Comments on: Find me a Qur'n!

Question: Find me a Qur'ān!

Aloysius Bear — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 19:55:59 -0800

Which translation of the Qur'ān should I read?

I have a copy of the translation by Muhammad Muhsin Khan and Muhammad Taqi-ud-Din Al-Hilali. The footnotes are sprawling and unhelpful, and the language in general is awful — stilted, awkward and cluttered with parenthetical attempts at clarification.

Can you recommend a more readable translation? I'm more concerned about the quality of the language than its modernity. If it were the Bible I was reading, I'd be happy with the Authorised ('King James') Version.

I'm reading it out of interest, not because of any desire to become a believer (nor am I a linguist or a theologian, if that matters). Cost is not an issue, because I can borrow from my university's divinity faculty library.

By: ClaudiaCenter

ClaudiaCenter — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 20:52:35 -0800

Tomorrow's NYT has an article on a new translation of the Koran due out in April. There's a discussion of several translations.

By: Burhanistan

Burhanistan — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 21:05:24 -0800

The one by Yusuf Ali is acceptable and you can usually find a copy with the Arabic side by side with the English with ample footnotes. Also, the A.J. Arberry translation is workmanlike (ie. not given to much poetic license) and actually recommended by a few sufi sheikhs I know. The Thomas Clearly version is largely kind of flat.

Beware the parenthetical attempts at clarification as you have noted. In many translations, they are the translators own biases burning through.

I say the above as someone with a beginner level grasp of arabic and have noticed errors in all translations that I've seen compared to the Arabic. There really are nuances in there that don't fare well in translation, unfortunately.

By: Burhanistan

Burhanistan — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 21:12:16 -0800

Also, not to get too Sufi on you, but here is an extract of a kind of meditation on some of the essential parts of the Quran (pdf).

By: mediareport

mediareport — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 21:26:52 -0800

Helf me find a Bible and a Koran.
Good translations of the world's religious texts?, especially this comment.

By: awenner

awenner — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 21:47:15 -0800

When I work with the Qur'an I use a combination of the Pickthall and Arberry translations. Arberry is truer to the poetics of the language, but Pickthall is easier to read, and his translation fits more with what Western readers expect a holy book to read like.

The reason for the parentheticals is that, as you might know already, Arabic is a language based on a series of roots, and any word can have a number of subtexts given the related meanings of other words derived from the same root. As a result, Islamic scholars secular and otherwise, when approaching the Qur'an, in determining the meaning of a particular phrase, resort to many different explanations. I've found that religiously-oriented translations tend to have more of these, and refer to traditional works of scholarship (tafseers), while secular scholars try to minimize extratextual comments in order to produce a more elegant appearance. There are merits to both of these approaches, and it really depends on the purposes of the reader.

Where there is consensus, it's that the Qur'an really is an untranslatable book. Any rendering in another language will necessarily be removed from the poetry and power of the original.

By: pullayup

pullayup — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:39:16 -0800

I like Thomas Cleary's for its readability, but as everone else notes it's a mistake to think of any translation as authoritative.

By: zamboni

zamboni — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 06:01:30 -0800

I found this blog post helpful.

By: CRM114

CRM114 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 10:27:33 -0800

I am very fond of Ahmed Ali's translation, ISBN: 0-691-07499-2.

By: languagehat

languagehat — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 13:12:48 -0800

I like Muhammad Asad. Great notes, and the translation is very readable.