My reading of The Holy Qur'an for fasting month is going well. Except that it's not really a reading. Any translation is doomed to failure, a central feature of Muslim thought, and much as there's a lot to admire in Abdullah Yusuf Ali's version (wonderful notes, by the way), I know it's no more than a faint echo of the original.
I've been managing two juz a day (a juz being a thirtieth of the whole) so I should complete the whole by the middle of the month. I'm thinking of then following up with a read through of the Arberry translation - but I'm more likely to get stuck into the original Arabic and focus on a few of the later sura. My present reading has started from the front, as it were, which lends the enterprise a certain flavour. There's a strong argument, partly related to chronology, of starting from the final sura and working backwards - which is how you read the book when learning the Arabic.
In fact, there's an argument for starting anywhere in that, whilst there is a sense of development, a sort of architecture, it's fundamentally a static experience, as if catching the facets of a brilliant jewel that gloriously repeats itself.
But it's also a singularly uncomfortable jewel. A book that reads the reader.
No comments:
Post a Comment