Psalm 68: A literary translation
- A truly literary translation will suggest the foreignness of the original without being incomprehensible.
- A literary translation will not be literary in ways that the original is not.
I’d like to riff on those two maxims looking at Psalm 68:35.
O God, [thou art] terrible out of thy holy places: the God of Israel [is] he that giveth strength and power unto [his] people. Blessed [be] God. (KJV)
Awesome is God in his sanctuary,
the God of Israel;
he gives power and strength to his people. (NRSV)
The KJV is unnecessarily foreign sounding in this verse. God is not terrible! In Jacobean English that might have been a perfectly good way to say what the Hebrew is suggesting: God fills his enemies with terror.
NRSV also fails in using the word “awesome.” In modern English, mountains are awesome. And, like, Lord of the Rings was like, totally awesome, you know? “Awesome” is a misleading translation.
The NRSV sounds better to modern ears. It also looks better to modern eyes. Those [brackets] are [really] annoying. And most editions of the KJV have very crude formatting and layout. The NRSV improves over the RSV in this regard.
Despite sounding better, the NRSV flubs up on something that the translators of the Authorized Version got right. “Awesome is God” is not natural English. It has a nice ring to it and sounds sort of poetic, but the Hebrew behind this translation is not poetic. Instead it is standard Hebrew syntax in which the verb precedes the subject. So, a translation of this verse that matched the literary quality of the original would simply say, “God is awesome” or better yet, “God is awe-inspiring.”
I’m willing to bet that many Praise & Worship choruses are poetic for ungrammatical reasons. Holy is the Lord. Worthy is the Lord. Great is the Lord. They all have a nice sound but the original language behind them is more plain.
There are other curious features of the opening clause in Psalm 68:35. Who does “your” refer to? And why are “sanctuaries” plural? A literary translation would at least allude to that foreignness or explicitly mention other translation options in a footnote.
Doug at Metacatholic is musing on literary translations along similar lines: Literary translation of a non-literary text
And thanks to John Hobbins for reviewing my thesis before I made a fool of myself in public.
Of course that depends on the target audience.
Indeed. But do we know in what ways the original of Psalm 68 was literary? Yes, it is poetry, which implies being literary in some sense. But its particular obscurities are very likely more to do with its age than its deliberately literary style. And my argument that we don’t know enough about ancient Hebrew to judge whether something was considered to be in a literary style or not applies a fortiori to this archaic poem from a period when we know almost nothing, outside itself and a few other poems, about Hebrew literature (if we can talk about that without anachronism) and other forms of the language.
KJV is simply inaccurate here, for a modern English speaking audience. Its foreignness is that of 16th-17th century England, not of Israel 3000 years earlier.
“Awesome”, however, has a very different meaning, very appropriate here, for British English speakers – although we have become familiar with the much weakened American sense.
My edition of NRSV has “very crude formatting and layout”. These are matters for publishers, not of translation.
A good point, which can be generalised to much of what is claimed to be “literary translation”.
Peter wrote: Indeed. But do we know in what ways the original of Psalm 68 was literary?
I am right with you on this point. It is entirely possible that 68 was written in a consciously archaic style. It is just as likely that it was written in ordinary prose but referring to events that will forever be obscure to us. A literary translation has as much potential to deceive the modern reader as a common-language translation.
Even so, sometimes I’d like to read a Bible with a higher reading level than the CEV. And the TNIV and ESV both leave me flat so I’d be happy to discover another option. I’m just now getting into the REB but despite my being a flaming Anglophile (look at the company I keep!), it is just a bit too… How can I say this? When I read it, I can hear Tony Blair’s voice in my head. Long term that could have a disastrous effect on my faith!
Oh dear, you’ll have to avoid REB. Fortunately I don’t hear George W’s voice in the American (but slightly Anglicised) Bibles I mostly read.
Would you want your Bible to have a higher reading level than the CEV even if someone could prove that the original didn’t have a higher reading level?
Good question. I’d want Hebrews to sound more scholarly than Mark and Psalms to sound more poetic than Judges. I’d like to hear the clash of swords in Nahum and the murmur of love in SOS.
Agreed. I was just afraid you wanted Mark to sound scholarly, not like it does in CEV, although the original is not at all scholarly.