Review
Title: Let’s Talk About the Translation of The Book of Mormon
Author: Gerritt J. Dirkmaat & Michael Hubbard MacKay
Publisher: Deseret Book
Genre: Scripture Studies
Year Published: 2023
Number of Pages: 130
Binding: Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-63993-091-3
Price: $12.99
Reviewed by Harlow Clark for the Association of Mormon Letters
I had just taken a modern Brit Lit class from Steve Walker when his 1983 essay, “Joseph Smith: The Gift of Seeing,” co-authored with Richard Van Wagoner, was published in Dialogue. I told him I had been initially offended by the article–“We were, too. It’s not our usual picture of the Prophet”–but then I realized it wasn’t talking about whether Joseph translated, but how.
That was my introduction to the image of Joseph translating with his face buried in a hat to shut out light and not translating directly from the plates, running his finger along the line as he dictated to Oliver Cowdery on the other side of a blanket strung up between them.
Forty years later, the image of Joseph with his head buried in the hat is still potentially unsettling enough that Gerritt J. Dirkmaat and Michael Hubbard MacKay approach the whole matter of translation cautiously in Let’s Talk About the Translation of The Book of Mormon.
They start by telling of two rival Palmyra publishers, Jonathan Hadley and Egbert Grandin, who both rejected The Book of Mormon and accepted publishing it. They rejected the book because they found Joseph’s account of its miraculous origin silly. They either didn’t believe in miracles or didn’t believe they would happen to an ignoramus like Joe Smith.
So, what does a historian do with claims of miracles, they ask, when miracles can’t be tested scientifically or repeated at will? Well, first you ask another question. Did the people who made the miraculous claim believe in miracles? Yes. Joseph insisted all his life that the translation was a miracle wrought by “the gift and power of God.”
What, then, is a miracle? A miracle is something that could not have happened without the direct intervention of God. This may seem obvious, but not everyone, even among believers, thinks of the Book of Mormon translation as something that could not have happened without divine intervention and cannot be repeated at will, so the authors illustrate the point by a story found in all three synoptic gospels, that of Jesus walking on the water. Because it’s a miracle, it can’t be scientifically tested or repeated at will. Anyone experimenters would end up all wet (p. 4).
The authors are indirectly addressing several objections to the Book of Mormon. They’re clearly reminding Christian readers that they already believe in improbable (that is, unprovable, untestable) things, so the miraculous nature of the story is not incompatible with Christian belief or history. They’re also cheerfully admitting that the story Joseph Smith told is beyond normal human experience. (“I came to the conclusion at a very early age, earlier than I can remember, that you don’t get books from angels and translate them by miracles,” Sterling McMurrin said in the interview that got the 7th East Press kicked off campus.)
Cheerfully, but indirectly. The authors are also indirectly conceding Hadley and Grandin’s point: Joseph Smith was an uneducated young man who didn’t have the intellectual or social pedigree that would have qualified him to produce a 588-page work of scripture. They’re also challenging the idea that historians must resolve the question of origins to say anything meaningful about a miraculous event, that you either believe the story or you don’t, and the only thing you can do is to say why or why not.
Instead, historians can examine the consequences of a story, what people did because they believed Jesus walked on water, and what the story meant to early believers. And while we can’t interview the evangelists about their sources and how they compiled the Gospels, we can read and examine the accounts of people who were involved in the Book of Mormon translation, including scribes and witnesses.
Examining their stories yields some valuable insights into questions like why Joseph kept asking to let Martin Harris take the manuscript after the Lord had told him no twice. The authors note that Joseph bought his home and farm in Harmony, Pennsylvania, from Emma’s father for $200, which he couldn’t pay, and the $3,000 cost of printing was 15 times that much. Asking Martin to cover that cost in the face of opposition from family and friends without any evidence to show from the project was a big ask and must have weighed heavily on the young prophet (p 34).
There is also an invitation to imagine what breaking his oath and losing the manuscript meant to Martin without an understanding of God’s mercy and forgiveness set forth in later visions like the Three Degrees of Glory. His poignant cry, “Oh I have lost my soul. I have lost my soul,” was not hyperbolic (p. 40).
The book similarly adds detail to the story of Martin’s successor as scribe. The young schoolteacher Oliver Cowdery wasn’t boarding with the Smiths just because their children were enrolled at the school. He sought Joseph out because he had seen the plates in a vision (p. 46).
The book also includes stories about how people responded to the Book of Mormon once published. (I savor the irony of Sophia Howe’s joining the church in Ohio and donating money for the effort to redeem Zion in Missouri, notwithstanding her husband Eber Howe’s hard work to discredit the church in Mormonism Unvailed and other writings.)
Dirkmaat and MacKay end with a useful FAQ, but one question they don’t consider is, who told Oliver Cowdery all he had to do was ask, and the translation would come to him? Martin Harris? Emma? Joseph himself? All the witnesses to the translation say Joseph looked in the hat to shut out the light so he could see the words appearing on the seer stone.
Most of the commentary I’ve read on those accounts takes them to mean that whatever Joseph saw on the seer stone were the words he read to his scribes. I wonder, though, how reliable their accounts are.
I worked for a time on the revision of the Book of Mormon translator’s manual. The first thing my trainer told me is that the important qualification for a translator is fluency in the target language. A good glossary and an explanation of rhetorical devices (like chiasmus and other forms of parallelism) and other linguistic features can do a lot to make up for a lack of fluency in the original language.
So, when I read the accounts of words appearing on the seer stone, I wonder if they are something like the translation ponies hundreds of years of schoolboys used to translate their Latin passages or if they were a word-for-word translation that Joseph had to render into idiomatic English.
“That’s all speculation,” I can hear someone say. “We have to stick to primary sources.” True. Except the primary source, the only person who could see what was on the stone in the hat refused to say what he saw. Or at least how he translated what he saw.
Why is this important? Because the other source familiar with the logistics of the translation said explicitly that it was not given to the translator. “Behold you have not understood; you have supposed that I would give it unto you, when you took no thought save it was to ask me” (Doctrine and Covenants 9:7).
Is the you in that phrase plural? Maybe Joseph didn’t understand how he translated. Maybe he was in such a deep state of concentration that he didn’t know what kind of mental work he was doing as he looked at the seer stone.
Speculation again? Why is the matter of whether Joseph was reading the translation off of the seer stone so important? Just because of the tension it creates with Section 9? Or because it raises the question of whose translation Joseph was reading if Joseph was reading the translation? The authors don’t raise this question, but they address it in talking about the witness statements Joseph included in the book. They look at the phrase in “The Testimony of Three Witnesses,” “And we also know that they have been translated by the gift and power of God, for his voice hath declared it unto us,” and read it as reassurance to the witnesses. “Knowing that Joseph would be declared the author of the Book of Mormon, they heard God’s voice testify that He was responsible for the translation” (p. 59).
There is another reason why the way we think about what Joseph saw in the hat matters. Whether he read the translation off of the seer stone or dictated what he had been studying out in his mind, Joseph saw the translation as his work, his responsibility. And he wasn’t satisfied with it. He made thousands of changes for the second and third editions without worrying about whether it would be a sacrilege to change something given by the gift and power of God.
Dirkmaat and MacKay discuss this peripherally in their answers to several questions about different theories concerning the translation. On pages 93-94, they lay out Royal Skousen’s argument that Joseph was reading the translation from the seer stone and Samuel Brown’s response to it. In the endnote for the discussion, they mention Brandt Gardner’s disagreement with Skousen, then say, “In any case, all of these men still hold to the miraculous nature of the translation despite their differences about how it occurred”|(p. 124, note 28).
When I started this review, I thought the authors’ indirect method of approaching difficult questions about the translation was a sign that the topic of translation was touchy and needed a light tread. As I got deeper into the review, working on my tablet on the way to a dental appointment, I remembered something Jim Faulconer said in class one time. It may have been when we were reading Truth and Method, where Hans-Georg Gadamer spends the first 90 pages dismantling Kant’s esthetic, or it may have been in another class where the topic came up of philosophers responding to each other by name.
Jim said the 19th-century philosophers wouldn’t have called each other out by name. It was considered bad form, and people who knew the issues involved knew who the philosopher was responding to. Seen in that regard, this book is an elegant invitation to treat each other gently, as gentle people, when talking about things where we could be shouting.
I could end the review there, but I want to say two more things. Because Dirkmaat and MacKay don’t discuss Section 9, I went to Overdrive and checked out their earlier book, From Darkness Unto Light, and they cite one scholar who suggests the two years when Joseph was preparing to translate were the years when he was thinking it out in his mind. I hope to review that book, but I don’t know when that will be. My second checkout just expired, and there are two people waiting so I’m third in line.
And finally, a shout out to Michael Hubbard MacKay’s “Performing the Translation: Character Transcripts and Joseph Smith’s Earliest Translating Practices” and Jared Hickman’s “‘Bringing Forth’ the Book of Mormon: Translation as the Reconfiguration of Bodies in Space-Time” (in Producing Ancient Scripture, ed. Michael Hubbard MacKay, Mark Ashurst-McGee and Brian M Hauglid, The University of Utah Press, 2020). These two essays invite us to think about the full range of meanings of the word translate, including the root words trans latus, to carry across, and consider that Joseph’s first act of translation was to carry the plates across the distance from the hill to a hiding place in an old log, then to his home.