The Crack that Lets in the Light: Concepts of the Divine and a Problem in Religious Translation

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Leonard Cohen’s 1992 album “The Future” included the song “Anthem”, which contains these lines: “There is a crack, a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in”. Thirteenth-century Persian scholar, poet and Sufi mystic Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi wrote: “The wound is the place where the light enters you.”In this paper, we discuss the use of pronouns to designate God in the three Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, as a problem for the translation of holy and other religious writings. In a sense, translators do not merely translate language but religion itself, and God-language is inextricably linked to how the deity is conceptualised. From a theological perspective, each of the monotheistic religions mentioned above maintains that the divinity is unfathomable, indescribable, and beyond categories such as, for instance, ‘male’ and ‘female’. Thus, in Judaism, the name for God, transliterated by the letters YHWH, is not pronounced. Not naming or labelling is a safeguard against identifying God with any concept we form, since verbal language may point to the divinity but is unable to circumscribe it. However, the scriptures, liturgical texts, and traditions of these religions (and others) rely on forms, on mind-made constructions one verbal language is able to convey and which can then be translated, more or less successfully, into another verbal language ─ different from the previous one and yet similar in terms of the fundamental constraint which makes it forever inadequate, imperfect, acting like a veil or, worse, a wall which prevents one from perceiving. Drawing on English-language translations, we contend that translation reveals the state of the debate concerning names, pronouns, concepts within each religion and that, insurmountable as the challenges may seem, they are likely to be the very cracks which make it possible for understanding to be deepened.