We too should translate some books

From King Alfred's preface to his own Anglo-Saxon translation of Gregory's Pastoral Rule:

When I then called to mind all this, then I remembered how I saw, ere that all in them was laid waste and burnt up, how the churches throughout all the English race stood filled with treasures and books, and also a great multitude of God's servants, but they knew very little use of those books, for that they could not understand anything of them, for that they were not written in their own language, such as they, our elders, spoke, who erewhile held these places; they loved wisdom, and through that got wealth, and left it to us. Here men may yet see their path, but we know not how to tread in their footsteps, inasmuch as we have both lost that wealth and wisdom, for that we would not with our minds stoop to their tracks.

When I then called to mind all this, I then wondered greatly about those good and wise men that have been of old among the English race, and who had fully learned all the books, that they have not been willing to turn any part of them into their own language. But then I soon again answered myself and said, "They did not think that men would ever become so reckless, and that learning should fall off in such a way. Of set purpose, then, they let it alone, and wished that there should be more wisdom in this land the more languages we knew."

Then I remembered how the Law was first found in the Hebrew tongue, and again, when the Greeks learnt it, then they turned the whole of it into their own language, and also all the other books. And again the Latins also in the same way, when they had learned it, turned it all through wise interpreters into their own language, and likewise all other Christian nations have translated some part into their own speech. Wherefore I think it better, if it also appears so to you, that we too should translate some books, which are the most necessary for all men to understand - that we should turn these into that tongue which we all can know, and so bring it about, as we very easily may, with God's help, if we have rest, that all the youth that now is among the English race, of free men, that have property, so that they can apply themselves to these things, may be committed to others for the sake of instruction, so long as they have no power for any other employments, until the time that they may know well how to read English writing. Let men afterwards further teach them Latin, those whom they are willing further to teach, and whom they wish to advance to a higher state.

Psalm 1

From one of my multitude of small text-formatting projects, the first of Sir Philip Sidney's Psalm translations:

PSALM I.

Beatus vir.

He blessed is who neither loosely treads
The straying steps as wicked councel leads,
      Ne for bad mates in way of sinners waiteth,
      Nor yet himself with idle scorners seateth;
But on Gods law his whole delight doth bind,
Which night and day hee calls to marking mind.

He shall be like a freshly planted tree,
To which sweet springs of waters neighbours be;
      Whose branches faile not timely fruite to nourish.
      Nor withered leaf shall make it faile to flourish:
So all the things whereto that man doth bend
Shall prosper still with well succeeding end.

Such blessing shall not wicked wretches see,
But like vile chaff with wind shall scattred be;
      For neither shall the men in sinne delighted
      Consist when they to highest doome are cited,
Ne yet shall suff'red be a place to take
Where godly men do their assembly make.

For God doth know, and knowing doth approve
The trade of them that just proceedings love:
      But they that sinne in sinfull breast do cherish,
      The way they go, shall be the way to perish.

Here's the KJV.

T. S. Eliot on the New English Bible

Lege. Two excerpts:

The age covered by the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I was richer in writers of genius than is our own, and we should not expect a translation made in our time to be a masterpiece of our literature or, as was the Authorized Version of 1611, an exemplar of English prose for successive generations of writers.

We are, however, entitled to expect from a panel chosen from among the most distinguished scholars of our day at least a work of dignified mediocrity. When we find that we are offered something far below that modest level, something which astonishes in its combination of the vulgar, the trivial, and the pedantic, we ask in alarm: "What is happening to the English language?"

So long as the New English Bible was used only for private reading, it would be merely a symptom of the decay of the English language in the middle of the twentieth century. But the more it is adopted for religious services the more it will become an active agent of decadence.

There may be Ministers of the Gospel who do not realize that the music of the phrase, of the paragraph, of the period is an essential constituent of good English prose, and who fail to understand that the life of a reading of Gospel and Epistle in the liturgy is in this music of the spoken word.

Fr Neuhaus on Bible translations

Three articles from his magazine First Things in which the good Father rails against our Catholic Newspeak Bible and endorses the Revised Standard Version, Catholic Edition. A tip o' the hat to Dylan, an aficionado of good translations.

• Bible Babel, May 2001
  
• More on Bible Babel, January 2006
  
  • "...it is very difficult to share thoughts when we do not share words."
• 70 or 70x7?, July 27, 2007