The Art of Writing Translations by Florian Von Banier

Fourth Chapter: On the Subject of The Holy Bible

*1 Nonetheless, The Holy Bible is an interesting book and you must read it, you should read it, I have read it, and do so each night.

*2 He that scoffs at The Holy Bible only betrays their own lack of understanding, like he who scoffs at other civilizations and thereby betrays his own inability to appreciate human life in all its varied and diverse forms.

*3 I do not scoff at the Holy Bible, yet I would never dare call it 'holy' in the truest sense of that word. The Bible is but a work of art, a written work, an exercise in language, even if it is the language of my greatest teacher, St. Jerome, and my second greatest teacher, Y'Shua (who some call by the name of Jesus Christ, which is of course not his true name, but his English name, his name translated into English, so it is a translation of an untranslatable name: it is like translating God's name: God has no name, and it certainly is not God, as I have shown in the preceding chapter.)

*4 The Holy Bible is an immense tradition, it is the work of many. It is an act of translation itself, as all works are.

*5 The greatest translator of The Holy Bible to ever live was St. Jerome, who produced what is known as The Holy Vulgate, which is a translation of The Holy Septuagint into the flowering language, Cicero's language of Latin. These works are excellent in their proportions in translation, and yet they are also excellent because they do not include The New Testament which is also God's word (because it is not Their word), but is very poorly written, and even more poorly translated into the languages I read: German, English, Latin, French, Japense, etc..

*83 Kabbalism is a model for interpretation and translation, and I have adopted much of it as my own, though I also know very little about the Kabbalah, the Zohar, and the Seven Principles.

*84 One of the greatest Kabbalists was The Rabbi Moshe Codrovero. He was born in 1522 in Safed, the city that was soon to become famed as a center of Kabbalah. The Rabbi devoted his life to studying The Zohar, the teachings of the seminal kabbalist and Mishnaic sage, Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai. The Rabbi M C's main interest was the systematisation of the Kabbalah, and he set it into a linguistic structure, which some call philosophcial, but I do not think it is philosohpcial at all. So respected was he in this endeavor that he was the first Kabbalist honored by having the word 'the' added before his initials, and even today is known as 'the RaMaK'. Before his passing in 1570, the Ramak said: "I shall soon leave this earth. Yet after my death, someone will replace me. And even though many of that person’s statements may seem to contradict mine, do not oppose him and do not argue with him, for they stem from the same source as do mine and are absolutely true. His soul is a spark of Shimon bar Yochai’s, and whoever opposes him opposes the Shechinah".

*85 The Zohar is The Holy Book of Splendor. In it, everything is written. And so, only in it, is God's name to be spelled out, but in secret, in ciphered writing. In translating The Holy Book of Splendor we approximate God. Buddha has also approximated God. And so I spend more time sitting under trees in silent meditation than I do reading The Zohar.

*86 One minute of profound meditation is worth one thousand years of sleep and one thousand years of devoted learning.

Fifth Chapter: The Seven Principles of Translation (not digitized)

Sixth Chapter: Of the First Four Principles (not digitized)

Seventh Chapter (lost)

Eighth Chapter: On the Virtues and Vices Involved in Translation by Florian Von Banier

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