Let’s first turn off all special lighting because the subject doesn’t need any. The Bible. The best-selling translation of all time blasted its way through all the rules ever drawn up. The Gospel in Sumatra has a hungry Jesus walking up to a banana plant in place of a fig tree (Matthew 21:18-19). The same Gospel removed the palm leaves from beneath His colt as He entered Jerusalem (Matthew 21:8), for in Africa it is discourteous to place anything in the path of a hero.
Since the messages of God have to be understood by the millions who did not receive them first-hand, the history of the Word, for which people were hounded from country to country, bankrupted, imprisoned, burned at the stake and declared enemies of both Church and State, is indubitably a tale of translation.
The word ‘bible’ is derived from the Greek biblia, the plural of biblion , book. The Bible is a collection of books. And that is the best description of it considering the thousands of languages and dialects into which it has been translated in the last century — nearly 2,500. But it was slow off the blocks. Phase one was when the Jewish scriptures, or what came to be called the Old Testament, radiated out of Jerusalem and needed Greek translators to jump the Mediterranean. Just before Christ was born, they moved into Latin, while Jews themselves began writing them in Aramaic.
***
As the Christian world expanded, translations of the first Christian texts (Paul’s letters and the Gospels) from the original Greek were sanctioned, including into Ethiopic, Coptic and Syriac. Meanwhile, both the Old and New Testaments were translated at various times into Latin and spread across what had by then become the Holy Roman Empire. Multiple translations began to circulate simultaneously, and the differences between them can only be imagined.
***
Phase two: Three hundred years after Christ, the reigning Pope Damasus I commissioned the scholar Jerome of Stridon to prepare a single acceptable ‘common version’ (known as the Vulgate) in Latin, the widely understood common language of the time. Jerome, who came up with the phrase ‘sense for sense’ as translatorial philosophy, brilliantly appropriated, edited, and rewrote; he has long been considered the patron saint of translators. He was canonised on an uncertain date some centuries after his death and his Feast Day, September 30, is observed as World Translation Day. This article is dedicated to him.
***
It took 900 years for the number of languages in which both the Old and New Testaments were made available to rise to just 19. By the time printing was invented there were 50. This crept up to 81 languages by 1800. But going back to Jerome, “Search the scriptures” said Christ to his followers (John 5:39), but how could they when the “key of knowledge” (Matthew 23:13/ Luke 11:52) was all locked up in Latin? It took a couple of centuries for Jerome’s translation to be authorised, and when it was, it became the exclusive property of the Church. Soon there was a veritable blockade against translations of the Bible into common tongues. England declared Jerome’s the only authorised version and made any English translation of it both a heresy and treason. Though it may be difficult to imagine now, when the Gospels were first printed and read directly in English (handwritten 1382, printed 1525), German (Martin Luther 1522) and other European languages, the experience turned whole nations upside down. The fire of mutinies against the medieval Church and its social power spread through translations, and one of the definitions of the Reformation is ‘People reading Paul’.
***
The earliest English translations of the New Testament owed nothing to Jerome, being transfers from the original Hebrew and Greek. All but three of John Wycliffe’s translations painfully copied by hand were collected and destroyed in public, and William Tyndale’s punishment for the first printed Bible (1525) was death by fire. But when have bans ever deterred scholars and translators? By the end of the 16th century there were more than 50 English translations of the Bible, which led to a royal commissioning of a ‘standard’ English version with 50 scholars working in Cambridge, Oxford and Westminster. Their united efforts produced the King James Version which might also be called the Miles Smith Version after its modest and brilliant general editor.
***
The King James Version, dedicated to King James, went through countless reprints in the U.S. till it lost its position to the New International Version in 1988. The KJV became, as Britain’s imperial march progressed in her colonies, the master copy for numerous early translations of the Bible into Asian and African languages. But it also did something else at ‘home’. The dominance of the English Bible particularly after Tyndale’s language weakened the use of Latin in England and encouraged the growth of simple, clear English, which was understood throughout the land. It was also one of the great sources of Shakespeare’s language, after which English has never looked back.
***
Though it probably did not occur to the translators, the story of Bible translation in India is also the story of the development of Indian language presses and the preparation of dictionaries in the regional languages. With these tools came the spread of journals, magazines, and newspapers in the local languages, which simply did not exist before, among non-scholarly populations. The primary goal of missionaries was to teach the Gospels for which they had to learn the regional languages and develop a certain hybridity or interculturality in the contact zone of translation. Side by side walked the importance of print, which was a crucial factor in awakening the consciousness of a people and a sense of pride in their regional identity.
***
The most successful enterprise of 20th century Bible translations was undertaken by Eugene Nida, a true culture missionary and Bible scholar, who travelled the world, lecturing and exploring languages, unapologetically promoting the translator’s right to be ‘free’ to find dynamic equivalences (the banana instead of the fig) and not stick to the ‘literal’. He had no use for a ‘scholars-only’ Bible and told his translators to sacrifice culture if they had to, but to get the message across. The Book was for everyone. Here he held hands with his artistic forerunner, Jerome. Not everyone agreed with his strategies believing that he was diluting the original so much that the translations were alienated from the source texts.
The King James Version, The Revised Version, The New International Version — there are as many versions of the Bible as there were translators and editors. An edition of the New Testament made in 1996 simplifies the English of the New International Version so much that those who are familiar with the stately language of the KJV might either smile or flinch. ‘Thy kingdom come’ becomes ‘Set the world right.’ ‘Thy will be done’ becomes ‘Do what’s best.’ ‘On earth as it is in heaven’ becomes ‘As above, so below.’ ‘Give us this day our daily bread’ becomes ‘Keep us alive with three square meals.’ ‘For Thine is the Kingdom and the power and the glory’ becomes ‘You’re in charge!’ (The New Testament in Contemporary Language ed. E.H. Peterson, Colorado Springs).
Shall we close with a line from Jerome’s letter to Augustine of Hippo (later St. Augustine) on the matter of a single word in the Book of Jonah? It caused an entire congregation to leave the church where the new translation was in use. “I am contented to make but little noise in an obscure corner of a monastery, with one to hear me or read to me.”
minioup@gmail.com
Mini Krishnan edits literary translations for Oxford University Press (India).
