Long ago, I had a simple but memorable experience in graduate school.

For some long-forgotten reason, the professor in a seminar on early Arabic poetry suddenly commented on Edward Fitzgerald’s celebrated Victorian translation from the Persian “Rubaiyat” of Omar Khayyam. It was, he said, perhaps the worst, most inaccurate, most dishonest translation ever done from a Middle Eastern language. No English stanza actually matches any actual Persian stanza.

That afternoon, by coincidence, I participated in a small seminar on classical Persian poetry. I was the only person there who had attended the morning’s Arabic seminar. Suddenly, the professor turned his attention to Fitzgerald’s version of the “Rubaiyat.” It was, he said, perhaps the finest translation ever done from a Middle Eastern language. While not strictly accurate, he remarked, Fitzgerald had created a great poem in English that brilliantly conveyed the sense, mood, and feel of the Persian original.

I think that both professors were right. Beyond simple descriptions (e.g., “The house is big”) and straightforward commands (e.g., “Shut the door!”), the richer a text is, literarily and conceptually, the harder it is to speak of a single “correct” translation for it.

In his intriguing new book “Changes in Languages: From Nephi to Now,” Brian Stubbs provides a simple but instructive example of one reason for this:

Suppose you read the sentence “The undesirable element was removed from the bar” in isolation, divorced from any context. You might immediately assume — I did — that it refers to a bouncer ejecting a rowdy drunk from a tavern. But this isn’t necessarily so. Perhaps a lab technician purified an unwanted chemical pollutant from an ingot or bar of metal. Maybe a composer removed a quarter note from a bar of music. Maybe an attorney was disbarred. Perhaps a piece of browned lettuce was taken from the salad bar. Conceivably, it’s a candy company that, in the wake of a national survey, dropped an ingredient from its best-selling chocolate bar.

Without context and cultural information, many radically different possibilities exist. How should a translator handle such ambiguities? One way to do so might be to expand the translation a bit beyond simple literalism (e.g., to render “bar” as “bar association” or to replace “undesirable element” with “unwanted pollutant”).

We always lack full context and cultural information for foreign, ancient texts.

Sometimes, though, a translation inescapably shrinks a text’s meaning. To choose a famous example, in Goethe’s “Faust,” (1.3), Faust struggles to translate John 1:1. “In the beginning was the Word,” says the King James Bible. But “Logos” can also mean or imply “logic,” “reason,” “discussion,” “argument,” an intermediary divine being (in John’s contemporary, the Middle Platonic Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria), or even, perhaps, a council. English “word” simply doesn’t contain all those senses. No single word can. Something — perhaps much — is lost.

Or, alternatively, something might be added. Perhaps something misleading. For instance, one popular translation of Friedrich Nietzsche’s “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” renders that philosopher’s reference to “die Leiden Zarathustras” — in German, simply, “the sufferings of Zarathustra” — as “the Passion of Zarathustra,” thus connecting Zarathustra with Christ. It’s not actually wrong, but the term is too specific. This is interpretation, not just translation. Still, I’ve seen discussions of Nietzsche that have used the translator’s word, which isn’t Nietzsche’s, to argue for Zarathustra as a “Christ figure.”

Here’s a scriptural illustration:

"For wheresoever the carcase is," says King James Matthew 24:28, "there will the eagles be gathered together."

A friend once described a Sunday School class discussing that passage. "What country," the teacher asked, "has an eagle as its symbol?" "The United States!" the class members answered, which demonstrated that Jesus Christ’s prophecy pertains specifically to America.

Unfortunately, though, Americans aren’t the only people with an eagle as a national symbol. Eagles appear on the flags of Mexico and Zambia and on the coats of arms of Austria, Russia, Ghana, Egypt, Poland, Germany and Nigeria. An eagle appeared on Roman military standards and symbolized Hitler's Third Reich. Moreover, eagles aren’t carrion birds; they don’t typically gather around carcasses. The passage almost certainly refers to vultures, not eagles.

When people ask me whether the Book of Mormon is a literal translation from the plates, I tell them that, lacking those plates, we can’t possibly know. But I also tell them that there’s really no such thing as a “literal translation.” And we probably wouldn’t want one, anyway. It might be at least partly incomprehensible.

Daniel Peterson teaches Arabic studies, founded BYU’s Middle Eastern Texts Initiative, directs MormonScholarsTestify.org, chairs mormoninterpreter.com, blogs daily at patheos.com/blogs/danpeterson, and speaks only for himself.