Selah

...High hills protect Israel...

...Concision can't do everything, of course...

...There are at least three criteria one can employ: accuracy of translation, devotional usefulness, and poetic merit...

...Thus "Please" (Psalm 125): As mountains ring Jerusalem So God surrounds the people, Chosen by heart, not by lot...

...In contrast to Gordon Jackson's long-lined, expansive meditations, almost all of Wieder's psalms are shorter, often considerably shorter, than other English versions, like a sauce reduced and intensified...

...Wind twists the evil ones, fearful...

...It is a testimony to Wieder's skills that his poems were able to get me out of the funk induced by his "Brief Explanation...

...Alan Jacobs teaches English at Wheaton College in Illinois...

...I learned a lot just sitting in the bleachers: To understand, and not mistake, my own Words for the breath that makes me pause...

...Laurance Wieder's Words to God's Music: A New Book of Psalms, clearly strives for poetic merit, and largely achieves it—though I must admit that his prefatory "Brief Explanation" very nearly scared me away from the whole project...

...God, give me enough light and will To say just what I see, See what I do, Do what I say, Say what you will...

...But poems like Psalm 19, while not long, are anything but terse, so what Wieder in his commitment to terseness provides is a kind of ironic commentary, a strong tonal contrast to the Hebrew and earlier English versions...

...When he comes to some of the more elaborate and rhetorically extravagant of the Psalms—Psalm 19, for instance: "The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament sheweth his handiwork"—Wieder doesn't attempt even to paraphrase: Big, shy, a schoolboy Canters laps around the ballfield, A dapple colt escaped both dam and stable Grazing the green theater of his being...

...Thomas...

...The late great English poet and scholar Donald Davie, who devoted much of his career to renovating the poetic reputations of such hymn-writers as Isaac Watts, Charles Wesley, and William Cowper, is probably sputtering in heavenly rage at this moment...

...And sometimes the colloquial note is discordant, as in "Memo" (Psalm 64): Great detective...

...Sometimes Wieder squeezes his syntax too tightly, as in "Festival" (Psalm 100), when he speaks for Israelites who did not praise God loudly until God made us / Enter squally bawling thank-yous / In our lifetime, children's children...

...but the second, deriving from Wieder's conviction that psalms "written to fit received melodies for singing" and psalms that "have a sectarian cast" aren't really poetry, and their authors not really poets, simply can't be sustained...

...Since I could immediately think of half-a-dozen such versions—including Gordon Jackson's quite recent Lincoln Psalter—I was puzzled by this claim...

...They are cedars on mountains...

...To see it clearly's sweet as sunlight On an autumn shoulder, shining on the face Of harder laws than stadiums in stone...

...The first distinction I won't dispute, because Wieder doesn't explore it in any detail...

...The effective severance of poetry and music happened long ago— their marriage recalled only in the term "lyric"—but to say, as Wieder seems to, that if you can sing it it's not poetry, is absurd, as is denying to Isaac Watts the title of "poet...

...Not the mouthpiece chopping / Logic, who'll have to hear his heart / Attacked...

...And that makes me think about why I like these poems...

...And typically the translator can achieve one of these qualities only at the expense of the others...

...Both the concision and enjambment recall the great and recently deceased Welsh poet R.S...

...Who escapes deduction...

...In that introductory note, Wieder says that, as far as he knows, he is "only the third poet to produce a complete English version," the others being the sixteenth-century team of Sir Philip Sidney and his sister, the Countess of Pembroke (whom Wieder counts as a single poet), and, two centuries later, Christopher Smart...

...But in general Wieder has found an idiom that communicates the gnarled energy intrinsic to the originals...

...That's the whole of it—the affecting, movingly ruminative whole of it...

...To what extent do they stand on their own...

...It turns out to be based on Wieder's belief that "poets' versions differ from psalms found in translations of the Bible, and from the metrical psalms found in hymnals...

...Their signal trait is terseness, concision, as is indicated by his titles, which are usually a single word: "Shake," "Crooked," "Trespass...

...His most recent book is A Theology of Reading: The Hermeneutics of Love...

...That cheers me up...

...Does their success depend on what I can always hear underneath them, that throbbing ground bass of those old rhetorical engines, the expansive, cascading language of Wycliffe and Tyndale and Coverdale and those now long-since forgotten laborers for King James?— poets, every one of them...