 Good morning everybody. I would like to thank first of all the ABS for giving me the honor of speaking to you. When I was first asked to speak and they asked what I wanted to talk about, I said I wanted to give a talk about science and religion. And they said thank you, but Dr. Arbaub will be covering that subject. So could you talk about your experiences as a translator of the Baha'i writings? So I would like to open by begging your forgiveness in advance if I shoehorn a little bit of science talk anyway in towards the beginning and present as well some of my own meandering thoughts about words both of the lower case and upper case variety. But it's all connected to the topic of translation and I hope to make this case by the end. I believe the case was made a little bit more difficult by the opening prayer with emphasizing the complete impotence of words in the absence of action. But then I felt like my case was made a little bit easier by the beautiful song that followed. Thank you to the singer that caused our hearts to soar. What a marvelous and mystical thing a word is. I think Carl Sagan evoked their mystery the best and I paraphrase translated into dark squiggles on a page, words take on an astonishing permanence, one glance and you're inside the mind of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands of years across the millennia and author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people that never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs, words break the shackles of time, they are proof that humans are capable of working magic. Words are proof as well that spirit and matter are intimately related. They are the matrix of human social existence, the fashioners of our social reality. To borrow a metaphor from Bahá'u'lláh we are like fish in the sea and words are the waters in which we swim all the while unaware of that which sustains us. Most of the time without giving a thought about their holy, curious, quasi-magical nature and our utter dependence upon them for our collective life. Some words of course matter more than others. Some words divide others unite. Most words are spoken in casual conversation and pass away as soon as they are said like the foam on the surface of the sea. Some put to music cause our hearts to soar as it did this morning. Some are lovingly, painstakingly crafted by their authors but read only by a few as many of us in this room know all too well in the case of academic papers and books. Some are parceled out in 140 character allotments and broadcasts to the world in a quest for social capital or perhaps simply to assert one's existence. A very few were spoken long ago and partially remembered but take on an influence far in excess of expectation. Who would have guessed that the one or two thousand recollected words of an obscure Jewish itinerant preacher would go on to shape the lives of countless millions for 2,000 years? In the end, we hope like the words of Jesus, the best words will be remembered and translated into enduring action. How indeed could we have enduring action without words to guide and shape it? What is the connection between words and reality? Do they in the words of Socrates carve nature at its joints? Can mere words be so assembled as to construct a faithful map of reality? We don't know sitting in our armchairs and tossing them back and forth as we have no access to ultimate reality. We have access only to our experience of it. We can make the grandest claims about ultimate reality. God exists. God is dead. There is an overarching purpose in creation. The purpose of existence is what you make of it. The real test of these propositions is not what we can say or prove from the comfort of our armchair, or we can offer classical proofs about, say, the existence of God, as Abdu'bahá did many times, but to Laura Clifford Barney over lunch, he said, these theoretical arguments are for weak souls. The real proof is what kind of world results when we construct our social reality around the one proposition or the other, by their fruits, ye shall know them. The litmus test of words then, whether fiction or nonfiction, is their effect in the world. The question of the relationship of words to reality becomes the practical matter of testing them by putting them into action. The proof lies not behind the words in the realm of the undiscoverable intention of their author, but in front of them in the minds and actions of the readers. Now, if the words of a particular language are the sea in which its speakers swim and the medium through which they communicate, then there are other seas and other waters, other languages. They may differ in some ways. One sea is more temperate than another. One is saltier than the other. But there's a deep structural similarity between one sea and another. It is this similarity that makes the work of the translator possible. It is also the basis for its fundamental limitation because language encodes our essential embodiedness. The metaphors we use in the language, all are drawn from our experience in the world. How could it be otherwise? The primordial origin of language is in conveying the very concrete things that were necessary for survival, the location of food or the existence of a threat. The deepest structures of language, subjects and objects, nouns, verbs and adjectives all carry the genealogical trace of their humble origins as they are part of the structure of language so they inescapably become a part of the structure of our thinking. So much so that we can hardly imagine otherwise, it takes a great act of will to transcend the confines of the language into which we were born. The reason I make this observation is that there is no law or principle that says that words are the best and most accurate way of representing and communicating reality. So I return to the question, do words carve nature at its joints or does the structure of reality transcend the lineaments of subject and object of noun, verb and adjective? There are to be sure many elements of human reality and experience that human languages are unable to express. And for this there are other kinds of languages, other media for the transmission of ideas, other seas, a symphony, a sculpture, a building facade, art music and architecture can convey realms of meaning which words are often at a loss to capture. They are rooted in a vocabulary and follow a grammar which is uniquely theirs. If there is a case to be made to single out one special language, one special medium of communication above others as being most suited to represent reality, surely one could argue it is the language of mathematics. The realization of this was a long time coming. It was first foreseen over 2500 years ago by Pythagoras who saw the geometry and ratio in the humming of strings. But it was not until the lifetimes of Galileo, of Kepler and Newton around the 17th century that it was fully appreciated that nature is written in the language of mathematics and that the secret inner workings of nature began to gradually be exposed. Why is mathematics so effective? It has a quantitative precision that natural human language lacks, yes? Perhaps as well its different vocabulary and grammar helps us to escape our own embodiedness. The equations of Schrodinger and of Einstein capture the outlines of a reality, of quantized matter, of curving space times, of events without identifiable cause or effect, of higher dimensions and parallel universes which our language bound brains cannot reach. But even do even these symbols and equations of such concision and power carve nature at its joints. We need only briefly refer to the transition between Newton's and Einstein's theories of gravity to see how a theory that is almost perfectly right can be almost perfectly wrong in describing the ultimate components of reality. The thing in itself, what the Platonists call the realm of ideas, what the Baha'i writings refer to as the realm of the eternal archetypes, it seems is forever unknown to us. All we can hope to do is find better and better approximations. Never knowing whether the next approximation will throw the metaphysical foundations of the previous approximation into complete disarray. And the whole theoretical edifice of science is now at a crisis point, a dangling contraption, arbitrary and asymmetrical with the essential elements necessary to restore the harmony either unobservable or worse non-existent. For the moment the quest to find the grand theory of matter and energy has never seen more distant. But these are topics for another time. The other speech I was going to write. There is another category of communication, another language for the transmission of ideas. This category is easily overlooked by the modern secular mindset because to the casual observer it looks just like natural language. Only the eye which sees and the ear which hears can perceive its utterly unique character. Here we return paradoxically to the limited realm of human language as the vehicle for the expression of the highest truths. Not the truths of the natural world to which the language of mathematics is so well-fitted. But for the truths still higher on the chain of being, truths of the human spirit and of its relationship to others and to the divine. To distinguish it from other words and to assign it a category apart, we designate it in writing in the uppercase. We refer to it as divine revelation. And the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God says the Gospel of John. And in Bahá'u'lláh's tablet of wisdom, the word of God exalted be as glory as higher and far superior to that which the senses can perceive for it is sanctified from every property or substance. This invisible word becomes flesh and dwells among us for a few years, leaving behind a faint reflection, a mere emblem of its reality in the form of visible words but words of unusual and unexpected creative power. The words, these words come rapidly as though pouring down from a great height and overflowing the confined boundaries of conventional language. Like the sage in Plato's Republic who after breaking his chains and seeing the world as it really is, returns to the subterranean cave where his fellows remain chained and strives to communicate to them in the language of the flickering shadows on the wall, what he saw in the real world. The Bob's ecstatic highly unconventional style is a testimony to this journey of the sage. To be sure he could write in pristine and correct Arabic and Persian when he chose but more often he shunned the traditional forms and forged a new linguistic space in which infinite meanings are spun out, not from the sentences or even the words but from the very letters comprising them. The exploded commentaries of the Bob as one scholar has called them stretch the boundaries of language as a medium for communication. As though making the point in the most challenging terms possible that language and reality are only imperfectly correlated, that the universe is overflowing with meaning and that language can capture only a few droplets thereof. But despite their limitations in the end we are a certain kind of creature suited to the waters in which we swim. We are fish and not birds. We will have to make do with words and their essential aquatic nature. And should a bird of the spirit wish to tell us of the atmosphere in which it soars, it must translate its melodies into the medium in which we swim. How many infinite truths lie within a drop, Bahá'u'lláh says, of which not even the barest reference can be made. It is possible to imagine the contact point between the human and the divine being expressed through means other than words. We have already mentioned art, architecture and music. Are there other alternatives? A suggestive hint can be found in a prophecy of Bahá'u'lláh about the next revelation. He does not give many clues in his writings about who or when as far as we know, but he does say something significant about the what, that words will not be its proof. Are this manifestation, Bahá'u'lláh writes, verses alone had been the proof unto all. Since in all the previous scriptures we had sent down this decree, hereafter the matter rests in the hand of God. It is for him to determine what to assign as proof in the succeeding manifestations. For in this manifestation, God had willed that most of the believers and the sincere ones should give utterance to verses, whence in the next dispensation we shall ordain a different matter as proof, lest all who speak in this fashion should show pride towards God. But to take us back to the present, our community, our community is a community of action. We are transforming neighborhoods, we are uniting hearts, we are building the framework of a new kind of social existence. We are also the caretakers, the transmitters, the heirs of an excellent and priceless heritage to future generations. This heritage is a collection of words of unusual origin and significance. Of the Bob's writings, some 2,000 works have been preserved comprising around 5 million words. Of Bahá'u'lláh's writings, perhaps 20,000 works, mainly very short letters or tablets comprising 6 million words. This is apart from the works of Abdu'l-Bahá'u'lláh and Sharia Fendi, also a roughly similar word count. It is a large collection, by no means record-breaking. The English author Charles Hamilton, perhaps the most prolific author in history, wrote some 100 million words, but these 11 million words that we're talking about, the words of Bahá'u'lláh and the Bob, these words are infinitely precious to the community that is their keeper. They are pondered, memorized, treasured, raged at, wept over, talked to our children from their earliest years. Collectively, they delineate not just the precepts of a new faith community, but the outline of a world-embracing spiritual revolution destined to transform our notion of religion itself and to sweep all humanity into its orbit. In one common faith, a statement prepared at the direction of the House of Justice, we read, Bahá'u'lláh has not brought into existence a new religion to stand beside the present multiplicity of sectarian organizations. Rather, has he recast the whole conception of religion as the principal force impelling the development of consciousness. So, the skeptic asks, that's a big claim. What's so special about these words that impel the development of consciousness more than all others? What makes these 11 million odd words unique above all others? On the surface, it's the same set of words, the same vocabulary put together according to the same rules of grammar. They've just been remixed. Saying the difference comes down to the source while these are from God and those are man-made, is a chicken and egg problem for those who haven't already come to a conclusion about their origin. Something else has to distinguish it when set side by side with other words and with no prior knowledge. But Bahá'u'lláh assures us indeed that they are unique. He says, no breeze can compare with the breezes of divine revelation, whilst the word which is uttered by God shineth and flasheth as the sun emits the books of men. And the one, the word which the one true God uttereth in this day. Though that word be the most familiar and common place of terms is invested with supreme, with unique distinction. There are two potential criteria of uniqueness of the word, the capital W word, that I would like to suggest we can eliminate at the start. The first is that they don't have to be masterpieces in the literary sense of the word. I think here actually St. Augustine says it best as he, as a young man began his exploration of the Christian scriptures coming from a Neoplatonic background. He says, this is around the year 400 AD. He says, I applied my mind therefore to the holy scriptures to see what manner of books they were. There I saw a thing, not discovered by the wise, nor revealed to the little ones. Low is the entrance to it. But where it issues, it is lofty and veiled in mysteries. And I was not such as could enter it or bend my neck to its path. For when I first turned my mind to the scriptures, I did not think what I am saying now. They seemed to me unworthy of comparison with the majesty of the rhetoric of Cicero. My pride shunned their modest style and my eyes could not penetrate their inner secrets. It was the same scripture which grows up with the little children, but I disdained to be a little child and swollen with my pride, fancied myself and adult. I would also like to suggest, secondly, that the criteria of uniqueness of divine revelation is not that it's magical or supernatural. There's an interesting story that we've read in the Donbreakers of the Bob's first encounter with the clergy in the Vakil Mosque in Shiraz in 1844 when he was forced at the pulpit to disclaim his cause. And we read the actual words that he spoke in Arabic, and it's very curious what he says. He disclaims to be the possessor of a cause of supernatural origin, and further states that if any word streamed from his pen, it was due solely to his innate nature, mas e fetrat, phrase in Persian. The cleric satisfied at his supposed recantation and let him go. What they did not understand was that the Bob was inaugurating a new way of thinking about the nature of divine revelation far from their superstitious imaginations. Fifty years later, to Laura Clifford Barney, Abdu'l-Baha would clarify this new concept of revelation, answering a question about whence the manifestations get their knowledge, he replied, religion consists in the necessary relationships deriving from the realities of things. If the manifestation of God, the divine lawgiver, were not informed of the realities of things, if he did not understand the necessary relationships deriving from these realities, he would assuredly be incapable of establishing a religion consonant with the needs and conditions of the time. So if it's not that they're literary masterpieces in a classical sense, if it's not that they're magical or supernatural, what are some of the criteria by which we distinguish these capital W words from the lower case W words? I'd like to highlight four and then talk about their implications for the translation work. The first is their penetrative power. The great poet Andalib, a contemporary of Baha'u'llah, had the following to say about this. It is the divine word which is the token and sign of a prophet. The convincing proof to all men and all ages, the everlasting miracle. Do not misunderstand the matter. When the prophet of God, Muhammad, called his verses signs ayat and declared the Quran to be his witness and proof, he did not intend to imply, as some vainly suppose, that the eloquence of the words was a proof. No, the essential characteristic of the divine word is the penetrative power. Nofuz in Persian. It is not spoken in vain. It compels. It constrains. It creates. It rules. It works in men's hearts. It lives and dies not. Georgetown's and the Hand of the Cause heard that same penetrative power in the voice of Baha'u'llah. In those English translations which were then available to him, this is before the time of the Guardian's translations, he could nevertheless hear that note, and here's how he describes it, writing to Shoghi Effendi. He says there is a note, a music, a voice, in the writings of Baha'u'llah, even in translations which never was heard in English literature before, and which has such power that it seems to shake the air as one reads. If other proof were lacking, this mighty voice would be sufficient. In the letter to Nellie Roche, Georgetown's and writes, the vibrations of Baha'u'llah's writings are so intense, they shiver me with an exaltation and a power I can hardly stand. Like standing out in a great storm with the winds roaring and the waves raging and the trees shrieking and crashing and the whole scene uplifting one with its tremendous power and energy and beauty till one is transported and feels part of the titanic drama. I think men will have to develop a lot before they can react rhythmically to Baha'u'llah's writings. Perhaps we're not meant to. The infinite has come among us nearer than ever before, and we are stunned by its presence. A second aspect of the word is its transformative nature. It can transform us personally. Many words inspire, but how many words induce people to utterly change their lives? Baha'u'llah writes in the Katabi Ghan, is it not the object of every revelation to effect a transformation in the whole character of mankind? A transformation that shall manifest itself both outwardly and inwardly, that shall affect both its inner life and external conditions, for if the character of mankind be not changed, the futility of God's universal manifestation would be apparent. By their fruits, ye shall know them. A third aspect of revelation is its multivalence. It contains multiple meanings within itself, sometimes simultaneously. The prophet uniquely above scientists, philosophers, poets is able to address different audiences simultaneously as such their words can be endlessly interpreted. In the Katabi Ghan, he writes, the birds of heaven and doves of eternity speak a twofold language. One language, the outward language, is devoid of illusions, unconcealed and unenveiled. The other language is veiled and concealed. In such utterances, the literal meaning, as generally understood by the people, is not what hath been intended. He writes in another tablet, know assuredly that just as thou firmly believeest that the word of God exalted be his glory, endureth forever, thou must likewise believe with undoubting faith that its meaning can never be exhausted. But there are more meanings than just these two, the outward and the inward. The Bob writes regarding the meanings. He says, verily each letter of the Quran is invested with as many manifest meanings as the number of atoms of all things. And each one of these manifest meanings hath and hidden meaning. And each of these hidden meanings possesseth an inward meaning. And each inward meaning containeth an inner inward meaning and so on as God willeth. Bahá'u'lláh helpfully gives us a round number. Quoting Hadeeth, we speak one word and by it we intend one and 70 meanings. Each one of these meanings we can explain. Abdu'l-Bahá ups the ante. The words of God have innumerable significance and mysteries of meanings, each one a thousand and more. This is a job for the reader as well as the translator. So that's the fourth area of uniqueness in the word of God. We can't avoid and we don't want to avoid although we might not have time to talk about how their content is unique and distinguishes it above all other words. Not that we read the equations of nature from Bahá'u'lláh's tablets or parse them to find the next grand unified theory of physics. They come from afar and have elsewhere their setting. Their content rather concerns matters higher on the chain of being. Social relationships and the individual relationship with the divine befitting the current stage of our evolution. And this it has recreated all things. It has instilled new life into old ideas. Bahá'u'lláh writes through the movement of our pen of glory. We have at the bidding of the omnipotent ordainer breezed a new life into every human frame and instilled into every word a fresh potency. What are some of the fundamental ideas that have been redefined in Bahá'u'lláh's writings? We could doubtless produce a long list but we'll mention just a few. The idea of God, a radically unknowable God whose unity excludeth all attributes. A reality that shatters the crystalline sphere, the final crystalline sphere of subject and object. A God as much a transcendent creator of the universe as an intimate light shining within the heart both and neither at the same time. A God whom the Bob provocatively tells us if we address in worship as object of our worship in prayer the Bob says that we have joined partners with God and have never worshiped God. How do we think about God if he's so far beyond even being an object of thought becomes a reality about which nothing at all can be said? And here we start to see the other side of the sphere. We start to see the more eastern side of the phenomenon of religion. At first alien to the Judeo-Christian Islamic conception of the divine that we're used to hearing about. The concept of spirit seen as red as a dualistic thing. Spirit and matter being two separate kinds of substances. Abduba says in one place that spirit that to the vegetable the animal is the spiritual reality. Taking the idea out of the realm of Cartesian dualism into something very different. Something fundamentally redefined. Something in which spirit and matter are seen as relative to one's position on the circle of existence. The idea of revelation which we've already discussed as supernatural as top down versus bottom up. As something emerging from the interconnected realities of things versus something that is sent down as though from above. The concept of religion also redefined in Bahá'u'lláh's writings. Is the Bahá'í faith properly categorized as a religion? I venture to ask. For certain practical purposes, such as registering our institutions with the authorities, managing community finances, the answer must clearly be yes. But Shoghi Effendi generally avoided the word, preferring the phrase the cause, the faith, the Bahá'í world faith. And in the early years of his ministry, the movement. So in some ways, yes, in some ways, no. The Bahá'í faith is in some ways a meta-religion, the apotheosis of religion. As Bahá'u'lláh says, the changeless faith of God, eternal in the past, eternal in the future. A fundamentally different way of thinking about this social reality. What is the common element in these various redefinitions, any one of which would really require a whole talk to discuss appropriately? What they have in common is a melting and dissolving of dualistic categories hardened by centuries of theological hair splitting, permitting for the first time the union of the religious traditions of the East and the West. Every issue has multiple perspectives which derive from the perspective of the seeker. No single perspective, no single approach can be correct at all times for all people. The sheer diversity of the human race, both individually and culturally precludes it. The relativity of religious truth extends not just across time, but across space. All of these above thoughts, as you can imagine, pose special challenges for every student of the revelation. For the translators of the writings, these challenges can seem intractable. When are old words being used in new ways? And should this somehow be reflected in the translation? If there are a range of possible meanings in the original, are any being excluded in the translation? What about the aesthetic dimensions of the original? If rhyme or alliteration is being used, can some equivalent be found in English? What if two different central figures write in two different styles? Should the translation try to preserve the difference? Or will they sound like the same person in translation? This is a particular problem in translating the writings of the Bob. Above all, what does it mean to translate the revelation if it's true content so far surpasses the mechanics of vocabulary and grammar? What about translating their penetrative power, their transformative influence, their multivalent meanings? To what extent is it the job of the translator to worry about these questions? An early Baha'i translator of the book Baha'i Scriptures in 1923 apologized in the introduction for presenting a king in rags. Perhaps that's just it. We have to have faith that though the brilliant image passed through a glass darkly, the reader will still recognize the sun as though face to face. There are a couple of directions one could go, approaches in translation in light of this. The first option would be don't overthink it. Stick to the text, put your head down, get out your dictionary and get out of the way of the text. Translate it as it was written word for word. A safe, literal translation is the most likely path we would take. Were it not for Baha'u'llah's own advice? In one of his well-known works, the Hurufate Al-Leen, the Exalted Letters, perhaps best described as an elegy on mortality. It's a very long tablet, it's found in the opening section of Adiyah Hazarate Mahbub, the popular prayer book of Baha'u'llah's writings. Baha'u'llah says the following in the opening pages, in the opening pages, sort of heading postscript of this work because it was originally revealed in Arabic and some of the believers asked him to translate it into Persian and Baha'u'llah ceded to the request and what we have in this tablet of the Exalted Letters is alternating paragraphs of Arabic and Persian where the Persian is Baha'u'llah's own translation of his writing from Arabic. And Baha'u'llah explains himself in the opening with a little sort of superscript at the beginning of this tablet. And this is what he says, this work was originally written in commemoration of the Exalted Letters but hath in these days been dedicated to a certain individual. Some of them requested an explanation and exegesis to be provided in the Persian tongue which was thus written and manifested in gem-like utterances. Yet, since a word-for-word translation after the pattern of the original would have been devoid of grace what so ever flowed from the pen was recorded. Though the possessors of insight grasped from every letter thereof a myriad mystical truths by way of spiritual subtleties and heavenly meanings, yet since some who dwell in the realm of human frailties may gaze thereon with the eye of objection, this explanation was provided that it may be placed above these pages. So, if a literal translation is not what Bahá'u'lláh himself recommends, what is to be done? Fortunately, we have option B, we have a guardian of the Bahá'í faith. Very, very fortunately for us, we have Shoghi Effendi who was appointed by Abdu'l-Baha not only as the center of the cause but as the authorized interpreter of his writings. And since all translation is word-for-word and active interpretation, that was very convenient for us. Shoghi Effendi suggests in the very front of the Qatabi y'Gon, and to my knowledge, he doesn't suggest this anywhere else, that his translations be used as a model for others. So humble, he only sort of slips it in here. He says the hope is that it may assist others in their efforts to approach what must be always regarded as the unattainable goal of the fitting rendering of Bahá'u'lláh's matchless utterance. So we have the guardians' translations to guide us. And there are a couple of aspects, two enormous aspects of the guardians' translations, each of which more important than the other. First of all, the style. Some people have problems with the guardian style, but the style was chosen very wisely. He chose a slightly archaic form of English. What does this do? This does a couple of things. First of all, it maintains an equivalent distance in register between spoken English as there is in the original texts. The distance, the original language, the original words are revealed at a higher register in a loftier language than everyday spoken Persian. So it's appropriate to find in English a register that is also loftier than that of everyday spoken English to find a dynamic equivalence of the tone and style of the work in the original. Secondly, what it does is it helps create for the reader a sense of sacred space. Sense that when you open these books and read these translations, you're entering onto sacred ground. One is reminded of when Moses on Mount Sinai enters into the presence of the burning bush and the voice of God says to him cast off thy sandals for thou art standing upon sacred ground. There's a sense of entering into this presence of the divine and this lofty style, this slightly archaic, slightly distant style in English translation helps immeasurable being creating that sense of sacred space. So there's the style of the Guardian's translations. There's secondly, obviously the content of the Guardian's translations that every word of his translations constitute and bring together and present for us authoritative interpretations. Bahá'u'lláh, Shogifin gives us essentially a vocabulary of translation for the writings, particularly of Bahá'u'lláh and secondarily of the Bob and of Abdu'l-Bahá. Of course, we can't follow the Guardian all the way. There are places he went as authorized interpreter of the text that we can't go. When Bahá'u'lláh says in the Katabi actas, had the Dean of law, mean qablu wa min ba'ad, safely translated as, this is the religion of God from a foretime and unto hereafter. It becomes under the inspired hand of the Guardian, this is the changeless faith of God, eternal in the past, eternal in the future. So I'm running out of time, so I'm only gonna be able to briefly touch on the question of modern translation, how translations are done at the World Center. And the particular reason I wanna go through this is partly to issue a call for help. And I don't wanna scare anyone off by listing what the ideal essential skill set is for the translation of the Bahá'u'lláh writings. One must be bilingual, trilingual is better. Deeply familiar with the writings in the original languages as well as the English translations of the Guardian must have a deep knowledge of literature, English literature, Persian literature and of the arts and sciences must have a deep understanding of the history of the English language. These are practically impossible, admittedly, in a single person. There's a solution, the solution is translation teams. The first translation team in fact, little known fact of my history was Shoghi Fendi in George Townsend. We attribute these beautiful translations to Shoghi Fendi and George Townsend, at his own insistence, his name does not appear in any of the translations of the Guardian, but George Townsend was there on every page. For all of Shoghi Fendi's mastery of English, proceeding in part from his education at Oxford, English was his third language. And George Townsend was immersed in the liturgical and sacred language of the English Bible, of the English Book of Common Prayer. He found words and phrases that really complete and polish these translations. Of course Shoghi Fendi in all cases, in the case of this particular partnership was the final arbiter on matters of accuracy and meaning. Another great translation pair was Marzia Gale and Ali Kuli Khan. As a very brief personal aside, my first Persian teacher was Marzia Gale. I was very lucky in my last years at Stanford to be able to study at her feet, as it were, go and have dinner with her every Wednesday, and she would teach me some Persian hidden words in a little grammar lesson. Her translations really have not been matched since. Shoghi Fendi's are the set the golden standards, but those of Marzia Gale really I think we can only look at in wonder. Abdu'l-Bahá gives us a solution specifically, that there are teams, and these teams must be comprised of two English speakers and two Persian speakers. He says, in the future, when you seek to translate the sacred writings, the task must be undertaken by a committee comprised of two Persian translators and two accomplished English writers. The Persian should translate and the two should cast, the Persian should translate and the English writer should cast the meaning in the mold of graceful expression so that the sweetness of the original may not be lost. They should then forward them to me for consideration and approval for publication. And that basic guidance is essentially what is being used today at the world center. It captures most of the main elements in the process used today. That the process is highly collaborative. Many eyes see these translations before they're authorized. It draws on diverse specializations across a wide spectrum of individuals. It always has the final approval of the authoritative center of the faith, but they're never final. Not necessarily correct. Even though the House of Justice approves these translations, it's only saying this is the best the community can do at this point in time. The translations, as I mentioned, are heavily based on the Guardian's own translation choices and they evolve over the course of many, many iterations, a dozen or more easily, with every single comment by every reviewer painstakingly collected and discussed. I'm being told that I'm completely out of time, so I'm gonna have to cut the remainder of this short with great apologies. I was gonna tell you all about the new writing, the new translations, and the new volumes. What was in them? But I'm sorry, friends. So I think we're gonna have to leave it at that. Please, if you have any interest, let me just end with this call, if you have any interest in this work, please contact the world center because there is a pipeline to ease you into the process. Volunteers are asked to translate little things just to fill the file with provisional translations that can be referred to as necessary. Individual translators can then form teams with other people. There's a process in place that I encourage you, if you have any interest, email researchatbwc.org or encourage your children to study the languages and get interested, or your grandchildren. All right, I'm being ushered off the stage, so thank you very much.