An English for the Hidden Words: Shoghi Effendi's Discipline

In *The Priceless Pearl* Rúḥíyyih Khánum offers a portrait of the Guardian as translator. The portrait is not, strictly, the subject of any one chapter; it runs across the volume, gathered from her observation of his daily working life in Haifa.

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Among his earliest and most careful translations was *The Hidden Words.* Bahá’u’lláh had revealed the small book in the 1850s in the wilderness above Baghdád — a series of brief aphorisms in Arabic and Persian, each addressed *O Son of Spirit, O Children of Men, O My Friends* — that gathered, in the simplest language, the moral teachings of the Cause.

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The Guardian set himself, in the late 1920s, to render the work into an English that would carry its weight for the Western Bahá’í communities. Rúḥíyyih Khánum describes the working method. He kept the Persian and the Arabic in front of him on the desk. He kept, beside them, the English Bible — the King James version, whose stately rhythm and faintly archaic vocabulary he had been studying since Oxford. He worked one Hidden Word at a time. He revised. He set aside. He came back.

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The result was the English text in which generations of Bahá’ís have memorised the Words: *O Son of Spirit, my first counsel is this: Possess a pure, kindly and radiant heart.* The voice is biblical without being affected; it is reverent without being solemn; it carries, in its unhurried cadences, the dignity of the Persian and the Arabic without the alien feel of literal translation.

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Rúḥíyyih Khánum recounts that he laboured similarly over every text he translated for the Bahá’í world — the *Iqán,* portions of the *Aqdas* that appeared in compilations during his lifetime, the long extracts from Bahá’u’lláh's writings he gathered into *Gleanings,* the *Prayers and Meditations.* In each case the same instruments lay on the desk: the original, the Bible, the dictionaries, the patient revising hand.

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He never, she notes, allowed himself the easy paraphrase that ordinary publishing would have permitted. He held himself to the standard of one whose translations would be read, in public worship, for a thousand years. The discipline shaped the books; the books shaped the community.

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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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