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Simran Uppal reflects on the contradictions of 400 years of the KJV

The King James Version was first published this week, in 1611. It’s possibly the most famous translation of any text into any language, one of those Shakespeare-like members of the canon that have shaped so many different registers of global English so much that occasionally you won’t even notice it.

Translation is sometimes understood as being a fight between ‘literal’ meaning and ‘spirit’, and when the text in question is the central scripture of what has become the world’s biggest religion, there’s special pressure on that division. Religion is something you feel, at its heart is spiritual, religious, devotional experience. How do a bunch of letters on paper thin enough to smoke with connect you to that?

The King James Version is deeply associated with Protestantism, of course, which as a denomination – here’s another dichotomy – was once summed up in a little two part motto, ‘fi de et literis’, ‘by faith and by scripture’. You could argue that you can’t have spirit without letter or faith without scripture or vice versa in each of those. The holy book of the Sikhs, for example, is made up entirely of hymns sung in sincere, totally dedicated adoration of the divine highest ideal. Faith and language and literature and soul are totally inextricable.

Tucked away in the middle of the Old Testament is possibly the most beautiful part of the KJV, the Song of Solomon. Any distinction between divine love and human romantic, erotic love is tossed aside in this glorious, gloriously lyrical poem. But this isn’t uncommon – Dante’s Vita Nova takes his love for Beatrice and transforms it into something divine, Edward Fitzgerald’s famous translation of the Rubaiyat is either an ode to wine and love or an intensely emotional hymn to God; I’ve always felt that it is both.

Another dichotomy we adore is the one between East and West, and similar to that the one between the Abrahamic and non-Abhramic religions. But Gandhi, who was to become profoundly religious in his Hinduism, found in the Gospels a message of compassion that led him to beautiful universal understandings, of ahimsa (non-violence and loving-kindness) and of yajna (service to the world). The figure of Christ was an inspiration for his strict Vedic lifestyle.

A text like the King James Version has a network of links and contradictions like an infinite paradoxical spider’s web; even if only for that, 400 or so years since its publication it’s no less exciting at all.

 

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