KOCHI: ‘March 31, 2020.’ Immanuel Henry, 69, tells you with a soft smile about the deadline he has set for his latest ‘project.’ The project is deceptively simple: copying the entire German Bible - both the Old and New Testaments - by hand. There are certain conditions that Immanuel has set for himself. The end product should be a twin to the original, down to the last colon, comma and full-stop. And, no, Immanuel does not speak a word of German.
‘’I’m learning on the go. Language is not the problem, concentration is,” he says, hunched over a writing board at his Jawahar Nagar residence. A well-thumbed copy of the Die Bibel sporting a pale green cover is kept open by his side. He’s covered most of Genesis, but the German edition is 1,480 pages long. When Immanuel completes his ‘hand-scribed’ copy, it too will be 1,480 pages long, resembling the original in every minute way. The only difference being that his will be hand-written, the way they did it before the invention of the printing press.
German Bible
And if you thought the retired BSNL sub-divisional engineer is indulging a whim, think again. He completed the handwritten copies of the Old and New Testaments in Tamil in 2011. It had taken him five years. Thrilled by his success, he started on the Malayalam Bible. This time the handwritten version was ready in four years. Recently, much to his delight, the Bible Society of India published his Tamil version. Immanuel hails from Nagercoil, but has been living in Thiruvananthapuram for past several decades now.
In 2006, he came across a newspaper article about a handwritten Tamil Bible that was being displayed in the city. “But that Bible was jointly written by 348 people and the pages were 1.5 ft x 2.5 ft in size. It was also rewritten on lined paper,” he recalls. The very same day he launched his own project. But why German? “I looked at many European languages. The Bible societies in England and Norway were not cooperating. Somebody has to proof-read what I have written. I sent a few pages which I’d copied to the German society and they said there were no mistakes in what I’d written,” he said.
He uses a German dictionary on his smartphone and keeps a scrap book on German words with their meanings in English. By March 31, 2020, he also hopes to be in adept in German. “It’s all self-study. The German used in my copy is 400-years-old. So I’ll be proficient in the 400-year-old German by the time I finish this,” he says with a laugh.
He covers two pages a day, and copying each page exactly as it is is painstaking work. For all his projects, Immanuel has used a .5 Cello Gripper ball pen. Initially, he preferred blue ink, but now uses black as it is easier to scan. The job he has chosen for himself is tough on the eyes, but so far his sight has not been affected. “I use glasses, of course. But so far I’ve had no problem. By God’s grace,” he adds.
