Untranslated

All day I think about it, then at night I say it.
Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing?
I have no idea.
My soul is from elsewhere, I’m sure of that,
and I intend to end up there.

but who is it now in my ear who hears my voice?
Who says words with my mouth?

Who looks out with my eyes? What is the soul?
I cannot stop asking. ..

Starts a poem ‘translated’ by Colman Barks (here in a beautiful reading)

It is a poem by the 11 th century Persian mystic Jalal adin Rumi but it has been pointed out that this translation is not really a reasonable translation at all: instead it reflects the commitments of the 20th century American Barks far more than the faith of the 11th century Rumi
Barks has appropriated the words of Rumi who was a Sufi, a mystical branch of Islam, and created a version palatable to a modern, western, culturally Christian sensibility.
I was once in a production of some writing by the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges – the piece was adapted by another Argentine who had known the great writer. The adaptor was a flamboyant and emotional person who took great care of the legacy of Borges, who he pronounced Jōrgé Luis Borgès.
I can never quite bring myself to say it like this even though I now know that ’s how it is said, because if I say Jōrgé Luis Borgès, nobody has a clue who I’m talking about. so. Anyway.
Borges didn’t write any plays of course, he wrote poetry, really great poetry and amazing novels (which are a bit too spookily allegorical for my taste) and he also wrote wonderful nonfiction (or at least as far as i can tell it is non fiction – but Borges is a writer who is very skilled at blurring boundaries).
Anyway Borges loved to quote the Italian phrase “Traduttore, traditore” to translate is to betray…
When we speak the word betray of course it is freighted with the very worst associations, treachery; pretending to feel one thing but acting in a another way altogether is the most horrifying act within human scope because as King Duncan says the night before he is murdered by his friend Macbeth: ‘there is no art to find the mind’s construction in the face’. (Macbeth1:4) Humans can pretend: actors are pretty cool with this fact but the rest of society finds it very problematic indeed – which is why actors used to be buried at crossroads.
The ultimate act of betrayal we think of is Judas kiss (Mark 14:43). The way Judas turns over Jesus to the Roman crucifixion, in an act of seeming love, is like a sleepwalking nightmare, and his suicide afterwards confirms the ultimate nature of the act.
How is translation betrayal?
I suppose if it turns meaning upside down it would be a betrayal of the original meaning and sense, but most translators surely try diligently to convey the meaning of the original don’t they? Not to contradict or obscure it.
But betrayal is also to give away, to reveal.
I recently encountered research about the gospel and what is called the kerygma or teaching of the Gospels. The scholar who expounded on this theme is clear that the Gospels share key teachings, the Sonship of Jesus, His death and resurrection and our potential salvation.
For me everyone of them is contested.
What was translated and what was betrayed – and what does that have the possibility of meaning?
Something that Borges, a man who had the greatest possible respect for writing of all kinds, reading in the original and enjoying translation, pointed out and which I had never noticed before, occurs in the pericope of the woman taken in adultery. (We call this story ‘the woman taken in adultery’ to reinforce the detail that there is no possibility that she is falsely accused; whatever we may think of the fact that she is accused at all, and let alone for a moment the fact that it is only her and not the man who must undoubtedly have been complicit in the act in which they were taken who is dragged here by the outraged elders) Borges points out that when he has thrown down His endless challenge to all hypocrites, to all puritans:
Let he who is without sin throw the first stone;
Jesus doesn’t watch the righteous stoners deliberate, he leaves them to it.
Very psychologically adept, he leaves them to face their consciences alone.
But the gospel writer says that Jesus leant down into the dust and wrote something, before straightening up to find himself alone with the woman.
What did he write?
He didn’t leave himself the chance of being misinterpreted or translated, the words are swept away… (I cant find the source of this it is no doubt somewhere in The Total Library

When something starts to surface we very often don’t recognise where it is surfacing from.
Last week I turned to the lectionary to draw a reading:
for someone as distant from the practice of homiletics as I am, turning occasionally to the lectionary can be like the biblical equivalent of spinning a bottle.
Because our tradition is a dissenting one we have rejected many of the credal assumptions that many Christians take as basic or fundamental to Christian life.
I don’t believe that Jesus was literally the son of God, or that he co existed in some way cosmically with the spirit of God and I don’t believe that anyone can come back to life, I don’t believe in an afterworld of Hell, so I don’t believe in the idea that without believing in the above mentioned tenets of faith I can be condemned to hell or redeemed from it, and yet, and crucially (no pun intended) I don’t believe that Jesus believed in any of those things either.
Jesus was a Jewish man who preached Judaism, as a rabbi. And I don’t think it honours his memory to centre ideas which were alien to his thinking or teaching.
I am convinced that we are a Biblical tradition nonetheless: we carry the Bible at the heart of our church as the guidance for our soul and I believe that it is not good enough to claim that we equally revere other holy books too, because honestly we do not participate in a Vedic culture, or Buddhist or Islamic culture, and when we try to, I often detect an attempt to evade the difficulties and obligations that the honest encounter with the Bible puts us to.
The struggle with God implicit in our encounter with this dense and frustrating body of material goes back a very long way; the people of Israel are so called because of their struggle with God. The very first Christian community is born out of a difficult dispute: Peter we read in the gospel account is the Rock on which the church is to be built and yet historical evidence suggests that James was in fact the leader of the early church in Jerusalelm, James who disputed with Paul about the nature of Jesus, and held that what we do is more important than what we believe (Jam 2:14).
An honest confrontation with difference of opinion is to my mind essential to Christian life, and the ability to contend with doubt, ambiguity and uncertainty is essential to spiritual maturity.
Religion offers us an opportunity to participate in an extended intelligence a knowledge and practice beyond our own scale, in community with others not only in this space but extending back through the experiences of ancestors and communities

I know that if I want to heal a spiritual problem I need spiritual resources from within and outside of my own experience. And this is the value of extended experience the nature of religion is that it extends our consciousness to include conversations and discourses beyond our time and place

Remember the days of old, we read in the book of Deuteronomy, (Deut 32:7) consider the years of many generations: ask thy father, and he will shew thee; thy elders, and they will tell thee?

Just as we look up and see distance and meaning in far galaxies and we see in the gutters leaves of such beauty reds and yellows ochering as they fade, just as our gaze traverses Andromedan galaxies; and the light as it passes through this empty church – the leaves here which are carven into stone, the columns which are trees.

This place to which I belong, I am grasped by what I cannot grasp…

When I looked at that same lectionary for inspiration for today the segment that transfixed my attention is this from Exodus 34:

The Lord said to Moses, “Chisel out two stone tablets like the first ones, and I will write on them the words that were on the first tablets, which you broke”.

Of course the new tablets which Moses brings down contain the decalogue; the commandments for good and reasonable life which have ordered social affairs for so long, containing instructions for our relationship to religious and social affairs. But it struck me for the first time how this action of breaking the first tablets is like the action of sweeping away the words Jesus had written in the dust. Jesus action recognising how impermanent our will is our thoughts like our lives lived out in passing, the wisdom of experience as it gathers around us with voices that remind us that we too must fade, we too are written in dust.

Taken collectively the Gospels which came to be collected and preached of have provided a solid basis for certainty and Christian puritans, fundamentalists and conservatives have signally resembled the wise elders who set about to kill by stoning an innocent woman. Jesus ministry is characterised by the refusal to be conformed to the ways of his world, in St Pauls phrase (Rom 12:2), and when his disciples exhort him to distance himself from others preaching in his name he refuses to do so (Mark 9: 38).