Entangled Languages: The Pearlsong and the 4T Series
By Adam Bremer-McCollum, CSWR Research Associate in Texts and Translations of Transcendence and Transformation. Edited by Aaron Michael Ullrey.
The following Research Reflection is part of an ongoing series spotlighting the academic study of religions.
My recent publication, The Pearlsong, the first volume in the Center for the Study of World Religion’s new book series Texts and Translations of Transcendence and Transformation (4T, for short), features at least 20 entangled languages and 13 different scripts (or alphabets), from the starting point of an ancient Syriac poem and its two Greek versions. The 4T series features premodern visionary and mystical texts in both new English translations and their source languages. We are curating a book series that welcomes such a package of philological possibility because the worlds we encounter in ancient texts are rarely monolingual. The series embraces sources with versions in multiple languages; sources surviving in quotes, rephrases, and fragmentary references in other languages; and even texts where an ancient translation into another language is the only trace.
Anti-monolingual books are also fun to read—“intellectually stimulating” if you prefer a more serious-sounding descriptor. Watching narratives, images, and idioms flow from one language to another and back again can be fascinating. It can also be mundane. But there’s always change and activity to captivate your attention and keep you amused in one way or another. Even if you can’t read the source language, a text can show something beautiful or otherwise special in its vocabulary, script, and other language-specific characteristics.
4T’s The Pearlsong was published in July 2025. It’s focused on a Syriac poem and two Greek versions in prose from the Late Ancient and Byzantine periods. I just finished typesetting the next volume in the series, which will be published before the end of 2025: CSWR Postdoctoral Fellow Fabien Muller’s Porphyry of Tyre on Theology and Theurgy, featuring Greek and Latin texts.
We have taken special care that the books in the series are a pleasure for the eyes to read and the hands to hold. The series’ design and its feel are intentional. The books will finely adorn your shelves and are comfortable to hold when you read them, not sacrificing one aspect for the other. Produced with great attention to layout and typography and accompanied by interpretive aids, the 4T main texts are displayed with the source language on the left page and English translations on the right. The printer and cover designer produced a stunning volume in The Pearlsong, with a sturdy letter-laden dustjacket and a cover emblazed with a pearl-and-serpent image. The freely available, digital publication displays the same rigor and attention to aesthetics.
In addition to the main texts in Syriac and Greek, and their corresponding translations, the 4T edition of The Pearlsong includes a commentary filled with entangled translations of text excerpts in an array of languages. Curious language learners will find Syriac-English and Greek-English glossaries after the texts. One appendix collects a slew of short texts about pearls in Syriac, Coptic, Arabic, and other languages. Another appendix includes two long Syriac extracts from the Acts of Thomas, the eventual hagiographic home for the poem. All the sources, mostly in non-Latin scripts, draw upon a panoply of visually striking writing systems, carefully reproduced for the series.
I invite you to The Pearlsong for its linguistic and textual entanglement, but also for its fantastic story elements: a giant snake guarding a special pearl, a magic sleeping spell, a missive that flies and speaks, and a shining garment that grants a kind of reflective self-insight. Among its diverse interpretations, the tale has been considered an allegory depicting the soul’s journey home from exile. Whatever it may mean, the story gives the imagination open spaces to roam. Ursula K. Le Guin notes in her 1974 essay “Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?” that imaginative fiction is fun to read, and these stories encourage readers to challenge the way things are in the “real world.” Like the readers, authors, translators, and homilists of the past, new readers of The Pearlsong will continue to construe a novel array of meanings as they roam through the text.
If you’re looking for an engaging story, for languages and texts and scripts caroming off each other, for fine paper and beautiful book covers, then The Pearlsong is the book for you this fall. And keep an eye out for further entries in the 4T series, a growing collection of fascinating, mind-opening texts in a bevy of languages, a place where scholars and translators have room to wander, and where readers will find strange, old voices, sometimes in unexpectedly familiar strains. The 4T series brings entangled texts, images, and languages to readers and learners new and old in a fulsome linguistic setting, with plenty of chances for philological fun along the way.