Translating the Dawn-Breakers: Shoghi Effendi's Long Nights

In *The Priceless Pearl* Rúḥíyyih Khánum devotes a careful chapter to the labour by which Shoghi Effendi gave the English-speaking Bahá’í world its principal book of early history: the volume now known as *The Dawn-Breakers.*

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The chronicle had been composed in Persian, in the 1880s, by Nabíl-i-Aʿẓam, a believer who had himself been a youth among the early Bábís and who had been encouraged by Bahá’u’lláh to record what he had seen and what he had heard from the companions of the Báb. The manuscript that emerged was vast, detailed, and written in the Persian historical idiom of the period — full of Quranic allusions, of theological digressions, of long passages in classical metre.

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The Guardian determined, in the late 1920s, that it must be made accessible to the West. He took the work upon himself. Rúḥíyyih Khánum describes the working method. He sat at his desk in the Master’s house in Haifa late into the night, with the Persian text in front of him, the English-Persian dictionaries he had compiled at Oxford within reach, and his own deep knowledge of both literatures held, page by page, in the same mind.

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He rendered each passage into the English register he had quietly chosen for the Sacred Writings — a formal, slightly archaic, faintly Biblical English — and he wrote, as well, the long footnotes that allowed a Western reader to follow the Persian background.

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The work occupied him, in stretches, across several years. Other Tablets, other letters, other administrative tasks were attended to during the day. The translation was the labour of the hours when Haifa was quiet. He shortened the original; selected what would carry; preserved the central narrative line from the Báb’s declaration in Shíráz to the martyrdoms of the late 1840s. The result, published in 1932, was a book of nearly seven hundred pages — a chronicle, footnoted and indexed, that remains the principal source for the early heroic age of the Faith.

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Rúḥíyyih Khánum’s chapter is also, between its lines, a portrait of the Guardian’s working ascetism. He did not travel; he did not entertain; he wrote and translated. The light burned in his small room until the early hours. The Faith for which he laboured received, in those years, the books on which its Western generations would be raised.

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*Paraphrased from The Priceless Pearl (Rúḥíyyih Khánum, Bahá'í Publishing Trust, 1969); see original for full text.*

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