Let in the Light

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AMONG the seminars that Mr Belloli is taking is one exploring post-colonial and anti-racist approaches to the New Testament. Both Denise Buell and Willie James Jennings have drawn attention to “which languages are given less prestige both in priestly formation and in the academy”, he observes. It is difficult to achieve reading proficiency in either language in the amount of time available, he says, and one of the pitfalls that he seeks to avoid is confirming the “ingrained inclination to think of other languages as more or less successful simulations of English in a sort of secret coded way. They aren’t simulations of English: they are living cultural and expressive phenomena on their own. . . A philologist who has translated classical texts, including The Aeneid (described by Ursula Le Guin as “the best translation yet”) and St Augustine’s Confessions, Dr Ruden is unafraid of ruffling feathers with her approach. In her introduction to The Gospels (Vintage, 2021), she argues that, when it comes to the New Testament, “the self-expressing text has fallen under the muffling, alien weight of later Christian institutions and had the life nearly smothered out of it.”

A strong theme in the chapters that follows is the “large territories of meaning” in a single word of Greek and Hebrew and the impossibility of capturing these in the English one chosen.

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The Bible Society has estimated that five million people around the world speak Jamaican Patois, and Ms Jones notes that it has “found its way into young people’s language”, including that of white children. She describes switching between “pure English” in some contexts and Patois among her friends. Without necessarily regretting the emphasis on Greek and Hebrew, I wonder what options could be given for people in my position to learn other languages of the Anglican Communion and the implications it might have for ministry — especially as some of the most effective places in which Churches have made reparations for their colonial history is by using their resources to preserve and teach indigenous languages, including through Bible translation.” Part of the problem is the perpetually romanticised narrative of the ‘artist’s struggle’, which sees the difference that disability or poor mental health brings as a catalyst of great art – but never the metaphor for or comment on the artist’s relationship with the outside world. We discuss pneuma and its translation as “Spirit”. In John 3 (“no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit”), she observes, “there’s this whole play on the word pneuma and it becomes a life breath, this essence of life, an essence of God’s life, of God giving life, and then the wind and its mysteries, the mysteries of its movement. It’s really kind of mind-blowing, the poetics of the whole thing, and the medieval scribe or Renaissance translator up to the modern era — people did not have an idea of how the rhetoric of this vocabulary could work, or how this vocabulary could work to elaborate the very important concepts here. Just rubber-stamp one word ‘spirit’ in English.

James sees himself as an animateur , activating creativity and encouraging the young people to see themselves as artists. Both the environment of the CAMHS unit and the subject-matter the young people were asked to focus on was very difficult – exploring these experiences in an arts context was a challenge. James wanted the young people to understand the rigour of creating art without falling for stereotypical expectations of what an artist is or how they make art. In Let in the Light, White invites readers to join him in a close and engaged encounter with the Confessions in which they will come to share his experience of the book’s power and profundity by reading at least some of it in Augustine’s own language. He offers an accessible guide to reading the text in Latin, line by line—even for those who have never studied the language. AT THE inauguration was the true account, and this true account was with god, and god was the true account.” These words are unlikely to be read aloud at many carol services this month, but for Dr Sarah Ruden, this is what it sounds like to translate the Gospels “more straightforwardly than is customary”, to help the reader to “respond to the books on their own terms”. Honestly when I heard it, I cried,” Ms Jones recalls. The daughter of a couple who moved from Jamaica in the late 1950s, she grew up listening to Jamaican Patois at home and has come to regard it as her “mother tongue — because that is what we first heard. So hearing it really chokes me up. Hearing Jesus speak in that vernacular, in that language, is like home. There are words he uses that mean more when spoken in Jamaican than in English. . . It’s like family talking.” In the summer of 2021, James was invited to submit a proposal to run The Mayor of London’s cultural response to the mental health crisis. This enabled them to start to formulate the shape of an arts led intervention that was tailored to young people and spoke about mental health. This led to a chance to work with the culture team at the GLA (Greater London Authority) and James turned to Zoé Whitley, Director of Chisenhale Gallery, to see if they could collaborate and extend the scope of this process. Their proposal was accepted and James, together with Chisenhale Gallery and Bernie Grants Art Centre has embarked on a long term process that builds on For They Let In The Light .The Gospels are, she argues, “the first of the truly power-hungry Truth writings”, a “sweeping assault of words” against the modern world’s huge apparatus of material power, in which “assertions take over the poetry and the sense as well, making the text suitable as a basis for force, reform, or both.” The authors “thought that all conventional assumptions should be adjusted or replaced”, with the result that “great jolts” were given to the meaning of words, leaving translators aiming at “moving targets”. She finds in the Gospels “the stretching of traditional language past the breaking point”. Unfortunately it still remains the case that, in the art world, disability and mental health make great art but only as long and one doesn’t speak about said disability or mental health condition. Sigh! We still don’t have the vocabulary to exhibit art that emanates from a rehabilitative process. THE result, The Gospels, is not Dr Ruden’s first translation of the Bible. In her 2017 book The Face of Water: A translator on beauty and meaning in the Bible (Pantheon, 2017), she offered translations of passages from both the Old and New Testament after first setting out some of the inherent “impossibilities”.

the vacuum cleaner & Collaborators in rehearsals for For They let In The Light (2022). Produced and commissioned by Chisenhale Gallery, London. Photo: Oscar Abdulla. As a reader of ancient literature, she writes, “most of what I see in English Bibles is loss: the loss of sound, the loss of literary imagery, the loss of emotion, and — inevitably, because these texts were performances deeply integrated into the lives of the authors and early readers and listeners — the loss of thought and experience.” Speaking about William Tyndale at St Paul’s Cathedral in 2017, the theologian Dr Jane Williams suggested that he and all translators “show us something of the sheer attention and love called out by faith”. Tyndale had believed, rightly, that “the Bible is too important to be in the hands of only a few.”As I watch, I’m reminded that who is, and who is not, permitted to call themselves an artist is still a source of frustration. Amongst the groups of people within society whose art is routinely disregarded or seen as subordinate are disabled people, people with mental health conditions, children and young people. Any intersectionality amongst these categories and the art world grows markedly more difficult. It is notable that the Jacobean translators of the Authorised Version were clear that a literal translation had not been attempted, writing in their preface: “we thinke good to admonish thee of (gentle Reader) that wee have not tyed our selves to an uniformitie of phrasing, or to an identitie of words, as some peradventure would wish that we had done. . .” TODAY, study of biblical languages is not a requirement for ordinands, although on many pathways it is either required or optional. Most will come to study with no prior knowledge of Greek or Hebrew, and, at St Stephen’s House, Dr Adam has observed students becoming “very excited at first discoveries”. James and Chisenhale Gallery saw For they let in the Light, not as just another project for young people, but an opportunity for those who have faced mental health challenges to work with world-class artists and to create artworks which find their way into galleries – not as part of an education or engagement programme but as part of the gallery programme. As a result, Chisenhale has been building a team around their new Curator of Social Practice, Seth Pimlott, who oversaw the presentation of For They Let In the Light . I think everything you can see in the Gospels is that Jesus wants us to think for ourselves,” she tells me. “He would be sad at somebody saying ‘Tell me what it actually means.’ He would say ‘no, no do some thinking. . .’”

Plastic Bag” is a song about searching for an escape from personal problems and hoping to find it in the lively atmosphere of a Saturday night party. Ed Sheeran tells the story of his friend and the myriad of troubles he is going through. Unable to find any solutions, this friend seeks a last resort in a party and the vanity that comes with it. IN HER introduction, Dr Ruden explains that she has “often turned to a word’s basic imagery as a defence against anachronism, obfuscation, and lethargy, which drain communications of their primordial electricity”. Reading her translation during Advent I enjoyed reading that the baby " capered" in Elizabeth's womb. The rendering of "crucified" as "hung on the stakes" is a powerfully vivid. Her choices undoubtedly have the ability to unnerve.In For They Let In The Light one of the cripping aesthetics of that piece came in the second period of the making. The young people wanted to respond to the videos that had been made while they were in hospital and they wanted to perform them. And I’m like – that’s amazing”.