I was walking in a gallery with a Mandarin speaking student. He looked at the English label identifying a ink painting from ancient China. He got rather sad at the “translation.” “Three pines by a river” was an accurate word for word translation but he said it missed almost everything of the Chinese title. There were three trees and not two or one and that “three” meant something. They were pine trees and not, say, maples or bamboo. And that meant something. These trees were by a river, not a little stream or a pond. That meant something also. They were by the river and not far from the water. That also meant something. So the point I was making about translating the Bible is easily illustrated by the difficulty of trying to translate three simple words attached to a picture. “Snow Country” by the Japanese novelist Kawabata is one of my favorite novels. The opening scene of traveling north into snow country is incredibly delicate. When I saw a literal translation of the first chapter I got a good lesson in Japanese. There was practically nothing there. The translator had had to put in the details that I loved and which would be evident to a Japanese reader but were there as allusions but not literally. So the crossing over of cultures and languages is like crossing the red sea.
There was a Japanese Catholic priest who was raised a Buddhist and then converted. He said he nearly went crazy reading the Bible in translation. The Japanese translation was not based on the Hebrew and Greek texts but on an English one. So the Japanese was several layers away from the original. It was nearly impossible for him to make his way through those layers. He learned Greek and Hebrew and did the translations himself into Japanese and that saved him, enriched him. His Christianity did not have to have a layer of western thought on top of Greek and Hebrew and then into yet another mentality.
Later in a very austere plain house of prayer he gave retreats that were completely original. The retreatants would spend their time writing in old style Chinese like characters the opening of the Gospel of St John. They would do only one word a day. If they could only spare three or four days for the retreat they only got to meditate on three or four words. A thirty day retreat would get them into the text but it would still take more time to finish. One character at a time is a Chinese and Japanese discipline because to write the character properly takes great attention, concentration, so that the writer with a brush can enter into the reality of meaning.
We would think it very strange to spend a whole day writing one word and meditation on that word. Is this because we understand so clearly the English translation of John’s opening, “In the beginning was the Word” ??? I don’t know anyone who ever said that they understood “beginning” or understood “Word.”
A silent, respectful “chewing” on the text of the Bible might lead us closer to the Word that was with God from the beginning…

Tags: Bible, Japanese, Kawabata, Mandarin, translation