![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
* Or, at least, vaguely related ramble. :o)
If anyone has an hour to fill, here is an amusing and erudite talk on God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible.
Obviously, the speaker is a historian and knows more than I, but I did find myself disagreeing with him in a few places. For a start, I was surprised to see he looked up to James I as an intellectual. The impression I'd got of James was that he was a boor whose complete lack of empathy with the Elizabethan court was exemplified by his beheading of Sir Walter Raleigh, and whose lack of religious tolerance (compared to Elizabeth, who had pursued it, having seen England torn apart by religious warfare during her sister's reign) was exemplified by his persecution of the crypto-Jewish community, and surge in public burnings for witchcraft.
I also disagree with him about what is desired in a translation of the Bible. Sometimes, majesty is indeed what is called for, and the KJV is indeed preeminent in its beauty of language. But, far from the Bible's being about the irruption of the Other into people's lives justifying the use of language inserting a distance between the reader and what they are reading about, I would say that the Bible is often about ordinary people, and, outside of the prophetic books generally uses ordinary language, and should therefore be translated accordingly.
Of course, this rule is subject to context: where the Bible is to be considered as an ancient document, for example. (In my story of the showdown between the prophet Elijah and King Ahab I deliberately went for a more archaic style where Elijah quoted the Pentateuch (pace Wellhausen et al.—my story (tacitly) presupposed that at least some of the material in the Torah was already ancient by the time of Elijah).)
The curious thing is that this approach of mine to translation of a reversal of the opinion I held twenty years ago: when the Singer's Prayer Book Committee was then soliciting opinions in updating the translation to a modern one for the centenary edition of the Singer's Prayer Book, I was opposed to it, preferring the KJVness of the old translation.
I still like it, actually; I just don't hold that it's always appropriate.
If anyone has an hour to fill, here is an amusing and erudite talk on God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible.
Obviously, the speaker is a historian and knows more than I, but I did find myself disagreeing with him in a few places. For a start, I was surprised to see he looked up to James I as an intellectual. The impression I'd got of James was that he was a boor whose complete lack of empathy with the Elizabethan court was exemplified by his beheading of Sir Walter Raleigh, and whose lack of religious tolerance (compared to Elizabeth, who had pursued it, having seen England torn apart by religious warfare during her sister's reign) was exemplified by his persecution of the crypto-Jewish community, and surge in public burnings for witchcraft.
I also disagree with him about what is desired in a translation of the Bible. Sometimes, majesty is indeed what is called for, and the KJV is indeed preeminent in its beauty of language. But, far from the Bible's being about the irruption of the Other into people's lives justifying the use of language inserting a distance between the reader and what they are reading about, I would say that the Bible is often about ordinary people, and, outside of the prophetic books generally uses ordinary language, and should therefore be translated accordingly.
Of course, this rule is subject to context: where the Bible is to be considered as an ancient document, for example. (In my story of the showdown between the prophet Elijah and King Ahab I deliberately went for a more archaic style where Elijah quoted the Pentateuch (pace Wellhausen et al.—my story (tacitly) presupposed that at least some of the material in the Torah was already ancient by the time of Elijah).)
The curious thing is that this approach of mine to translation of a reversal of the opinion I held twenty years ago: when the Singer's Prayer Book Committee was then soliciting opinions in updating the translation to a modern one for the centenary edition of the Singer's Prayer Book, I was opposed to it, preferring the KJVness of the old translation.
I still like it, actually; I just don't hold that it's always appropriate.
