Abdulkadir Abdelli
The Turkish historian İlber Ortaylı says: “The Holy Qur’an has the quality of artistic prose and rhymed prose (saj‘). Others carry this quality over into translation. The Turks’ translation of the Qur’an, however, is merely a translation; it is scientifically correct, but it has not captured the pleasure and style of the Qur’an, and there is no desire to do so. Yet this quality exists in the German translation – that is, we feel that pleasure when we read Rückert’s German translation of the Holy Qur’an.”
Perhaps it is the Turkish historian’s lack of Arabic that leads him to believe the Qur’an translated into Turkish is “scientifically correct”. And one can hardly think otherwise: how could a nation that produced so many Muslim scholars, al-Bukhari among them, not have a highly accurate translation of the Qur’an? The neglect of this aspect may be put down to the fact that Turkish scholars of Islam generally learned Arabic and read the Qur’an in it, and that until the mid-nineteenth century the Turkish intellectual usually spoke Arabic.
Many Turkish experts in Arabic literature are aware of this gap in the translation of the Holy Qur’an; there are a great many examples not only of weak artistry in translation but of shifts in meaning.
One example is enough to show the state of Qur’an translation. On the evening of 27 December 2013, a mahya – as it is called in Turkish, a phrase written in light bulbs – was strung between the two minarets of a mosque in Istanbul’s Üsküdar district. This was an Ottoman custom carried out on the nights of Ramadan, and the phrase was usually a welcome to the holy month.
This time, however, the phrase was signed “Holy Qur’an”. The European Union was soon up in arms, and the government ordered the removal of the sign, whose meaning was “O you who believe, do not take the Jews and the Christians as ‘friends’…”. The next day’s newspapers spoke of the great mistake made in hanging the mahya and of the need not to choose discriminatory phrases, but never mentioned that the uproar had been caused by the translation.
For my part, I checked the Turkish translations of the Holy Qur’an and found the verse rendered this way in all of them, with the word “friends” chosen to translate awliya’. An incident like this may be one of the reasons that led the Turkish translator Mehmet Hakkı Suçin to embark on the adventure of translating part of the Holy Qur’an in a different way.
In the preface to this translation, which he titled Şiir Şiir Ayetler (“Poetic Verses”), Suçin writes: “Bookshops are the faithful islands of rest in the endless sea of life. Whenever I tire of beating my wings amid the bustle of daily life, they call me to them with that magical smell of paper and host me, word by word, in their entirely different worlds. After one such day, in one of the Capital’s large bookshops, to which I had drifted of my own accord, I was looking at the shelves where religious books were displayed under the heading ‘religion’. The finely printed Qur’an translations lined up side by side caught my eye. I leafed through them one by one – first one, then another, then all of them. They made me think about the Qur’an’s own dynamic rhythm, and whether this rhythm could also be captured in Turkish.” (p. 7)
“The first thing that stood out in the suras I translated was that the verses were often rhymed, at times even metred, and had a high poetic ‘tempo’. In other words, form or aesthetic values showed themselves at once in the suras I translated. By form or aesthetic values I mean the poetic rhythm and musicality that run the risk of being lost in translation. In the verses, this form ultimately expresses a content or message. The translator must therefore accomplish the difficult task of preserving, on the one hand, the auditory aesthetic values created in the source text and, on the other, carrying the meaning of the text into the target language.” (pp. 7–8)
Suçin is of course aware of these shifts in meaning and has taken them into account; and although what drove him to this work was the shifts in the Qur’an’s artistic form, he continues in the preface: “I did not set out to translate the verses in rhyme in order to reconstruct these aesthetic values in Turkish. For on the one hand the content or meaning of the target text could have been sacrificed to rhyme, and on the other there was the risk of tiring the intellectual reader accustomed to the voice of contemporary poetry. I tried to compensate for the poetic quality of the Qur’anic verses in the target text not with rhymes but with the rhythm and inner-sound possibilities of contemporary poetry, as well as by drawing on the visual layout. In this way, as a translator, I was able to have a wide field of movement in carrying the meaning into the target text.” (p. 8)
This translation could be called a parallel translation: in form it has preserved the meaning with the greatest possible accuracy. Nor did the translator stop there: he included the Arabic text of the translated suras and appended a pronunciation guide at the end of the book, so that researchers who wish can compare the rhythm of the two texts.
Mehmet Hakkı Suçin has undertaken a task that has perhaps been overdue for centuries in Turkish culture. When I asked him whether he would continue the project and complete the whole Holy Qur’an in successive volumes, he said: “I have put forward a model. This work requires great effort and persistent labour; I would like it to be a guide or an incentive for others to complete the path.” The translator adds:
“In translating the Juz’ ‘Amma, which I called Şiir Şiir Ayetler, my aim is not to show how poetic the Holy Qur’an is. I wanted to reflect the ‘dynamism’ of the Qur’anic verses in Turkish, even if only a little. On the other hand, we know that the negative image drawn of poets in some verses of the Qur’an stems from the bad function assumed by the poets and poetry of the period. For at the time the Qur’an was revealed, poets were seen as people who drew their inspiration from the jinn and similar hidden forces. The function of poetry at that time, and the meaning it carried, were entirely different from its function today. These matters are discussed in detail in the sources of Arabic literature.” (p. 9)
A translation that presents the art of prose in the Holy Qur’an may well be a need that can make the Qur’anic text dearer to those who do not speak Arabic, especially the Turks. The translation of the Juz’ ‘Amma is an important step, and it has pointed to an important gap in the translation of the Holy Qur’an – one noticed by non-Muslim Western orientalists, as the Turkish historian İlber Ortaylı pointed out, but not by a nation that led the Islamic world for several centuries. Perhaps this step will be the beginning of filling that gap.
Originally published as: Abdulkadir Abdelli, “Rhythmic Verses: Drawing on the Art of Qur’anic Prose”, Al-Araby Al-Jadeed, 14 February 2017. Translated from the Arabic for this site.