Preface to Baḥya Ibn Paqūda’s Duties of the Heart (I)

In this introduction to his translation of the first book of Baḥya Ibn Paqūda’s The Book of Direction to the Duties of the Heart, Judah Ibn Tibbon reflects on Arabic-to-Hebrew translations, identifying challenges endemic to all translation projects as well as the specific difficulties of bringing precise and philosophical Arabic prose into Hebrew. He criticizes unnamed translators who deviated from his preferred approach or were otherwise deficient in his eyes. Judah first translated only this part of Baḥya’s work, at the request of the Provençal communal leader Meshullam ben Jacob and his son Asher; Meshullam was perhaps drawn to the theological argumentation of the first book. Judah felt that Solomon Ibn Gabirol’s much shorter text on ethics, The Improvement of Moral Qualities, would replace or better achieve the ethical goals of the rest of Baḥya’s work. This was Judah’s first work of translation. Bracketed interpolations summarize elided text.