Picture the lonely austere missionary the Rev. Lancelot Edward Threlkeld, deep in Aboriginal country sometime between 1834 and 1837 in his property at what is now Toronto on the peninsula on the western side of Lake Macquarie. He is in the throes of translating the obscure Biblical prose of St Mark’s Gospel into the local Aboriginal language spoken in the vicinity of this lake north of Sydney. This was a language that had developed to cover daily indigenous life of living, hunting and survival, disputes and ritual.
Threlkeld had been sent by the London Missionary Society to Lake Macquarie in 1825 for evangelical purposes. He had determined that the first thing he should do was to learn the local language in order to communicate with the people there. And next, the best way he could see of fulfilling his mission as a missionary was to translate the gospels so he could pass on the essential messages in them. To succeed, he had to bend this language to his purpose as best he could. He was eventually to complete the gospels of Saints Luke and Mark, and to begin on St Matthew. To what extent the local population understood the gospel stories is not known, but Threlkeld was eventually not to succeed in converting a single one of them.
Threlkeld was married and with a growing family. At this time he was aged in his late forties, with a wife and nine surviving children. Given that children pick up languages quickly, it is likely that all but the youngest, Thomas, aged perhaps about three, would have been fluent speakers of ‘Awabakal’. Threlkeld himself probably had the restricted capability of a late learner.
On the particular day we are concerned with here, Threlkeld was faced with the verses of Chapter 13, which including the following:
[27] And then shall he send his angels, and shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from the uttermost part of the earth to the uttermost part of heaven.
Now he turns to verse 27, in which some words to challenge his ingenuity have here been picked out in bold type.
• Although Aboriginal languages do not normally have a word for conjunctions such as ‘and’, Threlkeld has long since had to accept a word for it, because ‘And’ seems to be the first word in about half or more of the verses in the gospels.
• He is going to use, yet again, the English word for ‘angel’.
• ‘gather’ is no problem: he has an acceptable word it.
• What is he going to do with ‘elect’, he probably asked himself.
• ‘four’? Normally Aboriginals had numbers only up to three, but he thinks he might actually have one for ‘four’.
• What is to be done about ‘uttermost’?
• So far he has been using ‘sky’ for ‘heaven’.
And so he sets about his translation, and comes up with:
This might be respelt using modern conventions as:
ngadun yagida ngaya yuganan nuwa barun ANGEL ngigumba, ngadun gawumanan wal barun ngirimadwara ngigumba andabirang wibigabirang waradabirang galungGadabirang barayidabirang andabirang GalungGadabirang murugugabirang.
Threlkeld had an Aboriginal informant, a fluent English speaker by the name of Biraban (also known by an English name as McGill), and Threlkeld routinely checked everything with him. However, these were the days of spears, initiations and tribal practice rather than Biblical scholarship, and there was probably a power imbalance between the austere European overlord Threlkeld and the Aboriginal employee Biraban. So it is possible Biraban was inclined to agree with anything Threlkeld proposed, however bizarre a phrase or topic might have sounded, including converting water into wine, or even walking on water on a lake such as the one nearby, or coming up with translations for concepts such as ‘disciples’.
The translation that Threlkeld devised for Verse 27 above, on a word-for-word basis, literally reads:
AND now then send-will he them-all ANGEL him-of, AND gather-make-will certainly them-all choose-make-done to him-of there-away from wind-away from four-away from distant-at-away from earth-away from there-from distant-at-away from sky-away from.
This may be expresed more idiomatically as:
And now then, he will send them, his angels, and will certainly gather them, his chosen (ones), from the four winds, from there the distant (parts of) the earth, from the distant (part of) the sky [i.e. heaven]
and so the connection with the Gospel passage, reproduced again below, can be readily enough perceived:
[27] And then shall he send his angels, and shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from the uttermost part of the earth to the uttermost part of heaven.
Except for one point: the word ‘from’ at the end of Threlkeld’s version, and the word ‘to’ in the King James translation of the verse.
What has happened? It would appear with all this translating of obscure wording, either Threlkeld has decided that ‘from’ is the correct preposition for the idea of gathering from here, there and everywhere; or has let slip through a wong suffix, meaning ‘away from‘ — instead of using a suffix for to or towards. In the final part of his translation he has written, based on the preposition ‘from’:
Galung–Ga-da-birang murugu-ga-birang.
distant-away from sky-away from
when he perhaps should have used expressions for ‘to’, reflecting the term actually used in the Gospel passage he was translating:
Galung–Gulang murugu-gulang.
distant-towards sky-towards
If so, this is a very simple slip up, and one that would have been picked up by anyone fluent in the language paying attention to the meaning of the passage.
JEREMY STEELE
Tuesday 15 May 2018
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