In the prophet's own words
Why do earnest spiritual seekers often find it necessary to learn to read spiritual texts in the original language? We have middle-class white buddhists contorting their hands around sanskrit letters, young black muslims coughing out arabic glutturals, biblical scholars struggling with declensions of aramaic and ancient greek, and of course, young american jews struggling with the hebrew of the Torah in downtown Manhattan.
Learning languages is hard. I lived in a foreign country and it took me over a year and a half to learn the basics. That's only to have a non-idiotic conversation at a party, talking about where I come from. It takes at least double that time to achieve the proficiency to read complex spiritual texts. So why the bother?
Most religion wrap themselves around a holy book. There's something majestic and authoritative about marks on papyrus. And ultimately, theology in written form is just more transportable. In the days before the printing press, books were much more precious commodities - laborious to make, expensive to finance, and difficult to make accurate copies of - books were expensive treasures for the rich and indolent, and the scholars that they would patronize. Even today, with the technologies of the printing press and the word processor, a beautifully produced book still possesses the qualities of a magical object.
Religious books in America are less exotic treasures and more of a marketable commodity. There is a whole cottage industry of translating religious books. All you have to do is march down to your nearest esoteric book store, and you will find a gazillion different translations of the Bhagavad Gita, all printed on cheap india paper in dirt cheap ink-type, that is thick and heavy, and hard to read. Differences between translations are enormous. Some translations translate difficult terms literally, keeping the phoneticisms of the original language. In other translations, english words are appropriated in awkward sounding ways, like the use of that clunker, lovingkindness, in South-east asian buddhist texts.
However, in many different traditions, it is taught that the earnest seeker must learn the original language that a holy book is written in, before they can truly understand the meaning behind the books. Why watch a grainy video shot by a handicam inside a noisy cinema when you can experience glorious 75 mm film in dolby surround sound?
If you've ever met earnest beginning spiritual seekers, you will find that they generally tend to be insufferable puritanical party-poopers, full of pointless trivia, and prescriptive to the hilt. Like the cool kids, they'll wear the right gear, say the right things, and rain down a stream of do's-and-dont's. To join a new religion is to deny one's original culture. It is an act of identity recreation. Speaking a new language, is the final erection of the new self.
But what is to be gained in reading the original book in the original language? The simple reason is that the great holy books are often, also great works of poetry. Spiritual power is poetic power married with spiritual insight. And poetry transmits meaning not just in the simple meaning of the words, but through shades of meaning and technical effects of rhyme, rhythm and meter. The Koran contains a myriad of puns and in-jokes, in arabic.
And because spiritual writing is poetry, it suffers the same difficulty in translation. Poetry is notoriously virtually impossible to translate. Most religious translations are made by earnest religious scholars, not linguistically adept poets. That is why teachers of religions find translations tinny and stilted. When religious teachers complain that a translation misses the spiritual essense, they are really saying that it lacks poetic fluency. So when a spiritual seeker takes the long and arduous journey in learning the original language of a spiritual text, they are really taking the world's most painful poetry class.
