Masscult and Midcult_ Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight MacDonald [92]
True, the morning stars still sing together, man is still born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward, the lilies of the field still eclipse Solomon in all his glory, Ecclesiastes still preaches “vanity of vanities,” and David still laments over Saul and Jonathan, “How are the mighty fallen! Tell it not in Gath, publish it not in the streets of Ashkelon.” So, too, our bombers tried to spare the more celebrated monuments of Europe, though “military necessity” often compelled their destruction. The Revisers’ military necessity is the language of the Common Man. Reading their work is like walking through an old city that has just been given, if not a saturation bombing, a thorough going-over. One looks about anxiously. Is this gone? Does that still survive? Surely they might have spared that! And even though many of the big landmarks are left—their fabric weakened by the Revisers’ policy of modernizing the grammatical usage—so many of the lesser structures have been razed that the whole feel of the place is different. In Cologne, in 1950, the cathedral still stood, alone and strange, in the midst of miles of rubble.
If the Revisers had changed K.J.V. only where modern scholarship found its translation defective, one would hardly notice the alterations. But what they are really translating is not the original Greek and Hebrew but the English of the King James Version, and the language they have put it into is modern expository prose, direct and clear, and also flat, insipid, and mediocre. To accomplish this alchemy in reverse, they have had to do a number of things. They have, first of all, modernized the usage. “Thou,” “ye,” “thy,” and “thine” are replaced by “you” and “your;” the obsolete verb endings “-est” and “-eth” are dropped; inverted word order is generally avoided; “unto” becomes “to,” “whither” “where,” “whatsoever” “whatever,” and so on. This was done not for comprehensibility, since any literate person knows what the old forms mean, but as part of the policy of making the Bible more “accessible” to the modern reader or listener. And, indeed, R.S.V. does slip more smoothly into the modern ear, but it also slides out more easily; the very strangeness and antique ceremony of the old forms make them linger in the mind. The 1901 American Standard Version kept the old usage, and I think rightly. For there are other considerations, too. One is the loss of familiarity. It is extraordinary what a difference modernization makes; even passages otherwise undisturbed have a blurred, slightly off-register effect. The Hebrew Old Testament is an archaic document, far more primitive even than Homer, and the old usage seems more appropriate. “Thus saith the Lord” is more Lordly than “Thus says the Lord,” “Praise ye the Lord!” is more exalted than “Praise the Lord!” The Ten Commandments lose when the awesome “Thou shalt not” is stepped down to the querulous “You shall not”; the prophet Nathan’s terrible denunciation to King David, “Thou art the man!,” collapses in the police-report “You are the man!,” and God’s solemn words to Adam, “Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return,” are flattened in the conversational “You are dust, and to dust you shall return.” A better case can be made for modernizing the New Testament’s usage, since it was written in the everyday Greek of the common people. But the Common Man of the first century A.D. was a considerably more poetic and (if he was a Christian) devout creature than his similar of the twentieth century, and the religious passion of Jesus and Paul, transcending modern experience, needs an exalted idiom to be adequately conveyed.