Chimed Poetry

The Koran was born as an oral document, in a largely preliterate society -- many Muslims maintained that the Prophet himself was without letters.   This “scripture” (as we call it, with print-culture bias) is in its natural element when recited aloud in public, by an expert in cantillation (tajwîd).  

The language of the text itself  lends itself naturally to such vocal performance, since, although it is not poetry (the verses are of greatly disparate length, and there is no meter), and though the verses to not exactly rhyme in a way characteristic of English or German,  they do (one might say) chime, showing assonance and consonance.

Readers of translations (or, strictly, “versions” or “interpretations”, as Muslim scholars insist) of the Koran, get no sense of this.    Nor should such a “chiming” version be undertaken in any rhyme-rich language, for the work as a whole.  Still, to give a flavor of it, here is an imitation or rhyming impression of the opening prayer of the Koran, the fâtiha:

To thee -- to thee -- our voice we raise --

Lord of the Worlds -- in hymns of praise.

Fount of all mercy  till End of Days,

Thee we entreat, our staff and stays.

Show us the straight path, midst welter of ways:

not that of the curse’d, nor of him who strays.

*

The canonical Latin prayers of the Historical Church  do not rhyme, nor show meter.   From the Creed:

Credo in unum Deum,
Patrem omnipotentem,
factorem cæli et terræ,
visibilium omnium et invisibilium.

But the later, popular prayers of the Middle Ages  often do.   Here is the Stabat mater, which is trochaic tetramater  and in strophic form:

Stabat Mater dolorosa

Iuxta crucem lacrimosa,

Dum pendebat filius.

Cuius animam gementem

Contristatam et dolentem

Pertransivit gladius.

O quam tristis et afflicta

Fuit illa benedicta

Mater unigeniti

Quae maerebat et dolebat.

Et tremebat, cum videbat

Nati poenas incliti.

*

For verse translations (in English, French, and German) of St. Francis’ hymn to Brother Sun, try this:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/04/welcome-francis-updated-anew.html

Explication de texte

A prayer for the Lenten season:

Almighty and everlasting God,

who hatest nothing that thou hast made,

and dost forgive the sins of all them that are penitent:

Create and make in us new and contrite hearts,

that we  worthily lamenting our sins, and acknowledging our wretchedness,

may obtain of thee, the God of all mercy, perfect remission and forgiveness;

 through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen.

Sterling commentary  here:

http://anglicanhistory.org/usa/advent/misoff.html

(Hush(shhhhhh) …. )

Once a little boy at bedtime  said a prayer so pure, it was picked up by the snow bunnies.  One by one  they crept into his bed as he slept, till he was covered with snow bunnies, a great furry comforter  of snow bunnies.  And then he dreamt a dream so true,

that all the squirrels dreamt it too.

Prayer at bedtime

Snow bunny snow bunny

be in my dreams

and we shall race swiftly

across the dark white sleepscape

faster and faster and

fasterandfasterandfasterand,

till we   sleeping /stop

dreaming /slip

deeper in sleep

Postures of Prayer

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From the current issue of the New Oxford Review:

Did you know?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Catholic act of kneeling before Christ in the Eucharist bespeaks openness and anticipation of receiving the Bread of Life, whereas the sensory enclosure of Muslim prostration shuts out the light and turns the self inward toward its own nothingness.

Prayer Postures: What They Mean & Why They Matter

http://www.newoxfordreview.org/article.jsp?did=0412-erb

Such interpretaive comparisons -- basically, metaphors -- can be of (mostly literary) interest, when done well:  as Chesterton did them, most brilliantly in his detective story “The Wrong Shape”, a tale that also addresses that matter of one’s own Nothingness.  (Father Brown on the different meanings of “I want nothing”, each time the swami said it, rank with the best literary criticism.)

But if you’re going to go that route, at least get your facts straight.

The typical Muslim prayer-posture is standing up.  The position of the arms vary with Sunni and Shia preferences, but a quite typical one is with the palms apart, open, and upwards.   Such a posture is, when it comes to that, clearly more outgoing than kneeling with palms pressed together.

Labbayka ....

The prostrations indeed exist, but are few in number  and not extended.  The fact that they are almost exclusively emphasized in the Western press, says more about the press, than about Islam.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raka%27ah

They are, thus, nothing like the prolonged prone penitential posture of certain religious in Christendom.

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click here

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For a while, I subscribed to NOR (and indeed, enjoyed my java from one of their signature mugs, which you can behold here) -- in part because my friend and spiritual advisor, Dr Massey, has been a contributor.   But the sort of tin-hat Tea-Party fervor that you might expect in Texas Tabernacles but which managed to infect a Catholic like Rick Santorum, may be seeping into the foundations of NOR as well.

With regret, I no longer subscribe.

Portraits of Penitence

That post of my abject groveling  apology seems to have gone over rather well;  hence, for the greater spiritual edification of the Talibân al-`Ilm, we offer here a gallery for contemplation, of penitents at their prayers.   They concern, as it happens, the well-known case of Mary Magdalene.  You could google them yourselves;  but for your convenience, I have (your servant) performed the prayerful work of seeking and clicking, renaming and saving, all for your developmental benefit.   So, seek solitude, and contemplate these icons;  for greater contemplative contemplation, you might wish to lock the bedroom door.

Gracious I hope my image does not become an occasion of sin for some excitable gentleman...

Yipes !  I forgot the Viewer Discretion Advised warning !!

Well,  better late than never:

To have seen that,

you have to have been eighteen.

[Post-scriptum:

This merry jest in no way aims at the Holy Mother Church, nor the resplendent truths of Christianity;  but simply acknowledges, with a kind of smile, the weakness of the flesh, well-known to all Christians.]

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[Update 21 April 2012]

[I approached Dr. Massey  for his nihil obstat.  He responds as follow:]

God, I love the female form.

And yes, that was actually not an interjection, but actually addressed to God.

The Greeks contemplated the ultimate meaning of beauty, kalos. And there is ultimately nothing more beautiful than the assortment you present here.

And the true meaning of a portrait of the Magdalene Repentant, in which I can not help but admire her from a physical standpoint, is to make me realize my own weakness and sin.

And if I then realize that I will never be able to not look at her that way--that only makes me abandon myself into God's grace, without which I am lost.

Ancient Judaic Wisdom passes down a prayer to say when captivated by the female form: "God, I thank you that you have made creation thus." And this places the surges of our heart in the proper context. It is a part of the glorious creation of our loving God. Only our human sinfulness has sullied it.

The Power of Snark

You may have noticed that, when battling the nihilists, I pull out all the stops:  Senatorial courtesy does not apply.  No apologies -- we’re in a war here.

A delectable new example of this strategy may be enjoyed in this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8ZdoNgR_Mc

Here Dr. Massey, whom readers of this site will repeatedly have met as an expert Latinist (also a published Arabist, and a former accountant or something for the National Social Security Adminstration, if I’ve got that right), upon the occasion of the introduction of a more philologically responsible translation of the Liturgy, dissects the old liberalistical mistranslation:  and this, with a scalpel, that is very tiny, but very sharp.  He means to enlighten the faithful-- and he expertly does so -- but also to attack the debasers:  the Red Cross Knight against the mealymouths.

The performance is admirable for students of rhetoric:  From what, to the average and casual reader, was a linguistically trivial matter, by patient prying   the polemicist opens up  a gaping wound.

For a more modest and secular parallel, try this, in which a tiny scrap of corporate mumbo-jumbo  written on a Dixie cup, and which I would not even have read  had I not been cooling my heels in a dentist’s waiting-room, upon semantical analysis,  leads to an indictment of rotting capitalism, culminating in a fulminating call to arms.

For further guidance from Dr. Massey concerning liturgical translation, click here:

Debts vs. Trespasses

Debts versus Trespasses

Each morning in public school, from primary through junior high, we began the day with the Lord’s Prayer.   Jew and Gentile, churched and unchurched, we all -- we each -- recited it with folded hands.

Our Father, who art in Heaven,

hallowed be thy name.

Thy kingdom come, thy will be done,  on Earth as it is in Heaven.

Give us, this day, our daily bread; 

and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.

And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

(It went on for a couple of lines more, which add nothing and are out of keeping with the terse efficiency of the rest of the prayer.   I regularly omit them when praying alone;  and was delighted to learn subsequently  that they are apparently not original, but a later addition.)

This healthy exercise was later abolished by the PC Police, as being damaging to non-Christians (though the content of the prayer, as distinguished from its provenience, is not specifically Christian).  

Well, was it?  I am in a position to testify to one case at any rate, since I came from a family of lapsed Unitarians and did not attend church.

It was not damaging in the least.  The recitation was a quiet, thoughtful time;  it was an experience in community with one’s classmates,  like reciting the Pledge of Allegiance (has that been abolished too, as discriminating against illegal immigrants and  people clinging to dual citizenship?)  On most days, in those safe and pleasant but intellectually mediocre pre-Sputnik public schoolrooms, it was our sole contact with anything loftier than the ABC’s, or with any style of language antedating “Hound Dog” (1956).

*

For a mini-movie

of madness and salvation,

click here:

The Penitent and the Impenitent Thief

*

The first hint that there might be any rift within the lute, came at a family summer camp when I was around nine.   We all stood outdoors in a large circle, and the head of the camp, a proper white-haired woman, lead us in the prayer.  Before we began, she stipulated:  “Let’s say it with tresspasses, and not …. the other.”   I had no idea what she meant by this mysterious unspoken “other”, and would not for some years more, but her faint frown and pursed lips are with me yet.

Eventually I heard the version “forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors”.  It sounded strange (and now has an unwelcome resonance, in this subprime age of mass welshing, both at the individual and the national level).   I looked at the Latin, and sure enough:  debita nostra.   But then the Latin is simply one translation of the Gospel Greek.  And that in turn is a translation of whatever it was that Jesus said:  and Jesus spoke Aramaic.

*

For illumination, I turned to my learnèd friend and spiritual advisor, Dr. Massey.

The Greek opheilemata (and verb) means more literally "debts." But it can also mean "trespasses." There is a perfectly good word for sin -- hamartia -- which, along with the Hebew root OUA, etymologically meant "to miss the mark with an arrow".

Matthew has forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. But Luke has forgive us our sins as we forgive our debtors.

This shows us that Matthew is the original text and even Luke didn't understand it.

Jesus uses the example of forgiving debts as an example of how we should forgive one another (Matt 18).

But why does the prayer use debt instead of sin?

I'm not sure that any authoritative answer exists.

I'm tempted to say that this may all go back to an infelicitous translation into Greek from an original Aramaic statement. Perhaps the same is true of the equally puzzling "Lead us not into Temptation."

*     *     *

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For our book-length semantic investigation,

in Arabic and the European languages,

click here

For further observations from Dr. Massey, concerning Biblical translation, click here.