Solomon Caesar Malan

He was the first of a dozen children born to his gifted father, Dr. Henri Abraham César Malan (1787–1864) and his Swiss wife, Salomé Georgette Jeanne Schönberger (1790-unknown).

[4] This situation of social alienation and counter-cultural religious assertiveness profoundly shaped the early years and educational training of the first son, César Jean Salomon.

During these formative years, César Jean Salomon also was taught botany, and because of his father's gift of a rather sophisticated workshop for his bright son, he learned skills in carpentry, bookbinding, and printing.

From his earliest youth, he manifested a remarkable faculty for the study of languages, but it was the romantic relationship he developed with Mary Mortlock that would reshape his destiny, move him to leave his father's home, and adopt the English name, Solomon Caesar Malan.

[7] Unquestionably, the young Malan took up his opportunity to study in Oxford with a vigour and intensity driven by both an insatiable desire to learn all that he could and to please those who had agreed to support him and his wife.

Unfortunately, this led to his losing sight in his left eye during those years, a threat to his gifted scholarly intentions, but one that did not ultimately obstruct either his personal motivation to learn or his intense self-imposed disciplines.

For just over sixty years he devoted himself to this study, ultimately donating the huge manuscript that he had produced at the end of his life to the Bodleian Library in Oxford in 1894, just a few months before his death.

[11] A young faculty member eager to serve, and to throw himself into his work with an intensity that had previously cost him the sight in his left eye, Malan added to his duties as a lecturer also his musical talents on organ, the responsibilities of leading chapel, and was also made the Secretary to the Bengal Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society.

[12] This traumatic context of Malan's short-lived tenure as a missionary educator in Calcutta should not be understated or overlooked, because his acquisition of living and ancient "eastern languages" began in earnest during this period.

Having learned of her death while in South Africa for his second period of recuperation, Malan made arrangements for the care of his sons, and worked out his grief in part by a means that would become a repeated pattern in his later years: obtaining permission to travel internationally.

[17] After serving as a subordinate priest for several years, Malan was offered in 1845 the vicarate in Broadwindsor, Dorset, one that included a sizeable home and provided a handsome income that could house his growing family.

Having settled into this ministry along with his family, Malan remained affiliated as vicar of this countryside congregation for four decades, a period he once referred to as his own "forty years in the wilderness.

"[18] In spite of this self-deprecating reference to Broadwindsor and his ministry there, Malan was enabled to do many more things that his polymath interests prompted him to pursue while there than if he had been, for example, a professor in Oxford.

These included translations from ancient Christian sources, various architectural and artistic productions, and extended into biblical studies as well as proverbial literature in as many languages as he could learn from texts that he was able to obtain from a relatively wide range of locations.

[22] In his magnum opus, the three-volume work entitled Original Notes on the Book of Proverbs (1889-1893), Malan demonstrated various levels of what could be assessed as "general competence" in reading and translating proverbial literature into English from at least fifty-four different languages.

[24] Public recognition of his talents as a linguist and his wide-ranging contributions as a Biblical scholar was confirmed through the University of Edinburgh, who presented him with an honorary doctorate for these achievements in 1880.

This is despite having to work with ancient translations in "Syrian, Ethiopic, Armenian, Sahidic, Mephitic, Gothic, Georgian, Sclavonic [sic], Anglo-Saxon, Arabic, and Persian.

[29] A second area of critically insightful evaluations that Malan published had to do with the use of various theological terms in biblical translations within Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Mongolian renderings as they were found in versions produced in the mid-19th century.

[30] Two other critical advances in biblical scholarship have been recently highlighted through studies of Malan's three-volume magnum opus, Original Notes on the Book of Proverbs (1889-1893).

He did this by means of his substantial Hebrew scholarly assessments, by reference to the Chaldean Targum, and versions of the biblical proverbial texts in Arabic, Armenian, Coptic and Syriac.

[31] The second critical advance within Malan's magnum opus is his recognition of a series of ancient Egyptian proverbial texts with those found in a section he highlighted from Proverbs 22:17 to 24:22.

From his own assessment of these alternative traditions of Christianity, he considered them not to be heretical (which was the general attitude of many in his day), but worthy of recognition and having creatively produced spiritual literature that he felt could be edifying for Anglican priests and their parishes.

The collections of birds' eggs held at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum show that he had an eye for natural details and a nuanced way of categorization.

Malan's studies of linguistic learning, hyperpolyglossia,[54] and aspects of supposed autistic personality traits casts uncertainty about his social skills.

One of his teachers who taught the younger Swiss student Syriac, proclaimed, "God must have made his brain of a brick form the Tower of Babel.

"[57] He was an unusually gifted man who was driven not only by an insatiable linguistic desire to understand human expressions of wisdom but also by a profoundly Christian vision of reality that curtailed and redirected many of his more unpalatable autistic habits.

Solomon Caesar Malan's linguistic explorations clearly outpaced his ability to bring a thoroughly critical assessment to that which he was learning from the study of comparative wisdom sayings.

[62] He did not always comprehend the complexities of the texts he read (especially in the case of the Mahābhārata),[63] and sometimes he tended to internalize his understanding of certain passages or phrases in terms of his Christian theology and its concomitant worldview.

This did not happen often, but it is manifest in various places within the published version of his magnum opus that make some of his English renderings of foreign language texts awkward to read.

These shortcomings should not eclipse what Malan was able to understand and apply to his evaluations of translations of biblical texts in East Asian languages, as well as expressions of Eastern Christian traditions.