I am disliking more and more the way the Psalms are mangled in our Bible translations.
When working with the Psalms in the Hebrew, one feature that stands out distinctly is a sense of rawness, not crude, but brutal and unfiltered honesty. The psalms are the direct outpourings of the hearts of the poets, and carry force and depth because of this.
However, this is lost in many translations in their smoothing of the text.
For example, we have Psalm 70, written by David. The content points to him being in quite some distress because he is being hunted down.
The first phrase of the Hebrew can be translated (and unusually directly) like this:
God, to deliver me,
Lord, to help me,
hurry up!
We can easily observe several poetic features which are present in the Hebrew (even if you can’t read it):
- The names of God come first in each clause.
- The parallelism between the first two lines is really, really obvious as they share the verb.
- The tone is simple and direct. There are only five Hebrew words here.
- The reader can see it as somewhat close to what they would say in such a situation. It isn’t Shakespeare.
But in these areas I have grievances with the translations I have around me.
My preferred translation, the ESV, puts David’s plea as follows:
Make haste, O God, to deliver me!
O Lord, make haste to help me!
The parallelism is preserved by keeping the verb constant, but this does sound (almost exactly) like Shakespeare. (read it aloud!) I think the eloquence harms this much – it sounds practiced rather than brutally honest, and the recognizability is completely lost.
The TNIV says thus:
Hasten, O God, to save me;
come quickly, LORD, to help me.
I actually don’t mind this one as much. The verb coming first helps the tone stay urgent, and the consistent sentence order helps it stay parallel. However, it still isn’t something I could envision myself saying.
And I shall include the Message’s version also:
God! Please hurry to my rescue! God, come quickly to my side!
I really have no idea where Peterson got those verbs from. Disregarding that (if possible), it is very recognizable and east to identify with.
I know I’m being very picky here, but because most people need a translation to interface with the Scriptures, it is so important that it be transparent and enjoyable.
Tags: psalms
