U Wirathu's Open Letter: Lost in Translation

It's unclear if U Wirathu himself penned the English version of his open letter to Hannah Beech, TIME's reporter who featured him in her article "The Face of Buddhist Terror," or if someone else translated it from the Burmese version with his blessing. Either way, a side-by-side comparison of the two reveals some curious discrepancies.

In his letter, Wirathu singled out the quote he felt Beech has distorted to tarnish his reputation. First, he showed the line attributed to him as it appeared in the article:

“Now is the time to rise up to make your blood boil.” 

Then he shared what he felt was the source. The contested lines seem to be the last couplet in his patriotic chant. In Burmese, they run:

အမ်ဳိးသားေရး ေသြးမေအးပဲ
အၿမဲတေစ ေႏြးပါေစ။

(You'll need Zawgyi One Burmese font to view the lines above correctly. Otherwise, you'll see a series of empty squares, resulting from your computer's inability to render the Burmese characters.)

In English, Wirathu (or his translator) presented the same two lines as:

For our national cause,
We will carry out it warmly without ignorance.

The trouble is, that English translation doesn't quite capture the essence of the original. It's a watered-down version, leaving us with a sanitized paraphrase. If I were translating the lines, I'd write:

For nationalism, don't let your blood cool off;
May it always be warm.

In Wirathu's Burmese version, the words thwe (blood), aye (cool), and nwe (warm) are prominently featured. In fact, they make up the rhyme scheme with their identical vowel tones. (Regardless of how I might feel about the content, I must acknowledge it's elegant, potent Burmese poetry.) In his English version, the metaphor is barely detectable in the adjective "warmly."

Assuming these were indeed the lines Beech was quoting (and I'm going by Wirathu's claim here), one might impugn her for mischaracterizing warm nationalism as boiling. Nevertheless, compared to Wirathu's own English translation, the line as printed in the article was a lot closer to the Burmese source.

Wirathu also took issues with the reporter's description of him as " the man in burgundy robes." He wrote: You are not a lady with high moral ground and you are same as dirty minded as extremists all over the world. Muslims are also like you want me to strip of the robe. They do not revere me as a Monk and call me “the man in the robe.”

In full context, here is the way the phrase appeared in the article: His face as still and serene as a statue's, the Buddhist monk who has taken the title "the Burmese bin Laden" begins his sermon. Hundreds of worshippers sit before him, palms pressed together, sweat trickling silently down their sticky backs. On cue, the crowd chants with the man in burgundy robes, the mantras drifting through the sultry air of a temple in Mandalay, Burma's second biggest city after Rangoon. (Emphasis in bold added by me.)

In a preceding sentence, the reporter has already established the subject, Wirathu, as a Buddhist monk. It is not necessary--nor is it desirable in good prose--to repeatedly use the same word to describe an individual. To infer a lack of reverence from "the man in burgundy robes" and to take it as an insinuation that he is unfit to be a monk is, I think, a fundamental misreading of a descriptive phrase.

There's another oddity. In the Burmese version, Wirathu signed off as:

(အၾကမ္းဖက္သမားႀကီး)
ဦးပဥၥင္း
ဦးဝီရသူ

The English version is signed off as:

Ven[erable] Wira Thu

The parenthetical phrase--(Terrorist)--is missing in the English letter. I don't believe for a moment it's an admission or a declaration. The tone of the letter--that of someone wounded by betrayal--suggests the word was added in a sarcastic note. Still, for the sake of accuracy, I feel it ought to mentioned.

There's something else that I fear won't come across even at the hand of the most skillful translator. The tone of Wirathu's Burmese letter is full of hurt, but not mean-spirited or spiteful--an impression you might get if you could only read the English translation. Yes, it is full of accusations and defensiveness, but, in comparison to some of his sermons about the Muslims, it's much more restrained and measured. That, I'm afraid, is something that will inevitably be lost due to the vast gap between the two languages.

What saddens me is that Burmese Buddhism's reputation has indeed been tarnished, more by some of its followers' hot-blooded reaction to the controversial TIME article than by the article itself. The virulent words with which they attack Beech online are beneath the noble religion they claim to embrace. They insist Buddhism in Burma is peaceful. (That may be true in principle, but in practice the mob's behavior has shown they're not above committing atrocities.) They're quick to label anyone who speaks favorably of the article, or anyone who's critical of Wirathu, as a Muslim slave. They're slow to acknowledge the article might be--just might be--raising valid concerns about the birth of a frenzied nationalist movement with a violent streak.

Wirathu's supporters have been applauding his open letter as a great rebuttal to TIME's article. It seems to me, an open mind might make a greater response.