Date: Tue, 02 Dec 1997
From: xxxx
Subject: Re: Aqdas 1, invocation

If this list is going to do what Mr. Winters has recommended [partake in this translation project -J.W.], then shouldn't it also discuss the theoretical differences, the merits, and the social implications between literal and literary translations? The Kitab-i-Aqdas is not just a book of laws or a means of practicing one's Arabic, it is also used as a source of inspiration and meditation for a religious community, therefore, one should also take into consideration the politics of translation.

There are many, many ways of translating a sentence, because translation is inherently an interpretive act.

There is a difference between exercising and improving one's Arabic and translation. I do not think Irfan is the proper venue for exercising and improving one's Arabic, but might well be for translation.

xxxx

Date: Tue, 2 Dec 1997
From: Jonah Winters
Subject: Purpose of this exercise

Dear xxxx et al.,

I agree that the point should not be mere translation; were it so, I would just translate the Aqdas with fellow students. What is of interest here, I believe, is the meaning of the *literal* translation as compared with that inaugurated by the Guardian. This would be fruit for extensive discussion that could yet avoid the more distant tangents of theory and application.

While translation is interpretation, it is yet fairly easy to do a purely literal translation--there aren't *too* many words in this text which can have markedly different meanings, but there are *many* whose literal meaning is fairly distant from that which the Guardian chose. This is what I think might be worthy of discussion. Also, we might wish to remember that a discussion of content was extensively undertaken in early Talisman1, so perhaps, to avoid a rehash, we should seek a median between discussing mere translation or solely content.

-J

Date: Mon, 1 Dec 1997
From: Sen McGlinn
Subject: Re: Aqdas 1: invocation

IN THE NAME OF HIM WHO IS THE SUPREME RULER
OVER ALL THAT HATH BEEN AND ALL THAT IS TO BE

Would anyone know whether the 'ruler of all that is to be' is an unusual phrase for an invocation? I am wondering whether it implies a theology in which there is progression in the life of God and thus in the spiritual realities, as compared to a theology in which the spiritual reality of creation is once-and-for-all and it remains only to realize this in concrete forms.

Jonah, your Arabic is probably better than mine, but I would have thought that the al-hAkmi `alA should be 'high/exalted ruler', as it is in the 1992 translation.

And a question of terms: is the arabic version 'authoritative', or just authorized. And the transliteration should be 'transliteration from the authorized edition'?

Sen

Date: Tue, 2 Dec 1997
From: Jonah Winters
Subject: Re: Aqdas 1: invocation

Dear Sen et al.,

Good points, Sen.

1) This transliteration is authorized because, like a book title, the invocation is vocalized in the 1995 Arabic Aqdas. This is the only vocalized verse, so the rest of the transliterations wil be provisional.

2) Unless I'm forgetting something about Arabic comparatives, the word `alA here is the preposition, not the adjective. See, since the first term (HAkim) has the article, I believe that, if the second term is to be read as a comparative/superlative, it too must have the article, i.e. al-HAkim al-`alA. Without the article, I'm reading `alA as a different word completely. This would be the word "over" in ShoghiEffendi's trans. "Supreme Ruler *over*". And the term HAkim can support the adjective "supreme," for my Wehr gives its meanings as "ruler, sovereign; governor, judge" and even, in conjunction with amr, as "autocrat, dictator." Anyone second or correct this reading?

-J

Date: Sat, 29 Nov 1997
From: Nima Hazini
Subject: Re: Aqdas 1: invocation

Sen McGlinn wrote:
IN THE NAME OF HIM WHO IS THE SUPREME RULER
OVER ALL THAT HATH BEEN AND ALL THAT IS TO BE

Would anyone know whether the 'ruler of all that is to be' is an unusual phrase for an invocation? I am wondering whether it implies a theology in which there is progression in the life of God and thus in the spiritual realities, as compared to a theology in which the spiritual reality of creation is once-and-for-all...

Progression in the life of God in an atemporal sense, certainly, not in any Teilhardian or neo-Hegelian manner (i.e. the evolution of the Godhead, etc). Creation is being renewed at each instant, as no self-disclosure repeats itself (la tikrar at-tajjali). Baha'u'llah's thought, remember, is firmly grounded in Ibn `Arabi and Mulla Sadra here. And the latter's notion of the eternal unfoldement of creation from non-existence into existence (the a'yan ath-thabita concept) is what is meant. It is also Augustinian in that God at creation implants the seed of all things at once during the act of creation. Yet, leaves all things to become, be and pass away in their own good time.

Spiritual realities or Presences of God is also what bolsters the whole conceptual edifice, yes. In Sufism we talk about the Five Divine Presences of God (hadarat illahiyyat'ul-khams) (with some later Sufi theoreticians there's even discussion of six or seven levels -- Nur `Ali Shah Isfahani, for example). Most importantly for our discussion here, in the Futuhat Ibn `Arabi says that each hadara (presence) is ruled by its own waqt (time) as well as its own zaman (duration). The waqt of of a presence represents its batin (inner aspect), and zaman its zahir (outward) - while sometimes the Shaykh changes the roles. Conversely it is also, when seen from another perspective, the expansion (bast) and contraction (qabd) of existence within the Godhead: God breathes in and breathes out creation. When he/she breathes out, existence comes to be; when he/she breathes in, all things go back to him/her. And, yes, God becomes in this scheme the ruler of all things both temporally and atemporally -- there are things God has created atemporally that have not manifested temporally.

Enough of my raving. Ya haqq, Nima

Date: Mon, 1 Dec 1997
From: Terry Culhane
Subject: Re: Aqdas 1: invocation

Nima :

Go ahead and rave on !

1) Specifically I would be interested in an elaboration of the "five Divine Presences."

2) In Bahau llahs thought would the concept of the Manifestation as a temporal reality relate to time and duration in the sense of a dispensation?

3) The atemporal unfolding of the Godhead or would it be more approriate to say the Self of God. One of my disagreements with process theology lies inthis area. I think they confuse the Self of God its acts of temporal creation with the eternal changeless Godhead. And the idea of atemporal creation not manifesting itself temporally corresponds to my own thought and to some extent my experience. This seems to be the notion of "worlds within worlds" that baha mentions in Surih i Vafa and the Tablet of Vision.

warm regards,
Terry

Date: Wed, 3 Dec 1997
From: ...
Subject: Elder-Miller

Who is Elder-Miller and why would he (they) consider themselves competent to re-translate the Kitab-i-Aqdas?

Date: Wed, 3 Dec 1997
From: Jonah Winters
Subject: Who was Elder-Miller

Good question. First, Miller was no one I would quote as an authority on Baha'i matters. This is a long and often re-hashed topic, some articles about which (such as one lengthy one by Douglas Martin) are up at the Baha'i Academics Resource Area. However, the translation of the Aqdas appended to his main book on the Faith is linguistically, if not theologically, reliable.

In the notes to section one, Invocation, you can read Elder's notes about how he had this translation reviewed by other Arabists and Baha'is. Also here is the title page and excerpts of the intro from the Aqdas in The Baha'i Faith: Its History and Teachings so you can see what they say about this translation. For the record, while Mille r's book is shamefully bad, Elder's translation seems fine.

-J

Date: Wed, 03 Dec 1997
From: John Walbridge
Subject: Elder and Miller

William Miller was a longtime Prebyterian missionary in Iran, from the 20s to the 50s roughly, I think. He had a considerable interest in the Baha'is, which he inherited from his missionary mentor in Iran, who was Wilson, as I recall. He wrote two books on the Faith, one in the 30s, I think, and the other in the mid-70s. (Sorry to be so vague, but my library is on the other side of the world.) The latter book was occasioned by his receiving a large collection of material from one Jalal Azal, a retired civil servant in Cyprus who was a descendant of Mirza Yahya.

Miller was convinced that the Baha'is were deliberately keeping the contents of the Aqdas secret and he believed that if the contents were divulged, they would serve to discredit the Faith. The project lurched into motion when Miller was approached by a friend who was an anti- Catholic activist. This gentleman, whose name escapes me at the moment, was convinced that the Faith was a new Papism and therefore ought to be strangled in the cradle. He encouraged Miller to move forward on the translation.

The catch was that while Miller had quite good Persian, he knew not a word of Arabic, so they approached Elder, another missionary retired from many years in Cairo who also had some modest credentials in Islamic studies. Elder, however, knew nothing of the Faith, and certainly didn't know the kind of telegraphic Babi Arabic that the Aqdas is written in. A good deal of correspondence ensued in which Elder queried Miller about the baffling allusions and Miller tried to figure out what they must mean without having the kind of technical knowledge necessary or being able to read the text for himself.

The result, as you are presumably seeing, was not very felicitous: extremely awkward English with many mistakes caused by not knowing the tradition.

The Royal Asiatic Society, not very enthusiastically, agreed to publish it in their series if Miller and Elder would pay the costs, which they did. They then waited eagerly for the expected splash, which never came. The Baha'is didn't buy it; indeed, very few knew about it. The orientalists weren't interested because at the time Shiism, Iran, and late religious developments were not of great interest. So the book sank like a stone.

Miller eventually put his Babi and Baha'i papers in the Princeton University Library (with anxious letters to the librarian warning him to protect them carefully from Baha'i attempts to destroy them). There is a pretty good collection of Babi manuscripts, mostly late copies of Azali provenance made from one Said Khan Kurdistani, a convert from Islam to Christianity and a friend of Miller. (The manuscripts ultimately come from the same Azali scribe that Browne got many of his manuscripts from, so unfortunately there is a good deal of overlap between the Browne and Miller collections.) He also deposited his Baha'i files there, many of which are concerned with the Aqdas translation. There are also the documents from Jalal Azal, which are filled with interesting, but extremely tendentious material. At one point I got copies of most of the papers, minus the uninteresting things like his bills from the Publishing Trust, with the intention of doing a paper on the Aqdas translation, which is how I know this stuff. I never did the paper, though.

John Walbridge
University of the Punjab

Date: Sat, 06 Dec 1997
From: xxxx
Subject: Fwd: (more on Miller-Elder)

Some of chapters of the Aqdas, especially those translated by Shoghi Effendu, have affected me as the most resounding and awe-inspiring in the entire Baha'i literature. Therefore I'm surprised to read that the original is written in "telegraphic Babi Arabic". Could you please explain what this means?

Sat Dec 6 14:29:59 1997
From: Brent Poirier
Subject: Terseness of expression

As to the qualities of Baha'u'llah's Arabic usage in the Aqdas, referring both to its terseness, and to its majesty, from the Introduction to the Aqdas, by the Universal House of Justice (Aqdas, pp. 9-10):

"A word should be said about the style of language in which the Kitab-i-Aqdas has been rendered into English. Baha'u'llah enjoyed a superb mastery of Arabic, and preferred to use it in those Tablets and other Writings where its precision of meaning was particularly appropriate to the exposition of basic principle. Beyond the choice of language itself, however, the style employed is of an exalted and emotive character, immensely compelling, particularly to those familiar with the great literary tradition out of which it arose. In taking up his task of translation, Shoghi Effendi faced the challenge of finding an English style which would not only faithfully convey the exactness of the text's meaning, but would also evoke in the reader the spirit of meditative reverence which is a distinguishing feature of response to the original. The form of expression he selected, reminiscent of the style used by the seventeenth-century translators of the Bible, captures the elevated mode of Baha'u'llah's Arabic, while remaining accessible to the contemporary reader. His translations, moreover, are illumined by his uniquely inspired understanding of the purport and implications of the originals.

"Although both Arabic and English are languages with rich vocabularies and varied modes of expression, their forms differ widely from one another. The Arabic of the Kitab-i-Aqdas is marked by intense concentration and terseness of expression. It is a characteristic of this style that if a connotation is obvious it should not be explicitly stated. This presents a problem for a reader whose cultural, religious and literary background is entirely different from that of Arabic. A literal translation of a passage which is clear in the Arabic could be obscure in English. It therefore becomes necessary to include in the English translation of such passages that element of the Arabic sentence which is obviously implicit in the original. At the same time, it is vital to avoid extrapolating this process to the point where it would add unjustifiably to the original or limit its meaning. Striking the right balance between beauty and clarity of expression on the one hand, and literalness on the other, is one of the major issues with which the translators have had to grapple and which has caused repeated reconsideration of the rendering of certain passages."