Gleanings from an Ocean: Shoghi Effendi Renders the Word into English

*A retelling based on **The Priceless Pearl** by Rúḥíyyih Khánum, her biography of Shoghi Effendi, which describes the Guardian's work of translating the Writings into English. Phrases in quotation marks are preserved in that book or are titles of the works named.*

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The Word that Bahá'u'lláh revealed is an ocean. He filled, over forty years, volume upon volume — tablets, books, prayers, meditations, letters to kings and to humble believers — and the greater part of it lay, at His passing, in the Persian and Arabic in which it had been revealed. For the Persian believers, that ocean was open.

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But by the early decades of the twentieth century the Faith had crossed the seas; there were communities in America and Britain and across Europe, growing in number and in devotion, who could not read a single word of Bahá'u'lláh in the language He had used. They loved a Revelation most of which they could not yet directly read. The task of opening that ocean to them fell to one man: Shoghi Effendi, the Guardian of the Cause.

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## The need and the man

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When 'Abdu'l-Bahá passed in 1921, His Will appointed His grandson, Shoghi Effendi, as Guardian of the Faith. Among the many burdens that descended on the young Guardian's shoulders was this one: the Western believers needed the Word in English, and needed it rendered with an authority and a beauty worthy of its source. There existed earlier translations, made by devoted hands, but they were uneven, and some were unreliable. What was wanted was an English version that a seeker could trust completely and that would carry, into a new language, something of the majesty of the original.

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Shoghi Effendi was uniquely fitted for the work. Rúḥíyyih Khánum, who knew him as no one else did, records in *The Priceless Pearl* the rare combination he brought to it. He had grown up in 'Abdu'l-Bahá's household, steeped in the Writings in their original tongues. He had then gone to study at Oxford, where he immersed himself in English with the deliberate aim of mastering it as an instrument for the service of the Cause.

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He loved the English of the King James Bible — its gravity, its cadence, its capacity to make ordinary words ring like scripture — and he chose that register, that stately and reverent English, as the vessel into which he would pour the revealed Word.

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## The discipline of the work

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The labour itself was slow, exacting, and solitary. Rúḥíyyih Khánum describes how the Guardian worked at his translations in the quiet of his Haifa office, often in the still hours when the day's avalanche of correspondence had been answered. He did not rush. He weighed words.

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He would seek, for a single passage, the English that was at once faithful to the meaning of the Persian or Arabic and worthy of its dignity — testing it against the original and against the literary English he so admired, unwilling to let an inferior rendering stand. A single ill-chosen word, he knew, might mislead a reader or dull the force of a verse for a hundred years.

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This was not the work of a man producing a rough digest so that people could get the gist. It was an act of reverence. The Guardian held that the believers and the seekers of the West deserved to encounter not a paraphrase of Bahá'u'lláh but, as nearly as translation allows, Bahá'u'lláh Himself — His own voice, His own sweep and authority, sounding now in their own tongue. So he gave the work the patience it demanded, polishing his renderings until they satisfied a standard that was, by every account, severe.

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## Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá'u'lláh

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The greatest fruit of this labour, for the direct knowledge of the Word, was the volume he published in 1935 under a title that itself describes the method: *Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá'u'lláh*. He did not, and could not, translate the whole ocean.

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Instead he *gleaned* — he went through the vast body of Bahá'u'lláh's revealed works and gathered out passages, more than a hundred and sixty of them, on the great themes of the Revelation: the nature of God and His Manifestations, the purpose of human life, the immortality of the soul, the renewal of the world, the unity of mankind, the coming of a divine civilization.

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He arranged them so that a reader opening the book would find, gathered into a single accessible volume, the essential teaching of Bahá'u'lláh in Bahá'u'lláh's own words.

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The effect on the Western Bahá'í world is difficult to overstate. Before *Gleanings*, the believer in Chicago or London who wished to study the Word of Bahá'u'lláh had only fragments and a few flawed renderings. After it, that believer could hold in one hand a trustworthy, beautiful English text and read, directly, what the Founder of the Faith had revealed about God and the soul and the destiny of humankind. The ocean had been opened. A whole community could now drink from it in its own language.

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## Why the labour mattered

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It is tempting to think of translation as a secondary, even a mechanical, task — the mere carrying of a meaning from one language to another. The Guardian's work shows it to be nothing of the kind. By rendering the Word into a faithful and worthy English, Shoghi Effendi did not simply make information available; he made *transformation* available.

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For it is the revealed Word, encountered directly, that changes hearts — and a community cut off from that Word by a barrier of language is cut off from the very thing that gives it life. In opening the Writings, the Guardian opened the channel through which the renewing power of the Revelation could reach the West.

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There is a fitting humility in the title he chose. He did not call his book *The Teachings of Bahá'u'lláh* or set his own name beside it as author. He called it *Gleanings* — the gathering of what others might pass by, handfuls drawn from a field that belonged entirely to Another. The Guardian's whole posture toward the Word was that of a servant gathering, with the utmost care, what his Lord had sown, and laying it before the friends.

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This is among the quietest of the stories the Feast of Words might tell, for its scene is only a man at a desk, weighing English words in the silence of an office on Mount Carmel. But the power of the revealed Word depends, in every age, on faithful hands to carry it — to copy it, to guard it, to render it into the tongues of those who hunger for it.

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Shoghi Effendi gave that labour the devotion of a lifetime, and through it the Word of Bahá'u'lláh found a new home, and a new voice, in the English-speaking world.

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*This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see **The Priceless Pearl** by Rúḥíyyih Khánum.*

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