[The following is an adapted and shortened version of a rather lengthy analytical piece published elsewhere on this site as “The Poverty of Translation”.]
Previously I wrote:
I would also contend that translation, of the Cloud or any similar texts concerning esoteric religious experience, must necessarily presuppose a theory of mind. Translation of these things is not a matter of striking upon the proper word-for-word correspondences that will bring out the “real” meanings.
Here’s some of what I mean.
If I were to translate the Cloud, I would need to make some choices about the locus of knowing and unknowing. Is it the brain? The mind? The heart? If I say the heart, do I mean this metaphorically? Analogically? Is there a subtle, immaterial heart corresponding to the coarse, material pump in the chest?
I don’t believe this could be avoided, because all of these are loaded words — loaded, that is, with concepts.
This is not a simple matter of saying, “The words hert, hart, heorte, etc., mean the same thing as heart.” The problem is in this little phrase, mean the same thing. What is that same thing that they mean? What if it is not at all a thing? What if, in our day and age, we simply do not recognize the existence of such a thing?
Thus, translation of texts like these is not to mistake word-to-word correspondences for word-to-concept correspondences.
Some things have to be read in translation. It can’t be helped. But I have some very strong feelings about the implications of this when it comes to approaching texts that can lead people astray. The translator needs to assume responsibility for potentially placing readers in a kind of mortal peril.
The following is a bit of a case study on what has happened to other books in translation, in particular the highly commercialized franchise known as Rumi. I hope there will be readers who consider it worth their time to consider how and why reading the works of Mevlânâ Jalâl ad-Dîn Rûmî in English might be a seriously fraught endeavor, and to apply these lessons to other translated texts.
It is well known that Rumi means money in America, and that words taken to be based upon his own can be a source of gratification, entertainment, and self-help. As a newspaper published in Mevlânâ’s homeland remarked recently:
A phenomenon sweeping both Turkey and the world, the “Rumi frenzy” is a juggernaut that has transformed a Sufi saint into a commodity bought and sold across the globe. Books of poetry, calendars, ballets, performances accompanied by “live music,” CDs and hundreds of websites have already rendered Rumi an indispensable component of popular culture. Some, like Franklin Lewis, however, are making a serious effort to halt the head-long rush toward the superficial popularization of Jamal ad-Din Rumi, a 13th century Persian mystic who died in the Central Anatolian province of Konya in 1273.
Lewis decries the popular appropriation of Rumi in his new biography of the Sufi, “Rumi: Past and Present, East and West.”
“I watch, feeling devastated by how popular culture dilutes and corrupts his teachings, with the foresight that the unrelenting advertising and consumerist tools of contemporary profane culture will inevitably homogenize the divine,” he said. Already the United States’ best-selling “poet,” Rumi’s works are read and sung as “live music” as an increasingly mainstream part of American popular culture; many others, meanwhile, listen to the great man’s poetry to relax while in traffic jams.
As you might expect under these circumstances, it also comes an no surprise that that much of what passes for the work of Mevlânâ Jalâl ad-Dîn (not at all the same person as “Rumi”) has been distorted beyond any fair similarity to the original. For one thing, the guy was a Muslim. Islamic identity does not exactly move product in America these days. So there are commercial advantages to playing this matter down.
This problem is not new, but was already at play when the only good (or, at least, the least bad) translation of the Masnevi was published early in the 20th century. Of the many highly remunerative translations that drive the Rumi Industry, Reynold Nicholson’s stands apart as (we are told) especially accurate. Is this a fair appraisal? One way to appraise Nicholson’s work is to search for nuance that is, as the phrase goes, lost in translation. What follows is a close reading of two pages of his Book V with particular attention to Qur’anic and technical religious vocabulary. Is the potentially offensive Islamic substrate preserved?
We begin with the following verse:
Abandon, then, the dry (verbal) prayer, O fortunate one. [Masnevi V: 1188]
Taken alone, this can be subject to many interpretations — and the taking of verses alone is, to be sure, a common conceit of the Rumi Industry. Among the ways this version of Mevlânâ’s actual words could be read are the following:
· Abandon religious obligations, and count yourself fortunate to have done so.
· Being exceptional in your spiritual gifts, consider yourself exempt from religious obligations.
· Leave aside religious practices that are exoteric (a “dry husk”) and replace them with esoteric spirituality.
· Pray, but not with verbal formulae.
Other verses in proximity to this one seem to suggest that the problem of prayer is not necessarily inherent, but resides somehow in its verbal expression:
These words, (whilst they stay) in the breast, are an income consisting of (spiritual) kernels: in silence the spiritual kernel grows a hundredfold. When it (the word) comes onto the tongue, the kernel is expended: refrain from expending, in order that the goodly kernel may remain (with you).
[Masnevi V: 1275-1276]
But this “keep it to yourself” notion is also a problematic way to interpret this section of the Masnevi, for at least two reasons. First, the section immediately following the one from which these verses have been taken carries the heading “Prayer” and begins as follows:
O Giver of (spiritual) nutriment and steadfastness and stability, give Thy creatures deliverance from this instability.
[Masnevi V: 1197]
This would seem to be a “verbal prayer”, if only because it begins with a vocative particle and continues in an imploring manner that one could readily imagine saying aloud. Perhaps what redeems this is that it is verbal, but not dry; or else, that it is neither dry nor verbal, expressing an inner voice having no vocal counterpart. But this is undeniably a section of a well crafted poem, structured for recitation aloud, and by no means what one expects of a spontaneous outpouring “within the soul” or such like.
A second problem arises in the heading of the previous section (i.e., preceding line V: 1171), which reads as follows in Nicholson’s rendering:
Explaining that when the evil-doer becomes settled in evil-doing, and sees the effect of the (spiritual) fortune of the doers of righteousness, he from envy becomes a devil and preventer of good, like Satan; for he whose stack is burnt desires that all (others) should have their stacks burnt: “hast thou seen him who forbids a servant (of God) when he performs the (ritual) prayer?”
Taken as given here, one faces a third conflict. Dry prayer is to be abandoned. and this tends to have a verbal character to it; but a verbal prayer is then offered, seeming to contradict the first injunction; and finally, a verse from the Qur’ân is presented stating that to bar the worshipper from ritual prayer is plainly demonic. Given these apparently conflicting statements, what is one to conclude about the necessity, permissibility, desirability, and nature of prayer?
In actual fact, this problem is a creation of the translator of the Masnevi, and not of the poem’s author. What Nicholson translates as prayer is a different word in each case, and what is lost in the translation is simply the shades of meaning inherent in each word in the original language. Thus the “dry (verbal) prayer” refers, in Mevlânâ’s own words, to ducâ, or supplication. This is not the ritual prayer prescribed for Muslims at five particular times of each day — the word for that is salât, and it is preventing the worshipper from the fulfillment of the obligation of salât that is considered Satanic and explicitly forbidden by the Qur’ân.
In no way, therefore, is Mevlânâ to be understood as urging the abandonment of religious obligations, and in this distinction is the resolution of the first apparent contradiction in the section quoted here. The obligation of salât is in no way contingent upon whether its performance is dry or not. On the other hand, the supplication [ducâ] ought to have some personal significance to the one who utters it. It is not obligatory, even if it is strongly urged that the believer offer ducâ. Admittedly, the ducâ can be formulaic, consisting of the repetition of some words from traditional texts whose meaning does not really reach the heart of the one uttering it. What the reader might consider is Mevlânâ’s position regarding the purpose of ducâ. As some have written, the gift of ducâ is not in the response to it, but in the upwelling of the need for Allâh within the seeker to which the ducâ gives voice. One who, like Satan, is in the thrall of envy and other vices is not susceptible to this gift, while remaining capable of dry recitation of a ducâ received at second hand.
As for the “prayer” that begins O Giver, the word in the original language of the poem is munâjât, which is to say, yet a third category of interaction with the divine. Having urged us to abandon the dry supplication, what is offered next is a more authentic one. We cannot simply repeat this as a formula, but must seek within ourselves a corresponding sincerity. The Arabic word munâjât means something like “intimate discourse or conversation” and originates from the radical √n-j-w, a variant of which is seen in the following verse of the Qur’ân:
And we called him from the right side of the mountain, and brought him near, in confidence [najiyyan].
[Maryam 19: 52]
This refers to the prophet Mûsâ, or Moses (peace be upon him), given the privilege of approaching his Lord Most High on Mount Sinai, as the Torah also reports. It is this communion with the divine, exemplified in a prophetic model [sunna], which may be inaccessible to us as ordinary seekers, but which is nevertheless to be sought in the sincerity of munâjât. It is also to be considered whether every truth is expressible in words, or whether the kernel is expended through expression because the referent of the experience of munâjât is neither known through language, nor reducible to it.
If Rumi really called the believer to abandon prayer, there would be at least two consequences: He would have left Islam (which may suit the publishing industry in America just fine); and he would have dragged an uncountable number of his readers away with him.
As with Rumi specifically, “mysticism” generally has the power to move product. There are no doubt strong motives to commodify mysticism as something to which a religious orthodoxy is extraneous, the better to reach a wider readership (— well, buyership). Thus Rumi is held to be who he is in spite of his Islam, not because of it — never mind that the original language supports no such claim.
Quacks like Coleman Barks and Deepak Chopra have made a mint on this desacralized Rumi. Despite being “widely regarded as the world’s premier translator of Rumi’s writings,” it is an open secret that Barks does not actually read Persian. (See here for a discussion of this and other issues in Rumi translation.)
How much of the literature of the Christian mystics translated into English has already suffered this twisted fate? How long will it be until someone tries the same thing with the Cloud? Has Carmen Butcher done so already?
These are issues to take seriously, if you really believe that words matter.
A Nekid Entente unto God 
This is all important stuff, and thank you for your detailed and thoughtful discussion of Rumi. As you know, I believe it is important to make the writings of the Christian mystics as accessible to as many people as possible — let alone the sacred text (Bible) itself. Isn’t it true that even the most careful and informed translation of a text does unspeakable violence to it? But the question of cost versus benefit kicks in: might it not be better to have many people read even a poor translation of a significant text, rather than not have access to it at all? Imagine if critics of humanitarian aid in Haiti insisted that only the finest steak and top quality produce be distributed (and then, only locally grown food to ensure maximum freshness)? Life is all about compromise, and translation is a sterling example of this reality. Now, I grant you that sloppy or ersatz “translations” (of the Coleman Barks/Stephen Mitchell variety) are a problem, but the solution is better translations, not no translations at all. This is why I fundamentally disagree with Maggie Ross and consider her position to be elitist (even though I do agree that anyone who wants to study a text like The Cloud of Unknowing, or, for that matter, the New Testament, must at that point take on the challenge of reading the text in the original).
One of the challenges of living in a free market, non-authoritarian economy is that we have no recourse to any authority other than the market to correct the damage of the market. You point out how market forces have created a Frankenstein version of Rumi. This is not news to me, although you have given me more detail than I have had before. Still, the question is: what to do about it? Your blog post is a noble effort, although it is a bit like throwing a glass of water on a raging house fire. What interests me is the question of how to articulate a more honest, accurate, and contextually authentic understanding of Rumi (or the Bible, or the mystics, or whomever) and then market it to the very people who have been beguiled by the Frankenstein Rumi. Like it or not, we have to use the market to correct the market’s errors. It looks like we have plenty of work to do.
With respect to Mevlânâ Rûmî, there is now a model of scholarship in translation that I cannot commend highly enough. (It is not of the Masnevi, though its method is currently being applied to that work.) See The Quatrains of Rumi: Ruba ‘iyat-é Jalaluddin Muhammad Balkhi-Rumi by Rawan Farhadi and Ibraham Gamard.
What makes this a model is the following: First, it is bilingual. The original text is presented together with the proposed translation. Many people who cannot independently read Mevlânâ in the Persian can, nevertheless, read some Persian, and this is a great help. Second, there are extensive notes, and these are cross-referenced well both within the text, and to other works. Many words are not translated at all, because they represent primary concepts of the author’s, and should be retained in the original language together with an apparatus of notes allowing meanings for the untranslated words to be derived. Third, it is the product of native speakers of both the source and target languages, in collaboration. Fourth, it was made as a devotional act under the supervision of a teacher in the original author’s spiritual lineage.
The result is a tome among tomes: 764 pages. It is also not likely to be remunerative, or necessarily findable, coming from a small press (Sufi Dari Books). All that may be for the best. Barriers to entry may be good. Seizure of the text and its legacy by fools looking for a quick buck certainly is not.
There are times when a certain elitism is commendable, and in most cases the use of the term elitist is no substitute for an argument detailing why a particular book should be massively available in translation. Books are not to consumers what subsistence is to the starving; in the tradition of the Cloud, they are, in fact, to be held somewhat suspect. I think it would not be so harmful to consider what arguments support the necessity of mass dissemination — not because mass dissemination is necessarily bad, but because we always need to examine our motives. A free press serves the prerogatives of capital. Does it invariably serve that of people?
A dear friend of mine went to Fez, a city holy to Muslims, to study. He went to the book bazaar and requested a particular book from a bookseller who had been recommended to him. The bookseller told him to come back in a couple of days. My friend did so. The bookseller again told him to come back. On the third visit, the book was there. My friend asked for the price. The bookseller was horrified. “One does not take money for a book like this — it’s yours.” A background check on my friend’s character had been going on between visits. This book was not considered a toy.
I would take these things on a case by case basis. You can see a translation of the book my friend requested right now, on line (go to http://bewley.virtualave.net/hikamcont.html). It is an amazing book; also, a terrifically dangerous one. In my opinion, if you can’t read Classical Arabic really well, you really have no business messing around with this book — not because the language is prerequisite, but because a certain culture is. Even if you can read the Arabic, you had better have a teacher. And even if you have a teacher, I’d want to be very careful she is the right one. Either these books have no real significance, or they do. If they do, the case for caution may be very strong. What if these sorts of books are medicine? Should we really believe we can write our own prescriptions? If so, why do we need these books? If not, how do we know we won’t destroy ourselves?
The Cloud is almost certainly not in this category. But other Christian books may be. Are all of them really so harmless? I think the case in favor of mass dissemination of books that we deem to be genuinely powerful needs to be made, not assumed.
I support the inverse position: that the argument needs to be made for censorship, not for lifting it. Because by any other name, controlling the dissemination of a text is censorship and needs to be called such. And censorship for metaphysical or spiritual reasons are, to me, among the least defensible cases.
I can understand and perhaps could even support the censorship of books like The Anarchist Cookbook or Protocols of the Elders of Zion (both of which, as my links reveal, are readily available on Amazon.com), simply because such books clearly promote violence and/or racism. In other words, they are demonstrably evil. But even then, perhaps it is better that such books do remain available, both as evidence that our society can tolerate dissent, and as a way to minimize their allure (as “forbidden” or “underground” texts). We know that prohibition does not promote teetotaling, but rather promotes organized crime. I suspect that a culture in which “powerful” spiritual teachings are controlled substances would spawn more nonsensical and even dangerous pseudo-spiritualities (or, conversely and just as dangerously, promote greater spiritual passivity among the people, which we see in settings like the Catholic Church) than would a culture where such teachings are freely available. This is certainly the kind of dynamic I saw at work in the Wiccan/Pagan community, where some communities try to control access to the “coven secrets” while others make their lore freely available. Without exception, the “open source” groups I knew appeared to be psychologically and socially more balanced than their more secretive counterparts.
I think the medicine argument is a red herring. What is more dangerous: to make medical information available and open up the risk that some people will abuse it, or to foster a culture of dependency on the “authorities” which reduces individuals to passive “healthcare consumers,” unwilling or incapable of participating in their own health care management? We know that it is dangerous to operate motor vehicles, and so most states have a set of minimal requirements to license operators. We could make those requirements more rigorous, but all that would do is increase the likelihood that more people would choose to drive without a license. Once again, the cost/benefit dynamic applies: we need to find the greatest social benefit at the most acceptable level of cost. I just believe in an open source society, where free access to information is worth the cost of specious information (including bad translations) also being freely available.
As for “A free press serves the prerogatives of capital. Does it invariably serve that of people?” I would argue that the freer the press is, the more balanced is its service of the public interest, even at the expense of those who own the various presses. It seems to me that in my 50 years, we’ve seen a deterioration of the free press in America as ownership of the mass media has increasingly been concentrated in the hands of the Murdochs and the Bertelsmanns of the world. The blatant partisanship of Fox News leaps to mind as an example of this kind of deterioration. But the solution to corporate media is certainly not state-run media, thank you very much! It can only be the heroic actions of people who are alarmed by the compromise of corporate media making their own cooperative, sacrificial efforts to provide alternative voices in the marketplace. In other words, the revolution has to come from the ground up, which is where I think the intellectual Marxists like Lenin and Mao missed the boat. Can such an effort be easy? Of course not. Are the odds stacked against us? You bet. But our motivation must be to expand freedom, not to punish “capital.” If we become motivated by revenge, we become mirror images of those we call our enemies. This is why I think Jesus is so much more important (and radical) than Marx.
So I think your comment about capital is ultimately another red herring. Making truly transformational spiritual texts freely available will hardly make a difference to the Rupert Murdochs of the world, but they might make clericalism just a little less attractive, which I think is in balance mostly a good thing.
There’s a difference between imposing censorship and reconsidering traditional ways of being prudent. I am delighted that material, such as your books, that inspire people to search is available. No one would oppose that. I also think it’s a very fine thing for ordinary people to read some simpler primary sources, including I suppose the Cloud.
But I would also take the view that there are texts that deserve prerequisites. The Masnevî has such a history, and I think it is informative. Mevlânâ Rûmî asserts that it can be read on many levels. At the most superficial, it is a bunch of folk-tales with edifying morals. Ottoman street performers would tell these at festivals and in the marketplaces. At a somewhat higher level, many of the great mosques in the larger Ottoman cities employed a Masnevî reciter who could sing the poem from memory in its entirety. Sessions would take place congregationally, in the mosques, following the mid-afternoon prayer, and would include some more challenging commentary. This is more restrictive. Beyond this were study centers with an endowment to serve no other purpose, and beyond that initiation into a devotional order that took the Masnevî as a core text in spiritual formation. This was a text that was very widely available in the Ottoman world, but with levels of access appropriate to the spiritual level of the supplicant.
I will post separately something about the qualifications of the exegete of the Qur’an to give an idea of another traditional set of hurdles.
My red herring about texts as medicine is actually proverbial among the classical Sufi scholars. Many of the greatest books in the tradition begin with this claim in some sort or another, which in turn goes back to a hadith of the Prophet Muhammad. The dangers posed by powerful spiritual texts involve the potential perdition of the soul and the dragging down of others as well. Quack teachers as a greater peril than bad drivers because the consequences ostensibly endure well beyond death.
This was brought home to me by a the one person I have met in my life who is by any standard a saint, a true intimate of God. I asked him if it would be permissible for me to read Ibn Arabi. He told me that the problem with Ibn Arabi is that Westerners think he is a great, great Sufi, when in fact he did not achieve realization, and in consequence left a number of errors in his books that conduce to pantheism. This makes them too dangerous to read for scholars able to do so in the original languages. What, then, of neophytes taking them up in English?
Either powerful spiritual/mystical texts really have power, or they do not. If they don’t, they are harmless, I suppose, and probably better than pulp fiction. If they do, I think caution is called for. It’s really not up to me to make such things unavailable. But it is up to me to urge others to consider whether they might not be getting in over their heads. I do not take books like these lightly in my own life, and would hope others could practice caution as well.
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too much
I think we’re probably not so far apart from one another, actually. One of the things I’ve learned as a blogger and author is that as soon as I’ve written my words, they no longer belong to me. No one “owns” a text, not even the author! But this does not excuse us from the challenging task of reading texts wisely and carefully, and respecting the text’s “power,” to use your word. I suppose it would be interesting to consider where prudence ends and censorship begins; I’m all for the former but have a hard time supporting the latter. But even “prudence” needs to be approached with prudence, for when is prudence truly in the best interest of all parties, and when is it merely a way to enforce existing systems of spiritual privilege? I think remaining mindful of this distinction must always be part of the equation.
It’s true that prudence and censorship conflate too easily in the mind. I think part of this comes from the suspicions we have reasonably acquired due to stories of the abuse of clerical power.
Other cultures show different ways to experience and disseminate texts, as I have tried to point to. One thing my anecdotes have in common, I realized for the first time this morning, is that texts are often socialized, embedded in a social milieu rather than perused as private property. For instance, all the levels of access to the involved interaction with others in a voluntary manner. In our society the experience of a text as a shared experience happens through book clubs and Bible study, and seldom much else.
And this prudence, too, can be socialized. Living in Morocco I found that many devout people would not read religious texts alone. They would seek a teacher to read it with them, and accept that the teacher approached for this purpose might interview them, and refuse their request. Teachers were, in effect, “waranteed” by a system whereby they were only supposed to teach texts they had received from other teachers in an unbroken line of authorization leading back to the text’s author.
In Turkey I spent the day with a very venerated Sufi teacher who received students all day in a long room lined from floor to ceiling with books. A student might wait in the room for hours, taking tea and praying communally, before his turn for a lesson came. When it did, the student would retrieve a copy of the pertinent book from the shelf and hand it to the teacher to read to him, commenting as he went. These lessons wee very public. Again, the social milieu played a part in ordering the process.
I think that the use of texts in social contexts is less insidious than the methods of social control, such as censorship, that leap to mind, and has many positive aspects. It was never my experience among Islamic scholars that access to texts approached socially would be restricted for objectionable reasons.
The use of texts as medicine is a related topic. The Masnevi of Mevlânå Rûmî (which is the text that began all this discussion) purports in its own words to be “the treatment for hearts, and the purge of sorrows, and the unveiler of the Qur’ân, and the effulgence of sustenance, and the cleansing of character [Prolegomena to Bk I, lines 8-9].
There is a superstitious end of this, such as as the use of the a short Kabbalistic treatise called the Shimush Tehillim, which prescribed particular chapters and verses from the Book of Psalms for prophylactic or healing purposes. Likewise, there are numerous instances cited in the Talmud and other sources regarding the use of verses of Torah to ward off demons, to lighten the pain at childbirth, as protection against danger on a journey, fierce dogs, bleeding and wounds, and the effects of fire and fever; or, for that matter, to gain favor or improve one’s memory.
In the patristic tradition, St. Basil’s Homily on the First Psalm asserts that all scripture, especially the Psalms, is a treatment for one or another disease. St. Athanasius speaks in a similar manner in his Epistle to Marcellinus on the interpretation of the Psalms.
And St. Ambrose wrote that “The Holy Spirit composed the Scriptures so that in them, as in a pharmacy open to all souls, we might each of us be able to find the medicine suited to our own particular illness.” Thi is especially the case of the Psalms, which “is medicine for our spiritual health. Whoever reads it will find in it a medicine to cure the wounds caused by his own particular passions. Whoever studies it deeply will find it a kind of gymnasium open for all souls to use, where the different psalms are like different exercises set out before him. In that gymnasium, in that stadium of virtue, he can choose the exercises that will train him best to win the victor’s crown.”
This may be one reason that the Cistercians recite them — congregationally no less, which is to say socially — every day.
Religious texts are powerful things that other societies have found ways to regulate. We don’t. Maybe we should think about it more carefully.