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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello and welcome to New Books in Late Antiquity presented by Ancient Jew Review. I'm Lydia Bramer McCollum and today we're talking with Dr. Adam Bramer McCollum about his new book, the Pearl Song, as well as the launch of a new book series, Texts and Translations of Transcendence and Transformation 4t for short. The series is published by the center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School. Adam is Series Editor along with the Center's Director, Charles M. Stang. Adam Bramer McCollum is also a Research Associate at the center for the Study of World Religions. He is a philologist and the author and translator of three monographs and dozens of article length studies on ancient texts and manuscripts. He is also my spouse. I know from experience that you will often find him in his office with a sprawling array of lexica and text resources for Georgian, Armenian, Middle Persian and these days. Today he is here to talk more about his new book, the Pearl Song, which was officially published in July 2025. The printed edition is stunning with elegant typesetting and high quality paper and printing. The material object is truly a pleasure to hold. Beyond the aesthetics, the book offers the reader a beautifully translated story of a young child who goes on a journey to faraway places, donning glistening garments, meeting dragons, and encountering talking letters. In addition to the translated text of the Pearlsong poem, the reader will find a thorough commentary and glossary. The appendices of the book offer further delights to explore everything from a discussion of Syriac poetry and meter to translations of the Acts of Thomas to an assemblage of ancient texts about pearls. The expansive subjects, texts and translations covered in the book will be a treasure to any reader. So Philology, stories and texts about pearls or just want a beautiful printed volume to adorn your bookshelf. This book has some have you here today. I want to start out with the traditional question on this channel. How did you come to write this book the Pearl Song?
- [02:36]
B
Thanks a lot for having me. And thanks for this this first question. So the text that the book is focused on is often known as the the Hymn of the Pearl or even the Hymn of the Soul. I'll talk about why I call it the Pearl Song later. But this text is a pretty well known text for students of Late Antiquity and especially students who know Syriac. So I knew I was aware of it. I read this with some students again and then also about the same time I was reading Eric Davis's High Weirdness, in which he discusses in a Couple of places discusses the Pearl Song or the Hymn of the Pearl as it's called there. And so it was kind of reignited from their interest in this text was reignited from a different direction just because of reading this book. And then about the same time I was having who's co editor with me of the four T series, we were discussing some possibilities for a finely printed book series that could also be available in open access and focus on really interesting sort of experience challenging mind this in not just one language, not just Greek or Latin or Syriacracoptic, but really any language of kind of late antiquity writ large and maybe even just pre modern focused on the eastern Mediterranean. And anyway, so we wanted to have original source texts together with an English translation and you know, some things like introductions, commentary, whatever. But that was sort of the basis and the. The last two T's in 4T about transcendence and transformation. This is. There was another initiative with this title going on at the cswr. So about this time I was hired and so Professor Stang and I got together and we decided to start this series and we wanted it to be, you know, again to have those characteristics of the two texts side by side with translation but then in a very nice series but also available as PDF. So that's kind of a long answer, but great.
- [05:01]
A
I love that you could give some grounding of both the academic or pleasurable inspiration of both Eric Davis work, but also the particular environment that HDS and the CSWR was allowed to offer to kind of begin the initiation of this series. You mentioned already that the book is available both as finely printed edition and open. How that is a part of your vision for the series?
- [05:32]
B
Yeah, good question. First off, it is, I should mention the publisher is the CSWR itself. So it's kind of an in house job with external readers and. And friends to help get it in good shape. But then you. So you can get it as a PDF on the CSWR website where you'll see the 4T page. So that's where all of the. This is the first volume in the series. There will be another one coming out in the first few months of 2026 and all of the books will be available this way, I should be clear, not just the Pearl Song. So the PDF can be. You can get it there. And. And it's. The book is published by CSWR but distributed by Harvard. So you can of course get it from their website or any other place you buy books.
- [06:26]
A
Beautiful. Can you say more about the materiality of the Pearl Song? Book and what you mean by a finely printed edition, how did you come to create and design the book and what does that mean to you and the series editor, the other series editor, I should say.
- [06:42]
B
Yeah. So I do the typesetting of the book with latex, which is well known in science and math and things, not maybe as known sometimes in the humanities. So I do that and then. So that produces the PDF. But the designers and printers of sort of the external parts of the book and the people who are in charge of choosing the pages with us and things like this, this is company called rdw printing out of provenance and they did an outstanding job. I mean we, we really have all been very impressed with it. The. My co editor and I both rise and just touch and it would feel nice. And so that's. This definitely definitely fills that, that goal. So again, it's on very nice paper. It's on. It's a, it's a soft cover, but it's a kind of thick cardboard and it's got each, each of the book will. Each of the books in the series will have really cool end of a gigantic snake or dragon and then there's a tiny little pearl at the bottom. So it's, so it's. They each will have, you know, bespoke covers and then the dust jacket itself is also going to be unique to each, to each book in the series. But it's got, it's very sturdy. You know, you can, you know, you can take it out to the lake and read it, stick it in your backpack or just leave it up on your shelf also. But it's gonna, it, it looks great and it feels great and holds up well so far at least it seems great.
- [08:19]
A
You mentioned that the PDF is available for free, which is always a great resource. But given that you're describing such a beautiful book, is the book quite expensive or is it also a kind of accessible price point?
- [08:32]
B
Yeah, thankfully it's relatively affordable. It's. This book is $40 in the US about $40. Which I mean, as you know, for texts like this, especially with, you know, nice paper and things that are not pretty to look at, you're going to pay more than that sometimes. So. And some of the books may eventually. Some of my. This book is, I should mention it's about 200. It's about 250 pages. And the smaller books will actually be cheaper if there ends up being some smaller ones. So the next book coming out in the series, which is by Fabian Muller on two texts by Porphyry this one also is about the same length as the Pearl Song, so It'll also be $40 probably. Great.
- [09:21]
A
And earlier on, in sharing your vision for the 4T series, you mentioned that the core part of each one of these volumes will include a text or a couple of texts in the source language and then as well as a new translation of these texts. Can you speak to your vision for the use and usefulness of the Pearlsong and other books in this series in terms of providing access to both the source language and new translations? What do you think that does and how do you envision the use and usefulness of these beautiful volumes?
- [09:58]
B
Yeah, this is, I mean there's a really old tradition pre print even of having, you know, languages or a source text and a translation beside it. So that goes back a long time, codicologically speaking maybe and probably even other than codex too. But we all, you know, anyone who works in classics or Late Antiquity knows the lower Classical library, there's the clay Sanskrit library, you know, that has these similarly parallel text with English translations. So this is a tradition a lot of, you know, text people or philologists like and my co editor and I also do. So we, you know, knew we really liked that format. But often these series, series, a series that does this often will focus on one language where again we're wanting it to be. It's really not even a closed box at this point. It really can be a lot of different things, but definitely all of the sort of big languages of Late antiquity that any of us would think of, but reaching into Central Asia as well because of a lot of other textual and religious connections between these areas during this time. But the, so we want it to, we want it, anybody who likes say a Greek, you know, is into Greek or into Coptic or into Syriac or something, we want those people to like and use these texts. But the translations too, as you mentioned, are new. You know, these aren't, you know, rehashes of anything else. They, and often I should say too, the texts are sometimes re edited as well. So the Pearl Song was completely, it has been edited before but I, you know, went back to the single Syriac manuscript that has it and prepared a new edition. So we want it to be useful to philologists, but for the translations we want to be obviously, you know, accurate and you know, reliable in all of this. But we want them to, you know, speak clear everyday 2025 language where possible. You know, that said, each translator of course has their own voice and as I'm learning right now in a co authored volume. Blending those two voices together is sometimes a very instructive experience, which will, I'm sure, yield a better product in the end. But another group in addition to just people who might want to see these texts from people who are in the field or the fields involved, but also people in the more general public, if they happen upon this thing for whatever reason, we want it to be accessible to them too, at least on some level. Another group of people that the series is aimed at is language learners and teachers, meaning, you know, for in this case Syriac or Greek. And so one way to really boost, hopefully its usefulness to that group is the inclusion of glossaries. So you've got, in other words, if you've got the Syriac text, you can read Syriac, you do have a translation, if you like to use that when you're learning. Some people do, some people don't, some teachers do, some teachers don't. But then also this glossary, even if you don't know Syriac and you just want to say, oh, I wonder what words are kind of in this thing and what do they look like? Because I think Syriac looks cool or something, that's a possibility that you can, that's a possible use of the book as well. And the glossaries, I should say, are kind of like the tone, the specific tone and the voice for the translation is dependent upon the translator. 2 We're not being especially strict about how absolutely comprehensive do the glossaries need to be. In other words, the glossaries, like the translations, are a bit of a reflection of the scholar who's producing the book, you know, so those may differ a little bit. But hopefully language students will, you know, find them helpful in some way or other.
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A
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- [15:39]
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Don't miss out. Shop Maytag in store or online today at Lowe's. Thank you so much for sharing a bit of background and context for this series and also some of the expansive futures for where the series is going and what it hopes to include. And I hope that language lovers all all around will find these volumes. They're really beautiful and once again available open access. So they really are putting these languages in the hands of the people I want to talk more about the Pearl Song itself. So the content of the book. So I want to start with a pretty basic question and ask you what is the Pearl Song? How does it fit in the vision for the series? Why is it and you already alluded to this a little bit, but why does it belong in a series about transformation and transcendence?
- [16:37]
B
So the Pearl Song, what I call the Pearl Song, and I hope it's a name that sticks, is what often is called the Hymn of the Pearl or the Hymn of the Soul. And so I'll say just a second about the title and then go into what the content of the thing is. So in the Syriac text, it is referred to as a madrasa, which is a word that is often translated as him. It has other meanings too, both in Syriac and in other Aramaic languages. And there's cognate. I mean, midrash even is the cognate in Hebrew, which is a term some people will know. But all that to say it doesn't necessarily always mean hymn. And in particular, on the English side of things, a hymn is definitely sung. First of all, you know, there's music and there's or at least not always sung. But there's that. That's the the idea that's there. And the Pear Song, according to the text, was more recited than sung or chanted. Maybe so. And I know I call it a song still, so that's kind of cheating. But Walt Whitman had the Song of Myself, which also doesn't have music. So the but anyway, so why call it not a hymn? It's not in praise of anything. If you read the hymn, it's not praising the pearl, it's not praising the soul, it's not praising anything. You know, so the home, you know The Homeric hymns, you know, are praising, you know, certain gods. Nothing's being praised here. And so I thought for that reason it's maybe good to move away from this language because again, the Hymn of the Pearl is not a title that's ancient at all. This is made up by, I don't know, somebody in the 1900s, probably, but. And so why is it sometimes called Hymn of the Soul? Well, so the, The Pearl song itself is a story, it's a narrative. Now, it's got some miraculous and crazy stuff going on in it, but it's. It is at as it is just a story. There's nobody there interpreting things or saying this means this or this should be that. That said, many people have interpreted it, interpreted it as some kind of allegory, whether it's of the soul, you know, going from Earth to some other place or, you know, leaving, you know, leaving material world for spiritual or something else. It certainly can be an allegory. It certainly can mean many of those things. But I'll. To me, it. I don't feel that there is such an absolute kind of allegorical equation, you know, which clearly some people seem to find. You know, they say, oh, well, the dragon equals. Or the snake equals chaos. And well, sure, maybe it does. But reading the story or reading the poem more as a story and appreciate appreciating it as a story, as a narrative, you know, that you can kind of, after you've read it and, you know, then you reflect on the events and think about them. You know, maybe that has some kind of application to your life in an allegory in a, you know, a typological sort of way. But, you know, that's. That's not something. There's not something built in, I don't feel in the text about that. I feel that all. There's a lot more possibility of meaning in the story if we treat it as a story and just a story and, and don't say no, well, it has to be this Gnostic myth or blah, blah, or it has to be, you know, something else. Again, I'm not against any of those kind of meanings. I would say it doesn't mean any of those. But it's not patently Manichean. It's not patently Christian, it's not. Not patently Jewish. So it's. Again, there's no. It's not even really patently religious in any way on the surface. It's a story. So what is the story? The story is of a child. We don't really know how young? But he's definitely pretty young. So he leaves what we learn to be the East. He calls it this a number of times, but the east presumably means Parthia here because his parents or his father is the king, a Parthian king. And so again, the Parthians, this is in Iran, broadly speaking, and further north as well. And up until 224C, I think that's right. And then the Sasanians are. I'm not a historian, but so that's about what time we're talking, you know, first century, second century, something like this, very early third century. And so he, this child is sent away. He doesn't just leave, he leaves his royal, you know, abode, but he's sent away by his parents. Why do they send him? Well, they say that he needs to go all the way to Egypt, which is a really long trip. But he's just a kid. Exactly right. So they have a lot of trust in him. But it's not just the kid. They do send a couple of, you know, people to go along with him, you know, some kind of tutor, pay to go kind of people, but they end up leaving eventually. So, thanks. But anyway, he goes on, gets to Egypt, however old he is. But interestingly, he leaves behind, he's got this very fancy shiny garment, and that's what it's called, it's basically called shiny thing, but it's clearly some kind of garment. Now whether this is like, you know, mystically shiny or if it's like sequiny or gold, you know, got sparkles in it, I. Who knows. But it is shining in some, in, in some way or other. So he leaves this at home. Okay, and this, and this will become important later, but. So he leaves, but he goes to Egypt because his parents say that there, in Egypt there's a pearl that he needs to get. No explanation. No. And it doesn't say like, you know, anything more really about the pearl, just that, you know, kind of it's there, but it's obviously not. Pearls don't tend to just be in easy to grab places. And this one happens to be under the watchful gaze of a, of a. In the Greek text, he's called a dragon, a drakon, and in Syriac he's called a hevya. This is drakon in Greek, dragon. And it means some kind of super, super, super gigantic snake. Okay, now whether or not they have some arms or maybe wings later, that's less certain really, but at minimum, it's a giant snake. Now, in the Syriac word or Syriac text, heavy eye just means snake. This is the normal word for snake. You go outside, you see a snake that's, you know, half a meter long, that's still a heavy. Or if it's three meters long, that's a giant snake. This meter, this snake was presumably bigger than that because it's called. Also scary fearsome. So if you. I mean, most people find snakes scary automatically, but the narrator decides to tell us that they're. That it's scary, too. So anyway, this snake is around it, and he's got to find some way to get it. So anyway, so that's his plan. He gets to Egypt. But while he's there, he kind of is, for whatever reason, sort of interested in everything that's going on in Egypt. He's sort, as he puts it, a little bit led astray by the Egyptians. And he in some way, kind of gets drunk, in a way on their food. And. Yeah, actually, narcotic is better a word to think of than drunk because he gets sleepy. There's a line, it says something like, way down by the heaviness of their food, I went into a deep sleep or fell into a deep sleep. And this deep sleep, I don't know, it's. It seems like not just a. Like a hardcore nap, but more like a Rip Van Winkle situation where, you know, who knows what he saw and all this, but he basically was asleep and he was out down to the Count. Now, again, it's a story. And is he asleep or is it just me? And he's like, sort of so Egyptianized that he's completely forgotten his mission, which is to get this pearl. And it's something along the. You know, with both of those kind of connected together. But what eventually wakes him up from his sleep? His parents, even though they're all the way back in Parthia, they have some kind of a telepathic knowledge about what's going on with their kid, that he's, you know, in trouble in terms of the. Getting the mission done. And so they're like, okay, we got to do something. We got to write a letter. And so they write a short letter, the text of which is included or a version of which is included in the poem. And basically it says, hey, wake up. And it gives two main imperatives. A few times in the letter, it's wake up and remember. So obviously, wake up, get out of your sleep. But also remember what you're there for. Remember the pearl. Remember your folks back home. Remember you're not actually Egyptian, even though you're In Egypt. And so all this serves to actually wake the. Wake the guy up, the. The boy really up. And it's. The letter itself speaks. It. I mean, the text is very clear about this. It like makes noise and kind of talk, recites itself in a way to. To the. To the person. And it's. It's. I don't know, this sort of concern and sending a. Let the concern of the telepathic knowledge and then their response being the concern to send this letter, you know, is just a. I don't know. It's. It's a really cool image to me of, you know, their care has this physical manifestation, the letter which actually flies and speaks. You know, it's not carried by a messenger or anything like that. The letter flies and then talks and does. It does the trick. It wakes. Wakes him up in Egypt. And he goes to the pearl to get the pearl. But of course, there's the issue of snake and what. There's two things you can do, at least two things you can do when you need to deal with a snake guarding a pearl. One, of course, is to kill the snake if you can. The other is to distract it in some way. You know, whether that's by drugs or a spell or music or something like this. In this case, it is a spell. It's not exactly clear what the spell is, but he says, I recited a spell over the snake, over the dragon. Use something like using or based on the names of my family. Okay, so it's something like, you know, instead of saying, you know, in the name of Angel Gabriel or in the name of God or, you know, in this case, it's in the name, excuse me, in the name of my father and my mother and my brother, my second, who is kind of this interesting double who's still back home, but he's not. Doesn't seem quite identical, but clearly very closely related. And so anyway, he's got the sort of the power of his family's names, and he uses this not to kill the snake, but to put the snake to sleep. And so this spell, whatever it is, whatever language it's in, even it works, puts the snake to sleep and he grabs the pearl out from under the snake and goes home. He's no more interested in Egypt after this. And on the way back home, he gets sent his. The shiny garment, you know, that we talked about before that he left his parents, I guess, realize sort of now's the time that he needs this. And who knows, maybe it was too big. I don't know. It's not. It was. It can't be that it was too big, actually, because it says that it was fitted to my size or something. Who knows? It's kind of a question what this thing does. But anyway, they send this shiny garment to him as he's headed back and he meets it and, you know, it's kind of like a very welcome, happy, you know, reunion back sort of with a part of his self, really, it seems. And then basically he comes back home with the pearl. But nothing else is really said about the pearl. I mean, you can just as well call it the. The Letter Song or something because, like, to me, the letter is as important as the pearl or more important in some ways, the shining garment is clearly important in the poem. I mean, it's mentioned several times, but kind of what it does is not exactly clear, at least to me. But anyway, that's a very long statement of what the Pearl Song is, I should say, just because I haven't made it clear yet. The text exists in Syriac in one manuscript only, and it exists in the Acts of Thomas, which is very, very, very, very famous. Sanct. Life. Of course, that text is known in Greek and in Syriac and in some other languages. It's thought to probably have been written in Syriac. Some people think Greek, but it's probably Syriac. And in. There's a number of manuscripts of this text in both Greek and in Syriac, but only in one case for each language. So only one manuscript in Greek, one manuscript in Syriac is there a Pearl Song. All the other manuscripts completely skip over it.
- [30:23]
A
If I understand you correctly, we have lots of attestations of the Acts of Thomas in Greek and Syriac, but in each language there's only one of those versions that includes the Pearl Song. So it's not always an addition. Do you think it was, like, slotted in later at some point because it just kind of fits or how do you think through that kind of curiosity?
- [30:46]
B
No, it's a really good question. I do think it's an addition. It's just hard to imagine that in both languages we've got so many cases of it without the text. And the thing is, if you read it without the Pearl Song, you miss nothing. And in fact, the Pearl Song doesn't add a whole lot. Now, there are ways you can say, oh, well, here's how it fits with the Acts of Thomas and there's several verbal echoes. Well, as you'll see from my commentary, there's verbal echoes from the Pearl Song all over the place. It's not just the Acts of Thomas. So I mean, this text is such that it could fit in a whole lot of places. It could mean, you know, clearly there's a whole lot of the language and some of the story which lines up with both Manichean and some Mandaic texts. But, you know, clearly some Christian hagiographers thought it was cool on both the Greek and Syriac side, you know, so. And there's me, who I don't think the text is Syriac or Manichean or I don't think it's Christian, Manichean, Mandaic or any of those things necessarily. But it was easily usable or adaptable by a lot of different people.
- [31:58]
A
So it's a useful test case to help think through some of the messiness of Late antiquity is kind of what I'm hearing, because it does pick up a lot of different themes. Of course, the trope of a journey to Egypt is something seen in so many different kinds of things. So that doesn't even really help locate it in any kind of way. So that's really interesting to think about its context and how you can open it up and to understand other authors who want to put it in the Acts of Thomas that you're saying, sure, you can see it there. Certainly one ancient reader in Syriac and Greek thought that it fit. So that does matter in some respect. But also we could think about how it connects to all these other different kinds of things. And you can even see that in the text that you assemble about pearls, just how pearls pop up in so many different things and all of this.
- [32:50]
B
Yeah, the other Greek text, which is why. And so the Pearl Song includes the Acts of Thomas versions of the Syriac one and the Greek one. But then there's an 11th century Greek retelling of the Pearl Song. It's not really a translation, but it's in a homily from a guy called Niketas of Thessaloniki, probably 11th century.
- [33:11]
A
But is this in the book?
- [33:13]
B
It's in the book. It's in the book. Same as the other Greek texts. You've got Greek on the left, English on the right. So if, even if you're just a Greek student and you're like, I don't care about Syriac, these two texts, you know, you've got a late ancient text from whatever, second, third century, something like this, and then you got this Byzantine text from the 11th century, which, you know, I mean, if you can read late ancient Greek, you can read this text. It's not, it's just, you know, fancy and florid and, and all. But it's it is a. Like I said, it's in a homily and it's. And again, I call it a retelling. It's not a translation, but it's clearly he's telling the story to people listening to him preach. And unlike in the Pearl song itself in Greek or in Syriac, this person gives a Christian interpretive key sort of at the end of it, which makes sense, it's a homily in a Christian church. But anyway, I just wanted to make clear and the glossary, by the way, for Greek includes both of those texts, not just the late ancient.
- [34:11]
A
So from that you have another case study of another author thinking about the usefulness of thinking through this text in a late ancient kind of context. So you can study the story with your translation, whether you have the Syriac skills or not, or maybe you can use this text to teach yourself Syriac, as you are noting. But then you can also think about again, both its kind of usefulness in understanding the acts of Thomas or its usefulness for a late ancient Greek author to be thinking about what does this story make me think about? Or maybe you can come up with your own things about what it makes you think about. But I love that you're helping us think about. Okay, this book already includes a lot of Syriac and Greek. One thing a reader will surely notice in this book if they spend any time with it, is the expansive range of scripts or writing systems throughout the book. Of course, Syriac is super prominent, a range of other Aramaic dialects or languages and also Greek as we've been discussing. But there's also Coptic, Parthian, Arabic and others. Can you say more about the polyglot nature of the book?
- [35:19]
B
Yeah, this was pretty intentional on my part, both as the author and as half of the editorship. I had some say in it at least. So we want the series as a whole to reflect sort of crossing boundaries and things like this. I mean, that's why you'll see the word trans, which of course means crossing boundaries in Latin in our title of the series. But part of that is about language. And so obviously we've got translations. I mean, that's the built in core thing. You've got a sour. At minimum there's a source text in Greek or Coptic or something and English. Right. But two, like even for even the Pearl song itself, this was a text that was translated from Syriac to Greek or less likely from Greek than Syriac. I think that's very unlikely in fact. But in any case, it was translated in late antiquity. It has been translated into French into German, into English a few times. So it's a text that really exemplifies sort of moving across languages and. And I wanted in my commentary to highlight that even more with some of the language and say, okay, well, we've got this line in the Pearl Song, which sounds a whole lot like this Manichean text, but it's written in Coptic. So obviously I could have just put it in English translation from the Coptic there. But again, languages are cool. We like looking at languages even if we don't know them, right? It's cool to look at, you know, Coptic script or something like this, even if you don't know Coptic. So basically, for all languages that are not English, whether they're modern, whatever, French or German or something, or old languages, every single thing is given in source language and usually in source script, if possible, and in a translation. So you're not going to find some German scholar from 1890 who's quoted without a translation. Okay, so you're going to find bothic. And again, this is, you know, basically a general rule for the series, but I wanted to really, really let you know, sort of these multilingual possibilities show up in the Pearl Song. There's something. There's around 20 languages, I think, quoted, you know, with. Again, with translation always. And, you know, a whole lot of scripts. I don't know how many, but a lot.
- [37:48]
A
And just to clarify, you translated all of this material on your own? No AI was consulted in any of this transl. Just to speak a little bit to.
- [37:59]
B
No, that's absolutely true. No, all of this is. All of these are my translations. The only. I think the only text in the whole book that I. That was. That's not my translation is Emily Wilson's Odyssey, which I just very much liked it and I had just been reading it, so I used her translation for that. But everything else was my Is. Is my translation and not. Not at all as a way to say, oh, no one else has translated this in a suitable way. But. But I wanted to do it as an author, as, you know, part of my work on the book. I mean, part of my research on this was to translate all of this stuff. So that's part of the intended output too, I guess, if that makes sense. It's okay not to be perfect with finances.
- [38:47]
A
Experian is your big financial friend and here to help. Did you know you can get matched.
- [38:52]
B
With credit cards on the app?
- [38:54]
A
Some cards are labeled no Ding decline, which means if you're not approved, they won't hurt your credit scores. Download the Experian app for free today. Applying for no Ding decline cards won't hurt your credit scores if you aren't initially approved. Initial approval will result in a hard inquiry which may impact your credit scores experience. Yeah, I love that you can highlight and think about how language and translation are also an integral part of research rather that that in itself can te teach you so much and that this book both gives that as a gift from you, but then other readers can take that and learn and think about what connections they also see in this story. I love that you're reminding us too, going back to your earlier response about just the immense reverberations of this text across so many different times and spaces and languages. And this book offers not a completely comprehensive because nothing can be, but a really comprehensive study case study in some of these reverberations. I want to also note that in your commentary, similar to the practice of weaving together multiple languages, the footnotes offer an eclectic range and array of conversation partners from the Shangri Las to dense academic volumes. Can you say something about your citation practices and what bringing together so many different types of sources teaches you and what you hope it might teach the reader?
- [40:26]
B
Yeah, thanks. I wanted the commentary to be a little bit more now it's, you know, looks very erudite and learned it and all this. Sure there's lots of citations, lots of languages and all this, but I wanted it to be a little bit more conversational. And by one aspect of that is it's not necessarily limited to academic texts, you know, that we might normally cite. And this is not necessarily something that's going to show up in other books and series, but we do want authors to, you know, in their commentaries especially to feel free to be a little bit creative and, you know, as unconventional as they feel for as free, as unconventional as they feel free being, you know. And so in my case, this meant citing. So obviously I cite a lot of Syriac texts and a lot of, you know, late ancient texts, you know, whether they're also in Greek or Coptic or something. But I don't just limit myself to that. I mean, I cite, I cite some old Aramaic inscriptions. Now these are from centuries before Syriac. Okay, but, you know, just because it's Aramaic still, maybe there's some cool language, you know, that we might find in old Aramaic inscriptions that, you know, even just slightly elucidate something neat and you know, that we find in the in Syriac and the Pearl Song. I mean, even further afield, I cite some Akkadian poems, the Epic of Ansu and Enuma Elish. But it's simply because there are some places in those poems that reflect some scenes very closely, I think, in the Pearl Song, and I quote a couple of Old English poems and one Middle English poem. And there, again, it's because, you know, they're those. All three of those, in fact, highlight sort of intense feelings of isolation, alienation, loneliness. And this is something that the pearlsong guy, the. The prince who sent away, he very clearly experiences when he's there in Egypt because, you know, a. He's sent away from his home, his parents. He's sent away by his parents that is, you know, his, you know, two little helpers who were with him. They eventually scram, you know, and he's by himself again, and he's in a foreign country. So again, I. I just found some language in those similar, you know, reflective or. Yeah, reflective of some of these scenes in the Pearl Song, you know, and I'm not, obviously not saying there's a connection between the Old English thing in Syriac, except for the fact that in 2025, I, as a scholar who was thinking about the Pearl Song, also happened to be thinking about these Old English texts at the same time. And I thought they went in. Well, they ma. They ma. They fit together well, you know, and obviously it's very subjective. I mean, you know. I mean, you know, if you read it, if my sister read it, there's going to be different thoughts. But I wanted in the commentary to share sort of some of mine and, you know, hopefully that can spark something in your, you know, the. The reader's imagination as well. And then other than texts, even far off linguistically and geographically and temporal texts, I quoted some, you know, a number of songs. I love music. So, you know, I. I cite the Mountain Goats, White Snake, Grateful Dead, Toto, and as you mentioned, the Shangri Las. The Shangri Las. Remember Walking in the sand, this song. If you don't know it, look it up on YouTube. And the day of this recitation there, remember walking in the sand. And this. But when they say this sort of imperative of remember, this is like, to me, this was like in the. In the Pearl Song, in the letter from the parents when they're saying, hey, wake up, kid. Remember this stuff. And again, it worked. So again, I think, to me, I mean, that's the fun thing about studying, reading these texts is making these connections with you as the reader in texts that, you know, whether those are songs or poems or lines from movies or Star Trek or an Old English poem, whatever.
- [44:53]
A
I Like that you're talking about your method as kind of placing yourself in the history of telling this story over and over. Right. So both studying, like, how ancients were thinking about or telling different stories, and then also more contemporary kinds of sources. And again, not saying that they were reading these texts or had a sort of desk with all these sources out, but that suddenly that moves away from having to read in the paradigm always of the soul as a kind of allegory, but that you can start to notice other kinds of questions or stories about the human condition of loneliness or distance, or reflecting on the, you know, the felt reality of diaspora, which connects to so much of our present day. And maybe readers can also connect to those feelings in our contemporary space time. And I think your work and that citation kind of opens that up to ask the reader to position themselves and ask, what do I hear when I'm reading this story? You know, if in the sort of mental film that you're producing, what's the soundtrack? And you didn't even create a soundtrack for the book, did you not?
- [46:06]
B
I did, yeah. And it's basically just the several songs, you know, that I quoted before. There were. There were, believe it or not, some lines of songs I didn't put in. So. But it really, I don't know. And the Pearl song, more than some other book or more than some other texts that will be in the. In the series, I'm sure is, to me, it seems really open to inviting, I should say, to these kind of reverberation, noticing these sort of reverberations and reflections. Because, I mean, yes, it is a late ancient text. Yes, it is a Syriac or Greek text, but this is a text that, you know, if you read that story, I mean, even if you don't know anything about Greek or Syriac or later antiquity, you know, if you're even slightly imaginative, there's kind of some cool stuff that might happen in your head when you're thinking them.
- [46:57]
A
Yeah. Thank you so much for sharing. I want to ask, what do you think or why do you think our audience of ancient Drew Review subscribers and Late Antiquity Channel listeners should check out this book? In addition to all the ways maybe others have listening to this interview have maybe already sparked, what do you think it has to offer people interested in Late Antiquity in particular?
- [47:19]
B
One thing I think is just it's a pretty solid reminder of how multilingual Late Antiquity was. You know, obviously, if you're focusing on, you know, a particular area or a particular time, it might mainly be Latin or mainly be Greek. Or mainly be Coptic or mainly be Christian, Palestinian, Aramaic or something. But in most of those cases there's also some other language pretty close by, right? I mean in with Coptic we know that Greek is pretty close by. You know, with again in the first slightly further east you go, there's Aramaic all over the place, mixing various kinds of Aramaic, mixing with Greek. And so this book just in the pearl song itself, but then hopefully too in some of the texts that I cited is a reminder that sort of the translation and you know, linguistic, textual migration was a very, very normal thing. So that's one part of it and two, because I did cite so many late ancient texts from lots of different sources, hopefully people from AJR will recognize a lot of friendly texts and a lot of familiar language, even if they don't know the exact texts. You know, I quote the Bavli, I quote the Palestinian Talmud, I quote a number of Mandaic texts, I quote a number of Manichaean texts, many in Coptic, but also some Parthian ones as well. So there's something there for everyone.
- [49:04]
A
I hope and don't sleep on the appendix about pearl texts where you can encounter lots of different ancient descriptions of how pearls were formed, the right correct sort, sort of environments of their formation and different theorizations of their materiality from a range of sources. I think that was the most delightful section in my personal opinion and I don't want others to miss that. As is a tradition on this channel, we like to ask with a question looking toward the future, I'd like to ask what project are you working on next? Will it still involve translation? What does it look like and what do you hope it teaches?
- [49:47]
B
Yes, translation is at the forefront of both of my current sort of next projects. One, and these are both going to eventually be 4T books. One of these is I'm writing with my co editor Charles Stang and this is the letter to Melania or also known as the Great Letter by Avagrius the and this is this text Vagrius wrote in Greek, but this text is only known in Syriac. So I've prepared a new edition in syriac based on 3 and 3.3 manuscripts and then the next. So that'll have all the same stuff, you know, intro text, translation, glossary and then a commentary. And then the second book is a very, very different one. This one is on cannabis texts in Arabic or Arabic texts on the talk about cannabis. A lot of these are poems, some of these are prose texts, both from kind of a historical but then also a polemical perspective. And so these texts are from 13th to the 15th centuries. So my book will bring together a number of these, certainly not all of them, but most of these have never been translated before into any language as far as I know. So there will be again the Arabic for all of these with English on the right side with glossary and with some commentary. So those are my two sort of main focuses right now.
- [51:28]
A
Lots of exciting material to come and more to learn from the 4T series, including that Fabian Mueller volume on Porphyry, which other listeners of the HAR Channel and Late Antiquity Channel will surely enjoy. I want to thank you so much for your time today. I hope listeners enjoyed this conversation and learning more about this wonderful new book. The Pearl Song, as a reminder, is available as a free PDF on the center for the Study of World Religions website and as a fine quality printed edition via Harvard University Press. Thank you, Adam Bramer McCall for being here today. It's been a pleasure talking with you.
- [52:11]
B
Thank you for having me.