Translation comes from somewhere, the language and literature of the original, but it also goes somewhere, into the language and literature of the translation language. Too often the experts in one know very little about the other. The cliché that only poets can translate poetry is half true. More exactly, only poetry-readers can translate poetry: those familiar with the contemporary poetry of the translation language, the context in which the translation will be read. On the evidence here, Alter seems to know very little about the last hundred years of English-language poetry.
After which follow a good number of bad translations, ranging from the incomprehensible to the hilarious.
Incomprehensible:
Considering that the Psalms are meant to be spoken or sung, many of Alter’s lines are difficult to say: ‘Your throne stands firm from of old,/from forever You are’ (93) is one for elocution class, and the KJ ‘Make haste, O God, to deliver me; make haste to help me, O Lord’ (70) has been turned into a stammer: ‘God, to save me,/Lord, to my help, hasten!’
Hilarious:
Inversion, the possessive, the unpronounceable and an unfortunate word-choice all converge in Psalm 18, where he transforms a dull line in the King James (‘As soon as they hear of me, they shall obey me: the strangers shall submit themselves unto me’) into: ‘At the mere ear’s report they obeyed me,/aliens cringed before me.’
The review follows up this criticism with counterexamples of the positive linguistic influence of the King James Version. The knock on the KJV (one I occasionally agree with) is that it was written in a language no one ever spoke, requiring, by way of consequence, much familiarity with written English before one can approximate it ...
(parenthetical note: I still remember well the one kid in my Sunday School class who owned a KJV Bible, and that we got into the habit of skipping him when reading Bible stories, largely because he could make nothing out of what he was to read. I can see this even now in my Bible study, where one must either have spent a long time with the KJV or else a good deal of advance notice to read it well. The lines do not scan in the manner of modern English, which makes reading straight more difficult. The trade-off point comes at memorization: a passage from the KJV is full of proper cadences, which, read correctly, remain in the mind, which is why I can remember large parts used in various liturgical services I've attended, even though it's been over three years since I last regularly had that experience.)
...but the reviewer makes the excellent counterpoint that the KJV translation of the Psalms lays down much of English's idiomatic poetic language.
Well worth your time, I must say.
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