Translations

I've been interested in Tibetan culture for twenty years now. I grew my keenness towards its philosophy and science after attending for ten years the Tibet Center of NYC, an open minded Buddhist learning center under the guidance of its founder Ven Rato Rinpoche.

For years I was lucky to attend lectures on great Tibetan and Indian Buddhist scholars, previously totally unknown to me. The great Nalanda Tradition was passed down to us even for the first time in the west. In some occasions the texts used just had been recently translated and published. It's really a profound and vast heritage that some English speaking editorials have been working for years to translate and preserve this endangered tradition.

In English this translation work have been under way for more than two centuries. But in Spanish and Catalan a giant gap of authoritative publications is missing and only in the last few decades some serious effort have been made with important results. But in some of these occasions I have noticed that editorials have to shorten verses to fit the size required for the format of the publication elected. That is the case of Kunu Lama Rinpoche's ´Jewel Lamp´ translated and published in 2013 as Lampara de Joyas. In this translation, a lot of the verses I have found out to be extremely edited to be reduced, in some occasions damaging the ultimate meaning of a verse eroding the meticulous care in which in Tibetan monastic study tradition treats each word as indispensable, even a coma.

I say this because after a weekend seminar on the book Rato Rinpoche requested no money, but for all of us to read the book ten times. And I did, even more than that. And this took me to translate it to Catalan. Never done before, I started in 1996 many years before someone else did the Spanish translation.

The problem with all translation, in special in Spanish and Catalan on this unknown field is the vast amount of terminology that we are working with. Mostly in Tibetan, but crucially from Pali and Sanscrit the extend of this field makes it impossible to agree in many occasions. Polluted by previous works done in some occasions by Jesuits in which Buddhist terms had Christian under tones, like Ëmancipation¨for ¨Liberation or Enlightenment.

Adding to this, there is no single dictionary accepted by all translators that acknowledges in unison the meaning of words like Bodhicitta, Samadhi or Tong-len. Even the word Buddha is spelled differently according to who has done the translation.

So in reality I just make my way in unchartered waters. As a matter of fact, the way to approach the translation from English to Catalan of these 365 verses has been done with the intention to be very fluid, as in an oral tradition as I have received. I don´t think a translation should use unnecessary wording and rhetoric. It should be simple to hear when sometimes the subject is deep indeed.

Following that line I have found out some demarcations for the translations of certain words: simple, short and accurate. So in my opinion the word Buddha should be translated into Spanish and Catalan as ´Buda´ simply. And most of the Sanscrit words like Bodhicitta with a very unique and specific meaning should keep the sanscrit sound, in Spanish Bodichita and in Catalan ´Boditxita´.

In this unfinished section I want to share my unpublished work that hope to grow in time to bring some glimpse to this brilliant culture.