Translating divinity

This article examines the 16th-17th century Malay poet Hamzah Fansuri as a figure at the threshold between not only two religious traditions, but also two linguistic worlds. Hamzah Fansuri is well known for introducing the Sufi poetic tradition to Malay-speaking audiences, translating the Arabic thought of Ibn al-ʿArabī into Malay verse. Writing in Jawi, he frequently employed Arabic words and bilingual puns. This article explores how, through his puns, Hamzah made use of the incommensurabilities of the Arabic and Malay languages to draw attention to the infinite and incomprehensible difference between God and humans, while showing how everything that exists does so by virtue of its participation in the reality of wujūd, Ibn al-ʿArabī’s term for God’s being, which is identical to God’s being found. Hamzah’s practice of translation and his puns is then used to bridge a divide in western theories of translation represented by Walter Benjamin and Paul Ricoeur’s work. Whereas Benjamin emphasises an ontological reality that opens up through the process of translation and Ricoeur emphasises an epistemological process, Hamzah collapses the distinction through wujūd, being and finding. Hamzah’s puns can be understood as a translation that allow the incomprehensible real to be gestured at through language, as in Benjamin, even as it involves the reader in an unending hermeneutical process, like Ricoeur.