WHAT COMMITTEE HATH WROUGHT
Miles, John A. Jr.
BOOKS WHAT COMMITTEE HATH WROUGHT JOHN A. MILES, JR. The English Bible, 1534-1859 PETER LEVI Eerdmans, $6.95 Recalling that our word Bible is a Greek plural become an English singular, we may...
...And one perhaps nearing its end...
...Without performance, no new translation, however meritorious, can hope to vanquish its rivals...
...With shaking and stirring he beateth upon the earth, and will not stand still at the voice of the trumpet...
...I could hope for no better fate for this small anthology of versions than that it should suggest something similar if radical work ever begins again on an English Bible (12-13...
...On the contrary, the history of Bible translation, like the history of Bible composition, seems to suggest that a masterpiece of this baffling sort can only be produced by committee...
...the following from Broughton's Job: Canst thou give to the horse courage...
...and from the translation of Hugh Brough-ton, a scholar who greeted the Authorized Version with "a sadness that will grieve me while I breathe, it is so ill done...
...The same point has been made more recently by Northrop Frye in The Secular Scripture, A Study of Romance (Harvard, 1976...
...but this death and rebirth must be a sociocultural transformation beyond anything that a translator could aspire to...
...namely, the unlikelihood that any English translation of the Bible will ever again be imposed...
...Each of the fourteen translations is briefly introduced, and the volume itself has an historical introduction in which Levi explains his purpose as follows: "The most modern English versions are none of them convincing on the level of language...
...And though it is an oversimpli-fication to refer to the Bible, a collec-lection written in three languages over a thousand years, as a masterpiece or to its dozens of authors as a committee, it is nearly as great an oversimplification to refer in the same terms to a translation that was in progress for a century...
...I suspect that English-speaking Bible readers, at least Christian Bible readers, have made a kind of peace with our plethora of translations...
...In any event, a second, more practical obstacle stands before "radical work" in Bible translation...
...there is no other English national epic...
...and no one of the contenders was ever conclusively routed...
...what is being created now as an English language is still inchoate and obscure, nor do we know whether any work of epic authority as language can ever be created in it again...
...The Douai-Rheims version was written by Gregory Martin, a classmate of Edmund Campion, in a style Levi calls "wonderfully musical, fresh, and sweet-smelling...
...Canst thou clothe his neck with thundering...
...There is, to begin with, the question of epic style...
...It was the vitality of the sermon as a form of literature spoken in church and collected for use at home that provided the clearest measure of that imposition...
...There may be something parochially English in the expectation that some one translation should be judged best and then universally employed...
...The best translators, then, like the best writers, have been borrowers and shameless thieves...
...He mocks terror, and shrinketh not, neither starteth back from the sword: Though the quiver rattle upon him, with bright blade, with spear with javelin...
...the almost complete embodiment of the English language, second only perhaps to the works of Shakespeare...
...Granted that none of these, not even Tyndale Press's Living Bible, despite the two million copies it sold in 1974 (largely in dimestores), is felt to be a common Bible equal to public reading, the taste for public reading is so nearly dead that the loss is not much felt...
...In its range and in the use we have made of it, one could say it was an epic...
...Since I cannot think that I am unique in this experience, I am forced to regard the new versions as ill-judged, and their imposition as an act of folly...
...I find this morally and intellectually confusing, since I find it means I am incapable of taking seriously anything that they say...
...but it is the Authorized Version that has been performed, and so Broughton is forgotten...
...Translation follows language more than it leads it...
...Frye writes: "Our tradition has given the Bible, as the epic in which God is the hero, the central place" (p...
...Its language is within ten years of the English of the generation of Shakespeare, and this of course is its strength...
...If this bold passage has not the better of the Authorized Version, it is at least its match...
...Today we have been cut off by our society from the roots of a lively and traditional language...
...This point emerges, in a way, from Levi's own examples, particularly those from the Douai-Rheims version (before the disastrous Challoner revision...
...We might in fact almost expect that what a committee wrote a committee could translate...
...The Bible may still be widely studied, but it is no longer recited, no longer performed...
...The English Bible, 1534-1859 PETER LEVI Eerdmans, $6.95 Recalling that our word Bible is a Greek plural become an English singular, we may wonder less that the Authorized or King James Version of the Bible is "the only masterpiece ever produced by a committee...
...I have known Bible scholars to smile at the memory of Fundamentalists who seemed to think that Jehovah's revelation to Moses had been a copy of the Authorized Version bound in leather and edged in gold...
...Reticence, clarity and sobriety, strength and simplicity, logical coherence and a decent habit of speech have their foundations in moral sensibility...
...I am clear that the principles of English style are a moral matter, not just a question of taste...
...Of course, as Michel Foucault writes, ". . . man is an invention of recent date...
...On a railroad fence south of Chicago's Loop, a lengthy citation from Revelations, spray-painted there by Jesus People, is cited in the same way: chapter, verse, and "-Jerusalem Bible...
...Now, there may never have been a sect quite this naive...
...and even those who might regret the replacement may be so infected with romantic sensibility that, try as they might, they cannot keep it out of their writing...
...Levi writes: ". . . The English Bible is...
...Both writers compare the role of the English Bible in English literature to that of Homer in Greek literature and conclude, in effect, that Eliot was wrong: the English language does have a classic-a borrowed, translated classic...
...As the subtitle of Frye's book suggests, the epic in which God is the hero has been largely replaced by a romance in which autonomous Man is the hero...
...His feet will dig in the plain ground, he rejoiceth in his strong-ness, he will go forth to meet the harness...
...Tyndale's boast that "If God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth the plough shall know more of the Scripture than thou dost" has been realized in the dissemination of cheap Bible study aids that, in good measure, have replaced the preacher...
...The passion of prophets, the anxiety of editors, the irascibility of scholars, and the pride of kings all contended for the translation even as, two thousand years earlier, they had contended for the original...
...and this is true even where interest in the Bible is high...
...Levi does well to remind us of all this, and yet we must doubt whether any new translation will ever attain the eminence he admires in past translations...
...No French translation, to name only one other linguistic community, has ever achieved that status...
...Nowadays, even where the church is strong, the scriptural homily may not be...
...But a study of early versions of the Bible gives one some reason to hope, since it appears that the proper virtues of the language have not altered so very much even now, but have simply been disregarded...
...More important, however, is the fact that the very criterion by which the Authorized Version was judged to have been imposed in the English-speaking world is increasingly inoperative...
...But if this classic, this unique English Bible, is an epic, can it be re-translated...
...The very King James Version itself may almost be read as a collation of the several translations that immediately preceded it...
...The nineteenth-century revisers of the Authorized Version found frequent passages where Tyndale's version of 1534 seemed preferable in 1880 to what King James' committee had substituted for it in 1611...
...Canst thou make him quake as a locust, or his proud snorting with terror...
...It was performance that lent the Authorized Version its unique cachet of amplitude and venerability...
...The romantic sensibility may die, and an epic language may be reborn...
...but even if there once was, I suspect there is no longer...
...and the Roman Catholic Jerusalem Bible, despite its use of "Yahweh" for others' "Jehovah," is among the versions cited...
...The modern English Bibles are written in the language, or the non-language, of a class, and of a class that has no authority in spoken English...
...Of the trumpet he will say, Heah, and from afar will smell the battle, the thunder and shout of princes...
...In an era when each scholar, though he be practiced in no style but the learned, holds it a point of honor to produce unaided his own Bible translation, Peter Levi's collection of sample passages from translations written between 1534 (Tyndale) and 1859 (Barnes) is a book to conjure by...
...The Watch-tower, the magazine of Jehovah's Witnesses, now cites scripture not only by chapter and verse but also by translation...
...As for Broughton's translations, a contemporary opinion was that they carried with them "a kind of holy, and happy Fascination, that the serious reader of them is won upon, by a sweet violence...
Vol. 103 • December 1976 • No. 25
