because they’re exclusive, restrictive and fatalistic.
We’re meant to believe they’re works of genius written by authors too elevated for us to understand.
But want to know a secret? “MFA reads” are merely expressing erudite esotericisms in order to entice the elite. They’re also surprisingly easy to write. Ask any lawyer, the ability to be incomprehensible is a learned skill. Esoteric language is meant to keep something hidden.
What is written to be read, can be read.*
*Unless of course there are cultural translations that make it harder. Dickens was originally written to be read, but now he’s hard to decipher because of the way they wrote back then. War and Peace translated correctly is actually a really interesting and simple read (though admittedly very long).
Besides, if you give it a few hundred years everyone will think of your language as quite elevated and academic too! Certainly, in a few hundred years, Star Wars, Harry Potter and Bluey will be analyzed by academics and seem impenetrably dense as well.
Authors are not only translators, they are also missionaries.
How you ask?
Missionaries must always translate to the common tongue of their mission field, right?
And that’s what you’re doing as a writer also.
But Sam, you say, a missionary is a specific job for specific Christians. It is a noble calling and not everyone is a missionary.
Well, yes, and also no.
In 1873, the great preacher Charles Spurgeon said:
“Every Christian here is either a missionary or an impostor. Recollect that. You either try to spread abroad the kingdom of Christ, or else you do not love him at all. It cannot be that there is a high appreciation of Jesus and a totally silent tongue about him. Of course I do not mean by that, that those who use the pen are silent: they are not.
If I might be so bold, I’ll tweak Spurgeon’s quote a bit.
I would not only say that every Christian is a missionary or an impostor but that every writer is a missionary, even the impostors.
Yes, every writer is a missionary, advocating for their narrative of what the world is really about. For example, Milan Kundera, Hermann Hesse, Kurt Vonnegut and Cormac McCarthy were all missionaries, advocating strongly for their specific worldview. I know that sounds funny, but it’s true. I’d go so far as to say that every artist must advance their own worldview through the songs, poems, books, or short stories that they write.
The more mature artists among us will not bring that worldview to the forefront and hit the audience over the head with it. That’s not only propaganda, but bad art. Yet no artist can remove their worldview from their work any more than they can remove their hands from their own brain.
As it happens, Bandersnatch Books was created by three missionaries: Carrie, Rachel and Annie Beth who all have backgrounds in literal missions. But less precisely, every comic book, every TV show, every Substack, every podcast was created by a missionary.
The only real question is what are you a missionary for?
In his great book, Practicing the Way, John Mark Comer points out that everyone is a disciple: “Everybody is following somebody—or at least something. Put another way, we’re all disciples. The question isn’t, Am I a disciple? It’s, Who or what am I a disciple of?”
As humans, we all must be disciples of something. But as authors we also must become missionaries because we must translate that something to our audiences.
So who are you discipling under? Where is your mission field? What are you translating and why?
And wow…isn’t the ocean pretty big?
September 24, 2025 - Release of middle grade fantasy novel by Glenn McCarty, The Song of the Stone Tiger - Available for Preorder!
November 2025 - Release of illustrated children’s poetry anthology, I’ve Got a Bad Case of Poetry - Preorder on the Kickstarter Platform
November 2025 - Release of lower middle-grade novel by Mary Barrows, Joe the Fourth and the King’s Crown
The Song of the Stone Tiger by @glennmccarty is now available for preorder!
The book releases September 24 but why wait? Preorder now!
Also please follow Bandersnatch Books on Instagram or Facebook!
“If all experienced God in the same way and returned Him an identical worship, the song of the church triumphant would have no symphony. It would be like an orchestra in which all the instruments played the same note.”
C.S. Lewis
 | A guest post by
|
Good stuff, Sam!
I agree that Shakespeare et all are much more accessible than we tend to give them credit for. But wouldn’t you agree that some of the reason why we struggle to understand Shakespeare and Dickens is because our language use is simpler—dare I say, stupider? How can we translate, but also encourage readers to stretch and grow? I think that’s the discipleship aspect of writing, don’t you?
“…Each generation of storytellers translates the old stories into the current metaphors.” I love this. It helps the work we do to feel much more important and much less important—both at the same time. Thanks for sharing.