Nephi in Translation

I feel bad for even admitting this, but Nephi has never been one of my favorite Book of Mormon prophets. Something about the way he writes tends to rub me the wrong way. So it's been interesting as I've been reading him again this last month, but in Japanese. Before you even think about being impressed with this, I should explain that my Japanese is all but non-existent these days. I haven't had much chance to speak it in the last few years, and consequently I've forgotten most of it. I realized recently what a sad waste that was, and so I decided to try reading the Book of Mormon in Japanese in the hopes that it would jog my foreign language memory a bit. Basically, I read a verse in English, and then I read it out loud in Japanese. This is only possible because the Japanese BofM has all the phonetic pronunciations next to the Chinese characters. If I didn't have those to help me out, I would probably never even try doing this in the first place. As it is, it's mostly a lot of sounds with a few words that I actually know thrown in the middle-- faith! Plan of Salvation! Holy Ghost!-- words that only a missionary would know (and words that I'd sometimes forgotten, but am relieved when I recognize).

Anyway, it's very slow going, to say the least. And now that I'm in the Isaiah chapters I'm getting even less out of my reading than before.

But. Reading in Japanese has helped me appreciate Nephi a little more, so here's the story.

It's interesting because the translation is very direct, and this can be problematic with the cultural differences between Japan and America. The most obvious example is just the fact that Nephi is always beginning his sentences with, "I, Nephi..." And here's where it gets tricky because in Japanese, it's considered very rude to use the word "I." It's self-centered to talk about yourself so much, so in most sentences, Japanese people will just leave out the "I" and assume you know who they're talking about. So when Nephi keeps saying, "Watashi Nifai wa..." I keep wondering if this seems as rude to the Japanese people reading the Book of Mormon as it seems to me. And I wonder if that could have been translated better (less directly) so that it wouldn't seem quite so self-centered. And then, when Nephi mentions that he is "large in stature," I just about die. You NEVER brag about yourself in Japan!

So this was on my mind as I read the other day, when I came across 1 Nephi 17:19, "And now it came to pass that I, Nephi, was exceedingly sorrowful because of the hardness of their hearts; and now when they saw that I began to be sorrowful they were glad in their hearts, insomuch that they did rejoice over me, saying: We knew that ye could not construct a ship, for we knew that ye were lacking in judgment; wherefore, thou canst not accomplish so great a work."

The word used in Japanese for sorrowful was "kanashii" which for whatever reason struck me as being much sadder than the English "sorrowful." And the Japanese word for "rejoice" was the verb form of the word "yorokobi" which means "joy," which, again, seemed much happier than I'd given it credit for in English. Such strong emotions between Nephi and his brothers surprised me. I mean, what sort of brothers tease their little brother until he is truly depressed-- kanashii-- and then, seeing the affect they've had on him, have joy? We all know that Laman and Lemuel are punks, but this somehow made it feel so much more personal to me. I realized just how sad it made Nephi that he could never manage to get through to them.

And this, of course, got me thinking some more. I think we can agree that prophets very rarely have easy lives. The scriptures are full of prophets being ignored, rejected, ridiculed, and/or killed. It seems that only the very lucky prophets manage to actually convert people and bring them to repentance. And Nephi fits in with this generalization pretty well.

But there's one way in which Nephi is very different from other prophets, and that's who his audience was. Most prophets preach to huge groups of people, many of whom are probably strangers. But Nephi only ever preached to his family-- his brothers and sisters and their spouses and children. And still he was rejected by more than half of them! That had to have been a lot more personal, and therefore hurt a lot more, than being rejected by strangers. It would certainly hurt my feelings a lot more if my own sisters were slamming their doors in my face than it did when the Japanese people did it.

Anyway, it occurred to me that Nephi had a much more difficult time of things than I probably have been giving him credit for. And if he feels the need to mention how strong he is or to talk about himself a bit much, maybe I can cut him some slack because he had a truly difficult mission in life.

Insights from reading the Book of Mormon in Japanese.