In the Name of God, the Mercy-Giving, the Merciful

 

A Glance at the Translation of the "Qur’an, a Call out to the Universe”

 

Praised be God Almighty, the Originator of the Qur'an; and blessings on the immortal soul of the Receptor of Divine Revelation, the Last and Greatest Prophet of God, who is the Trustee of the Message that was revealed to him as the final and most comprehensive heavenly scripture for mankind. Again I thank God, the Originator of the Qur’an, for the deeply-rooted and life-long love and respect towards the Heavenly Message of such an Immortal Book that he instilled in my heart since my adolescence. God has assisted me in different ways in learning, and to some extent, teaching the meanings of verses of this Holy Book, so much so that after rudimentary steps and necessary education in this regard, with the encouragement of Qur’anic experts I ventured cautiously into this vast, or rather infinite field, for research work on the Qur’an. Gradually, with the help of God and after a period of learning and teaching Qur’anic subjects I became intimate with the Holy Book, which we Muslims regard as the final and most comprehensive Message of God to mankind, superseding all other previously revealed heavenly scriptures.

 

Finally, as circumstances permitted me, with the help of the Almighty, I offered to the faithful the fruit of my inward warm enthusiasm, that is, the Persian-English translation of the Holy Qur'an. For years I attended classes and discourses of experts and authorities on the Holy Qur’an and greatly benefited from the different aspects of Qur’anic studies, which are a warranty for happiness in this world and in afterlife. Since in this particular field, I was neither a Source of Emulation (Mujtahid) nor an emulator (Muqallid), I acted with precaution on the basis of my knowledge. I re-read the Qur’an many times and strove to learn Qur'anic sciences, in order to understand the meaning of the words, terminology, styles and their interpretations. I knew that a translator of the Qur’an must have fifteen to twenty qualifications ranging from mastery over the principles of grammar and syntax to comprehensive research and investigation on the various exegesis – whether Arabic, Persian, or English. Moreover, he or she must be acquainted with not only the Glorious Qur’an itself but also its translation and interpretation.

 

After due study, based on my devotion and belief, I felt I had reached the point where my professors and pioneers in this path, would permit me to broach on this great job i.e. the translation of the meanings of the verses of the Holy Qur’an. I started with the last or 30th section (Joz). My method of translation was word for word, because I thought – and I came to this conclusion while teaching and learning in the elementary and intermediate levels – that school and university students prefer this method more; that is, they like the translated words to be exactly under the original Arabic words of the Holy Qur’an, or the order and arrangement of translation to be the same as that of the Holy Book. I proceeded to provide a special trilingual table beneath the translation of each ayah, for I had found out its instructive value through experience.

 

Although my work was warmly welcomed, certain experts reminded me that the importance of fluency and the lingual independence of the translated prose (Persian and English) was also important compared to its instructive value, since the instructive value was firmly intertwined with the translation itself, particularly through glossary tables provided by me to convey the exact meaning. The experts also drew my attention to the point that after the passing of over a thousand years and perhaps the same number of translations over that period, the age of word-for-word translation was over, whatever its use may be. The reason for this is that besides sticking to precision and loyalty in translation, the genuine principle in translation is the observance of the target language (here Persian and English). If the target language is word-for-word, it will present a dull, insipid, and unattractive picture of the scripture known for its timeless eloquence and wisdom, and the matchless beauty of its words, in addition to – God forbid – raising doubts in the minds of those unacquainted with the Arabic language that perhaps the original text has the same structure and style. In short, verbatim translation, however beautiful it may be, is ungrammatical and unconventional like all grandiloquent and beautiful Persian and English translations of the past. The early translators, while translating religious texts, especially the Holy Qur’an, were unaware of the theories and finer points of translation that emerged later on. And even if they were aware, as is evident by the cultural heritage of the 3rd-4th centuries of the Hijra when Greek and Syriac works were translated into Arabic, they thought that they were not fully qualified to translate the Holy Qur’an because of the glory and grandeur of the Divine Word. As a result they would, for example, put the verb at the beginning of the sentence to follow the pattern of the original Arabic that has different structure, whereas in Persian a verb comes at the end of the sentence; or in the English translations they would put adjectives and nouns in plural form.

 

This usage was because of the influence of the Arabic language on Old Persian prose. Then in succeeding centuries translators came out of the dominance of Arabic syntactic, style, and structural rules and as a result the Persian translations of the Holy Qur’an in the past half a century have become more readable and orderly than those of earlier times. Early translations were spectacular and valuable mostly from the viewpoint of single words, equivalents and combinations, in addition to being useful both from the perspective of history and lexicography. Furthermore, earlier translators were in the habit of using many synonyms and interpretive additions of their own, which today, in standard prose, are considered against the principles of translations, whether concerning the Qur’an and other religious texts, or in ordinary popular works.

 

As for the grandeur of the Holy Qur’an and its eternal message, its translations, compared with those of the Christian Bible (the Old and New Testaments) that has been translated into more than 2000 languages and published tens and even a hundred times, are perhaps fewer than what this Heavenly Scripture deserves. The number of translations of the Holy Qur’an over the past 5 or 6 centuries, and especially after the victory of the Islamic Revolution in Iran that drew the attention of world experts and scholars to the Holy Scripture of Muslims, are not more than 200 languages. Yet, we Iranian Muslims are proud of the fact that the first and foremost translation of the Holy Qur’an was in Persian, whether it was the translation of Salman al-Farsi, the great Iranian companion of Prophet Muhammad (SAWA) or whether it was the translation of Abu Ja’far at-Tabari’s exegesis in the second half of the 4th century AH by a group of scholars and jurisprudents in Bukhara during the rule of Amir Mansour bin Nuh Samani.

   

A point is that there are more English, French, and even Urdu translations of the Holy Qur’an compared to Persian translations of the past hundred years since the Constitutional Period in Iran (1905), including the beautiful and important translation by Baseer ol-Molk Sheibani. Another noteworthy point is that some Iranian scholars of the Qur’an have ventured to translate it into English, among which mention could be made of the poetic translation of Mr. Fazlollah Nik-Ayeen, translation by Mr. Ali Quli Qarai', translation by Mr. Assadollah Iranpanah (both in English and Persian) and also that of the late Mrs. Tahereh Saffarzadeh (in Persian and English).

 

Among the most important English translations of the Holy Qur'an since the 17th century that number more than 300 till now, are as follows:

1)    Alexander Ross,    2) William Bad well,   3) George Sale,  

4) J.W.Rodwell,   5) E.H.Palmer,   6) M.Piktal,   7) Richard Bell,  

8) A.J.Arberry,   9) Mir Ahmad Ali,   10) Yusuf Ali,   11) T.B.Irving (Al- Hajj Talim Ali),   12) N.J.Dawood,   13) Muhammad Asad.

 

If we were to number all translations of the Holy Qur'an in the English language, we would have a list of over 300 entries. Well this is the job of Qur'anic bibliographers.

To be more precise, a translator, who is well-qualified to render into the other language the Revealed Word of God (Qura'n), can improve the quality of any translation, including Persian and English.

 

My translation method is meaning-based and not verbatim, and I have given short interpretative additions inside parentheses. Since translation is related to interpretation, that is, any interpretation is a kind of extensive translation and translation is a concise interpretation, a translator of the Holy Qur'an similar to an interpreter of this Book should understand shades of meaning of the Heavenly Scripture, but set aside interpretive additions, and offer only the text as a translation. I mean the vocabulary and meaning in translation should reflect the original verse of the Holy Book, at times word-by-word but without sacrificing the meaning and purport of the revelation or the beauty of the language. Here the translator may make the same mistake our predecessors made in producing more than 1000 word-for-word translations over a period of more than a millennium. Verbatim translation originated because of the lack of translation theories and unfamiliarity with scientific and linguistic aspects of translation. In the old days when a word-for-word translation was done it was not yet clear that the translator shouldn't semantically distant himself from the Holy text, but from the viewpoint of vocabulary the distance emerged in order to follow grammatical rules and necessities of the target language (Persian and English in my translation).

 

Yes, the language of the Holy Qur'an belongs to the Semitic family in which there are a lot of emphatic particles, but Persian and English are supposed to be related to the Indo-European group of languages which have few emphatic particles, or for instance they have no absolute object (Maf’ool Motlaq), although Persian has a very large number of Arabic loan words and phrases. On the other hand verb tenses in Arabic are different from the other two languages. There is no present- perfect tense in Arabic, but since it exists in Persian and English, wherever the translator realizes that the meaning of simple past is somehow present-perfect, he or she should use present-perfect or simple present in translation. For instance, "al-lazina amanu" shouldn't be translated as "O you who believed", but rather, since it is continuation from the past till the present, it must be translated as "O you who believe".

 

Another example in the Holy Qur'an is that the certain and indispensable future comes in past tense, as in describing the status of the dwellers of Paradise and Hell and their words. Here the tense of Persian or English translation must be present. For instance, this Qur’anic sentence; "wa nada as-haab ol-jannate as-haab on-naar…" (A'araf-44) should undergo two changes in translation. First, in Arabic a plural subject takes a plural verb or, in some cases, it may take a singular verb. In the above-mentioned sentence if "nada" is to be translated word-for-word, it will be "he called out". But since "as-haab ol-jannate" is plural, so its verb must be translated in plural form, and hence "they called out". The second change that must be made in translating this short sentence into Persian and English is that we should use the present tense, i.e. "they call out" instead of the future tense. It's because of these technical points and nuances that the translator of the Holy Qur’an should have enough knowledge of the various aspects of the Arabic language (syntax, grammar, derivations, meanings, expressions, and novelties) and be well familiar with, and even have complete command of the potentialities of the Persian and English languages. The example of meaning-expression is that sometimes in the Holy Qura'n instead of ordering (imperative verb) predicative sentences are used. For example if this sentence "wal waledato yorze'na owladahonna howlayne kamelayne" (Baqara-233), whose aim is to order and express a jurisprudential decree, is translated in the imperative form, it will be wrong; i.e. "and mothers breastfeed their children two full years". If it is asked, why is this sentence wrong? The answer is that it does not comply with the reality, experience and the practice of human beings. Many mothers, due to any reason, may not breastfeed their children for two full years. Meanwhile if the sentence is translated in progressive present, the reader or the addressee will probably not feel that a jurisprudential decree on family issues is being expressed. The correct translation would be, "and mothers should breastfeed their children two full years." In fact, saying "they should breastfeed" instead of "they breastfeed" has a remarkable difference in meaning, as has been mentioned.

 

These examples were given to explain that the translator of the Qur’an like its interpreter must have complete command and mastery in 15 sciences and fields (as highlighted by Suyuti in his Qur’anic encyclopedia Azim ol-Itqaan). In practice we can also show how with the progress of language sciences, and the emergence of linguistics and methods of translation, Persian and other translations have improved. Like any other translator, whether male or female, I have endeavoured to correctly recite and understand the ayahs and phrases of the Holy Qur’an since my youth and I have extended the necessity of its teaching to its proper study. Thus I have been preoccupied with the study of researches on the Holy Qur’an, especially Persian, and recently English interpretations. I have also compared top translations of the Holy Qur’an in Persian and English with the sacred text of the Qur’an and made valuable notes in this regard. And having been inspired for years in studying and discussing this Heavenly Book, I feel that perhaps I am able to offer a beautiful and understandable translation of the Holy Qur’an for everybody without being verbatim. To improve the instructive value of translation, I have listed the words and phrases of each page in the form of a bilingual table along with their meanings. During my long years of translation I've used the best old Persian copies (like the first edition of the translation of Tafsir-e Meybodi, Tafsir-e Abol-Fotoh Raazi and Tafsir-e Soorabadi) and also well-known contemporary Persian translations such as the translations of Professors Fooladvand, Bahaoddin Khorramshahi, Moosavi Garmaroodi, and the English translations of Arthur Arbery, Shakir, Irwing, and Qara'i. Finally Messers Bahaoddin Khorramshahi, Mohammad Mahdi Fooladvand, and Hoossein Alizadeh have diligently proof read (edited) the Arabic-Persian and its related glossary, while Messers Seyyed Ali Shahbaz and Hassan Tavakkoli have edited the Arabic-English text and its related glossary. In the end I offer my heart-felt gratitude to all those who have enabled me to produce this work. May they all be rewarded by the Owner of the Holy Qur'an.

 

Praised be God, Who is the First, the Last, the Manifest and the Hidden.

 

Ma’soumeh Yazdanpanah (Khorramshahi)

 

Tir-1387-Tehran