Ongoing translating/typesetting of a book once-burned from the swinging 160s!
Are you a Bible or theology nerd? Go ahead and fork this!
Do you just need some examples of dual-language typesetting in TeX? Stay tuned.
Do you love studying Afro-Asiastic archaisms? You should take a look at this.
Was hoping to find some juicy Gnostic bits but, don't get your hopes up, the thing actually 'bytes... The big J uses some swear words, big deal! I guess that's why it was once collected and burned?
But it definitely feels like the oldest writing I've ever spent a long time with.
Curious what AI makes of it: the register is very hard to match in up-to-date English.
The original Syriac comes through really well, even if Tatian's version seems lost to time.
I'm tempted to divide the work into 5 parts, the way Joyce divided Finnegans Wake attempting to square the Viconian circle.
I think that's what gave me the patience to keep typing this thing out. (OCR wouldn't have done, as there's plenty of weird errata.) The timeless feeling of it. Kind of like dipping in to the Zohar.
Like I said, it just feels so old; getting a glimpse of the mindset of people back then through the language is truly interesting.
I do, however, wish Sei Shonagon had written it.
That is to say, for as ecstatic as its language is, sometimes it feels a bit overly-linearistic. A somewhat whimsical writer like Ms. Sei would have created something above and beyond the canonical four.
Sei Shonagon also would have written a more-easily-translated, equally-entrancing, perhaps a bit more picaresque, gospel harmony.
So if I in the future derive any works from this document, it will be in that more playful direction of thought.
As for what's contained here in manu.txt, think about the history behind it: written in the 160s from allegedly purely Aramaic sources, redacted according to later censors, but still retains differences and the flavor of the original language from 2000 years ago. Even in the multi-layered censored state it's in, the original sources, including long-lost gospel sources like Q, still shine through.
And so I hope Biblical scholars and archaeologists will take this document seriously. But also, possibly, poets? There have been times transcribing this document that I really felt like I was there in Galilee, or at least remembering it from some journey.
And yet there were other times working with this text when I could feel the weight of censorship from the difficult millenium-or-so (160-1060) it took to assume the form it's in here.
There is a certain perfection to this text. It's very clear from the pauses that this version of the gospels was primarily seen as a read-aloud book for church services, otherwise knows as a lectionary.
Being used as a lectionary for 1000 years, even if that subjected it to immense theological pressure, was good for it. And I'd memorize it, for sure. I'm sure my oration in any of the languages I'm using would improve.
I'm pretty sure it was meant to be read according to a yearly cycle, probably the same yearly cycle used to read the Carshun.
I didn't mark the verses; I explored the sonic poeticism of the pauses, such as:
والحمد من الله الواحد لا تلتمسون
Which translates:
And praise (is) from G-d, the One -- unsought (by y'all).
Or how about:
اليس من صنع الخارج هو صنع الداخل
Which translates:
Did not the one who made the Outer make the Interior?
Or this one, the last line I've translated as of today (August 1st, 2023):
السلام لك ايتها المملوة من النعمة سيدنا معك ايتها المباركة في النساء
Which I've translated as well as I can to be:
Peace be upon You, one so full of Grace; be with You, our Lady -- so blessed be among women.
...which is literally the only way I could find to translate 100% of the words and nuances.
Coupled with the hypnotic rhythms of the pauses, it's my favorite way to dip in to the Gospel. We must assume that those nuances go back to the original Aramaic sources for the New Testament that are now lost.
But translating language that's almost crafted so as to preserve a sense of its own capacity for esotericism, just like code-speak, can make the translator feel drunk on language.
I think this feeling of language-drunkenness, much like runner's high, is a unique feeling that accompanies any form of serious study of any Afro-Asiastic literary format, be it the priestly book of Pyramid Texts from the ancient Egyptian pyramid inscriptions -- the first mass-produced book in human history -- or the Torah.
The Kaballah incidentally refers it all to the holy fire of the hearth, to Hestia herself, and to the feeling of language-drunkenness as the sparks coming off of that fire.
But don't try teaching yourself one of the most difficult non-programming languages in the world just so you can read it and memorize it just yet.
There's no need to drop everything you're doing and just study this magical arrangement of 29 letters on a page.
The printed(ish) copy I worked from is not very good. I'll be making at least two or three different error checks as I typeset this book. At least wait until this repo is archived, someday, and my dual-language text+translation has been typeset and fully corrected. And then I'll know which of the words I've transcribed at this point are errors, and which are usages and archaisms that I'd literally never seen before I started studying this document.