From Angelish to English, and Back Again

by George F. Dole

Swedenborg wrote copiously, and perhaps we should not be surprised. He devoted a chapter of Heaven and Hell to the language of angels; two of the main points are that this language is profoundly moving (n. 238) and that it is “so full of wisdom that [angels] can in a single word express what we cannot say in a thousand words” (n. 239). In n. 155 of his Spiritual Experiences (which is a more accurate title than the traditional Spiritual Diary), he carried this thought a step further

“I talked with some spirits around me about angels’ language and their understanding of things, which the spirits were eager as could be to know. I told them, having learned it from experience, that we cannot even perceive angels’ language because it contains what seem to be innumerable things all at once, things which then had to be laid out in sequence at great length and with all kinds of digressions.”

Swedenborg, in other words, was a translator. He was confronted with meaning of unearthly depth and beauty, and had to try to convey it in the stubborn stuff of human language. His manuscripts bear witness to the effort this required, with things crossed out, rewritten, written between the lines and in the margins.

He was faced with the necessity of choosing words, with the constant realization that they were less than perfectly adequate. In n. 4585 of Secrets of Heaven (Arcana Coelestia), he paused in his interpretation of “and they journeyed from Bethel” (Genesis 35:16) to comment on his terminology.

“[some readers] will say, “What is this ‘inner person?’ Can you tell it from the outer? And what is this ‘natural’ and ‘rational’? Aren’t they the same thing? And what about this ‘spiritual’ and ‘heavenly’? Is this some new distinction? We’ve heard about ‘spiritual,’ but we never heard that ‘heavenly’ was something different…” However, since this is the kind of thing contained in the Word’s inner meaning, and since these things cannot be presented without appropriate terms, and since we lack more appropriate terms… , we cannot avoid using these words…”

So after one try at expressing some of this angelic meaning in poetic language (and I can’t wait till you see Stuart Shotwell’s forthcoming translation of The Worship and Love of God), Swedenborg settled down to the task of writing very simply, and “at great length, with lots of digressions,” not because he had a prosaic and repetitive mind, but because he was constantly confronting the kind of meaning that melts the heart and blows the mind and simply will not fit in ordinary language.

He wrote in what is now called “Neo-Latin.” This was a second language for him, but a far closer second than one might expect. He would have started learning it at kindergarten age. It was the language of all his university courses—not simply of the texts, but of the lectures and discussions. It was the language of international relations, the language of his own international correspondence. He did not translate his thoughts from Swedish into Latin, because Latin was itself a language he could handle with ease and with style. In an early set of fables, he imagined his muse visiting a house where Latin was spoken with true, classical elegance. “If Thou wouldst hear him conversing in the tongue of Latium … what pleasures wouldst Thou not derive from his ready-witted speech and genius, what elegance wouldst Thou not delight in, listening to his cultivated utterances …  Then behold, what language of the purest age, such as Maecenas once used when conversing [with] Augustus!” (Emanuel Swedenborg, Camena Borea, ed. Hans Helander [Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1988], p. 37) Then comes the task of translating Swedenborg’s Latin into English. There is an extensive literature about translating, with arguments for and against literalism, “dynamic equivalence,” “idiom-to-idiom translation,” and the like. There is no “one size fits all.” A grocery list calls for a strict literalism that would be disastrous for a poem. The New Century Edition is, as far as I know, the first edition that has tried to determine and be faithful to Swedenborg’s own stylistic priorities, to find English as clear and straightforward as his Latin.

This is not always easy, incidentally. I am fond of the remark of one British scientist-philosopher ( I wish I remembered which one) who said he did not feel he really knew a subject until he could write a children’s book about it. In my own translating, I have finally reached the point where I do not want to start translating a paragraph until I have read it through. There is probably a single angelic idea there, a single angelic “word,” if you will, that holds all the digressions together. I may not often sense just what that “word” is, but I have to give myself the opportunity to do so.

One reviewer wrote of the NCE Heaven and Hell, “Fresh and luminous, as though springing from the present moment, Swedenborg’s words seemed to flow directly to me without impediment.” I cannot read this (it’s on the back cover of the paperback edition) without remembering reading the reactions to Edison’s first recordings of music—you could scarcely tell, according to the amazed listeners, that the orchestra itself was not right there in the room. I’m delighted with the reviewer’s delight, but I suspect and hope that in a generation or two, our present efforts will strike people as regrettably scratchy.

Whatever the merits of the translation, though, it is not an end in itself. It is meant to be read, and its real purpose is not realized until— in or through it—readers catch some glimpse of angelic meaning. The departures from traditional terminology are without exceptions efforts at greater accuracy; but they are published also with the hope that their very unfamiliarity will make people stop and think. There is nothing abstract about spiritual meaning. It is profound and moving, solid and potent. It is not contained in black marks on a white page. Once the signals are traveling along the optic nerve of the reader, any life that the text may have must come from (or again, more precisely, through) the reader’s own heart.

At this point, then, we are talking about the opening of the inner reaches of the reader’s mind, and that is accomplished not through intellectual analysis but through living in community, through “acting with prudence, to the end that good may result” (New Jerusalem 100). In other words, whatever the language on the page, it takes an angel to translate it back into angelish. Fortunately, the heaven where angels are and the church where we are act in unison, like our own inner and outer natures, so if church people are focused on the good that love can do because of the truth their faith discloses and on the truth their faith discloses because of the good their love can do, then they are angels as to the inner reaches of their minds (True Christianity 1).

Rev. Dr. George Dole is pastor of the Bath, Maine, Swedenborgian Church and senior member of the translating team working on the New Century Edition of Emanuel Swedenborg’s works.