Mystical religious poetry is notoriously difficult to translate. It plumbs the depths of a particular language’s relationship with the unsayable, but the means by which one language plumbs those depths may differ from the means of another. Therein lies the difficulty: to retain, along with the usual elements of verse, the elusive meaning that can only be indicated, never said.
What good, then, is translated religious poetry? And what good is such poetry when it dates from many centuries ago, given our time’s increasing skepticism of organized religion?
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