Marzieh Gail: A Lifetime of Bahá'í Translation

World Order magazine, the literary and cultural quarterly published by the American Bahá'í community since 1935, has across its long publication history given substantial attention to the lives of the Bahá'í figures whose work has shaped the development of the Faith in the West. Among the appreciations carried in its pages was a substantial profile of Marzieh Gail — the American Bahá'í translator whose six-decade career rendered into English a substantial portion of the Persian and Arabic Bahá'í Writings.

Marzieh Gail was born in 1908 in Los Angeles to an early American Bahá'í family. Her father, Ali-Kuli Khan, had been a Persian diplomat and one of the early translators of Bahá'í texts into English. Her mother, Florence Breed, had been an early American believer who had travelled to Persia with her husband. Marzieh grew up bilingual in English and Persian, with substantial exposure also to French and to the vocabulary of the Bahá'í Writings.

Her translation career began in her twenties and continued into her late eighties. The body of her work is large. She translated, among other major works, the Memorials of the Faithful of 'Abdu'l-Bahá, several volumes of the Selections from the Writings of 'Abdu'l-Bahá, and a substantial number of the formative-period communications of Shoghi Effendi.

The World Order profile devoted attention to the specific challenges of Bahá'í translation. The Persian and Arabic of the Writings, the article observed, are elevated literary languages. The original texts are crafted with the lapidary attention of the most careful classical literature. To render such texts into English requires not only linguistic competence but a corresponding literary sensibility — and a willingness to sustain the labour of revision through the long successive drafts that the texts deserve.

Marzieh Gail's particular gift, the article observed, was the marriage of accurate scholarship and supple English prose. She produced English texts that were faithful to the Persian originals without being stilted. She worked, typically, through six or seven drafts of any given passage. She consulted with the senior Persian scholars at the Bahá'í World Centre on disputed points. She revised her own earlier translations across the decades, producing in some cases substantially different versions as her own English ear matured.

The article quoted her own observation on the nature of the work. Each generation must hear the Writings in its own English; the translator's task is never finally done. The remark was characteristic. Translation, in her view, was not a one-time act of rendering. It was a continuing labour of stewardship, requiring each generation to take up the work afresh in the language of its own period.

The profile closed with a brief account of her last major translation project — the rendering into English of certain late Persian Tablets of 'Abdu'l-Bahá that had not previously been published in the West. The translation was completed shortly before her death in 1993. The published volume appeared posthumously and was reviewed by the World Order in the issue immediately following.

The World Order's attention to translators like Marzieh Gail belongs to the magazine's broader project of documenting the building of the American Bahá'í community through the contributions of its individual members. Her profile is one of many.

Source: World Order magazine, profile of Marzieh Gail (mid-1980s issue). Paraphrase only; see original for full text.

Editors, W. O.. (1985). *World Order*. National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá'ís of the United States.