Hey Joe, let’s make a new translation of the Bible.
Great idea, Sara — who will we get to write it?
Let’s get the worst writers in the university to pen it
Excellent idea — I know just the department — Biblical Studies.(From: Iyov: The Shonda of the NJB Psalms)
John Hobbins is shooting down Bible translations over at his blog. King James doesn’t scan. Robert Alter misses the mark. I agree with his orneriness but for different reasons. These translations don’t work because they’re not written in an English that I understand. What in the world is a buckler? Is it something on a shoe? What is a haft? Twice a quarter?
It is entirely possible to translate the Psalms without missing the mark and one fellow who has done it is actually a university/Biblical studies type: Eugene Peterson. His translation of Psalm 35 is excellent. I read it with pleasure. I got the point. The English didn’t trip me up but rather it pumped me up.
Take this passage:
Make them like cinders in a high wind, with Yahweh’s angel working the bellows.
Make their road lightless and mud-slick, with Yahweh’s angel on their tails.
That, my friends, is English poetry. It doesn’t scan like the Hebrew but that wasn’t it’s aim. And that’s where John Hobbins is missing the mark. He is judging English translations based on scansion. I don’t know of anyone who’s attempting a metrical translation of English that approximates the Hebrew. John is welcome to try but I can guarantee that the results will be atrocious.
I love Emily Dickinson. But the Psalms we need today should be written by the next Sylvia Plath.
What we need today is a Death Metal Psalmist. Someone who can take the anguish and goth of the Hebrew Psalms and express it in thudding drums and bass and the howling guitars of Heavy Metal. Hard Rock music is the closest thing to the Psalms in English today. It seethes with anger, violence, and pleading to a God who shrugs at our suffering.
The closest I ever felt to the Psalms was one day at the library when I accidentally checked out a CD by Soundgarden. My pulse raced. My mind swirled. I felt like I was listening to the the screams of souls whose hell is on earth. If our translations can capture a little of that then we’ve hit the mark.
Brilliant! I’ve said this same thing often myself. I had a music teacher once say that all “metal” was not conducive for worship. I then pointed out the incongruity of singing “A fire goes before him, and burns up all his enemies. The hills melt like wax at the presence of the Lord” to a “show tune.” It would make much more sense to sing a song that is ultimately about the righteous reign of God (poured out in judgment) to a metal rift. There is a group from the 90’s called Betrayal that had an album titled “Renaissance by Death.” The album is quite a piece of work. I remember in particular their song about Elijah and the prophets of Baal. It just made sense that the frenzy of that episode be sung to metal as well.
Rock on!
Dude. Totally.
Very nice post, David.
Of course, the Message is not a translation, but a paraphrase. By definition, it makes stuff up as it goes. Paradoxically, however, a paraphrase sometimes does a better job of translation in a holistic sense than a straight-up translation.
But I think it’s absurd to criticize a translation because it contains words you don’t know, like “buckler.” So what? If you have the time, learn something new, for Pete’s sake.
You are confusing, I think, intelligibility of all words and idioms with “Gestalt” intelligibility. Let me illustrate with an analogy. There is a poem that begins:
Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.
The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,
In hopes that St Nicholas soon would be there.
The children were nestled all snug in their beds,
While visions of sugar-plums danced in their heads.
And mamma in her ‘kerchief, and I in my cap,
Had just settled our brains for a long winter’s nap.
It ends:
He sprang to his sleigh, to his team gave a whistle,
And away they all flew like the down of a thistle.
But I heard him exclaim, ‘ere he drove out of sight,
“Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good-night!”
My 5 year old Anna loves that poem, and knows line after line by heart. Does she understand it? Of course she does. She likes to point out to me that the poem forgets Rudolph. But if I ask her, “do you know what the down of a thistle is?”, she doesn’t. She doesn’t know what a thistle is, or what the down of a thistle is.
A faithful translation of the Bible, I contend, will be like that. It will not, based on field testing, remove examples of ‘down of a thistle.’ It will retain them, perhaps with a footnote to help readers out, trusting, in any case, that the literature will be read in a context in which there are people who believe enough that the Bible is the Word of God that they will take the time to find out what a buckler is.
Wow, John!
Anna really does know! Until she spoke up, I never really knew what you were talking about (and neither, it seems, did David).
Of course, “Down of a Thistle” is that book of poems written so beautifully, not by Sylvia Plath, but by Margaret Esse Danner, in which she asks that question, How far is it from Beale Street to Benin City?
Here’s a couple of Africa(n) Psalms by Danner:
The Lady Executive Looks at a Mangbetu Palm Wine Jug
But though it seems to stand full flared,
It has long been denied. Its role upset.
This womb is neither warm nor wet.
This African jug is dry.
Look, see, there are no flowers here,
No plunging stems or roots
From which the living buds can shoot.
Africa, Drifting Through Me Sings
Africa: I turn
to meet this vast land of bittersweet.
Africa; whose creviced walls
cradle myriad waterfalls.
Africa; where black men stride
toward freedom’s ever inching tide.
Africa; the paradox
do I pry Pandora’s box
Africa: I read these things
her blood drifting through me, sings.
There is a certain power in euphony even when it’s nonsense. Reminds me of the Makhuwa youth choir that was really grooving to a changani song about God. Only problem is they thought they were singing about the devil. It’s one thing to grapple with ancient concepts but having another layer of archaic vocabulary like buckler and haft is not bringing us closer to the original. JK, I like that poetry.
John, you may be
But I fear that in most places your trust is misplaced. At least there may be some such people in most places, and maybe even a lot of them in a few places. But I am more interested in getting the Bible read by people who may not even believe that the Bible is the Word of God, and even if they do they share with me in having absolutely no idea why that fact means that they should “take the time to find out what a buckler is”, take that time out from learning important things about God and from serving him.
Amazingly enough, there are a lot of christian bands, from power to death metal, from gothic to doom offering a huge variety of modern psalms. On “Listening Passionately”, my audioblog, I have made a couple of posts on the link betweeen worship and metal. Here are the links: http://listeningpassionately.blogspot.com/2008/04/northern-praise.html
http://listeningpassionately.blogspot.com/2008/05/praising-jesus-christ-in-different-way.html, and http://listeningpassionately.blogspot.com/2008/05/praising-jesus-christ-in-different-way_02.html.
I guess Pantokrator, Saviour Machine and Slechtvalk would stand out. The “Mercy Lord” by Antestor is a really old (1994) doom track from their first record. The Psalm 51 is the inspiration behind the track.
Thanks javejor. Although in general that’s not my cup of tea I do like to listen to that stuff once in a while as an antidote to insipid and dull ccm.
David and Peter,
I don’t think you two are self-consistent in your objections to language like “buckler.” David, if you stuck to NLT, you would be consistent. It removes “‘buckler” and replaces it with “armor.” But you get bored with NLT. I can tell. That’s why you quote The Message instead. Well, the same people, more or less, who don’t know what a “buckler” is, don’t know what “bellows” are, and probably have a hard time with “cinders,” too.
Peter, TNIV changed NIV “buckler” to “armor.” Obviously you approve (I don’t). Thankfully, however, TNIV is not consistent and preserves the hard theological words no one understands without much effort, intellectual and spiritual. Words like “atone,” “justify,” and “sanctify.” If you were consistent, you would be touting CEV.
In principle, I’m fine with CEV. Thing is, most of the people in the Bible Belt I think should read CEV (that’s where there reading level is) prefer KJV. Go figure.
Quite a bit of the poetry in the Bible was no doubt difficult, with some words and phrases unclear to the non-literate, right from the beginning. But God, I guess, was mistaken in doing that. He should have field-tested every word and syntactical figure, and if Shmuel ben Elkanah didn’t get the meaning first try, down with it.
Anyway, I don’t care how much you dumb down the language of Scripture. Dumbed down or smarted up, with the help of the Holy Spirit, anyone can understand the principal message of the Bible. On the other hand, the Holy Spirit, in my experience, leads people into community, grafts “supernatural” gifts onto “natural” ones, builds on intellectual effort rather than make light of it, and, when all is said and done, points us to the passage, “and a little child shall lead them.” But you guys put the cart before the horse.
In my experience, people often “graduate” from a translation like GNB to a harder translation like NRSV. Is your experience really that different? As for the Message, yes, a lot of people love it in my neck of the woods. But it does not replace NRSV, NIV, or whatever other translation they use. It supplements it.
Hi David. Well, of course, music is a matter of taste. And don´t be afraid, I´m not only listening to metal, but still, I really enjoy it and God has used it in many ways in me. Given the fact that you mentionned the wish for “heavy metal psalms”, I just wanted to point out that those things actually do exist.
What’s “Yahweh’s angel”?
Google says it’s this and shows it as that.
Does Petersen say something else? “God’s angel“?
Make them like cinders in a high wind,
with God’s angel working the bellows.
Make their road lightless and mud-slick,
with God’s angel on their tails.
Out of sheer cussedness they set a trap to catch me;
And what is this “sheer cussedness” that they’re talking about?
John, I would prefer to get rid of “justify” etc as well. I don’t consider TNIV an ideal translation for all. But it is good for someone like me who knows what “justify” means but not “buckler”. Well, it means “armour”, does it? In that case, why didn’t they say so the first time?
Bible Belt people prefer KJV because they don’t want a translation they can understand which might then require them to change their lives.