Masscult and Midcult_ Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight MacDonald [93]
The Revisers state that the old usage has been preserved in “language addressed to God or in exalted poetic apostrophe.” The first exemption has been respected—why God’s own language should not also be permitted some antique elevation I cannot see—but the second often has not. Surely the Psalms are “exalted poetic apostrophe,” yet in the Nineteenth Psalm, “Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night showeth knowledge” is diminished to “Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night declares knowledge.” Even the sacred (one would think) Twenty-third Psalm comes out a bit fuzzy: “He makes me lie down” for the rhythmic “He maketh me to lie down,” and instead of the triumphant “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death” the tamer “Even though I walk.” The most damaging effect of modernizing the usage is the alteration of rhythm, which is all-important in a book so often read aloud; quite aside from literary grace, the ceremonial effect of the Bible is enhanced by the interesting, varied, and suitable rhythms of K.J.V. But to (partially) avoid inversion, the Revisers render “Male and female created He them” (Genesis 1:27) “Male and female He created them,” breaking the rhythm’s back simply by changing the position of two words. In the K.J.V., Ecclesiastes moves to a slow, mourning music:
What profit hath a man of all his labor which he taketh under the sun? One generation passeth and another generation cometh, but the earth abideth forever....For there is no remembrance of the wise more than of the fool for ever, seeing that which now is in the days to come shall all be forgotten. And how dieth the wise man? As the fool.
This now steps along to a brisker, less complex, and also less authoritative measure:
What does a man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun? A generation goes and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever....For of the wise man as of the fool there is no enduring remembrance, seeing that in the days to come all will have been long forgotten. How the wise man dies just like the fool!
Ruth’s familiar and moving “Whither thou goest, I will go” loses its cadenced charm when it is transmuted into “Where you go, I will go.” So, too, Philippians 4:8 (“Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just”) is robbed of its earnest gravity when it is speeded up by replacing “whatsoever” with “whatever,” just as Matthew 11:28 (“Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden”) becomes inappropriately brisk when it is modernized to “Come to me, all who labor.”
In this modernization there is an understandable, if misguided, principle at work. But many changes seem to derive not from principle but merely from officiousness, from the restlessness that causes people to pluck imaginary or microscopic bits of fluff off coat lapels. Too frequently some great and familiar phrase is marred or obliterated for the sake of a trivial change in the sense, or none at all. “Den of thieves” is now “den of robbers,” “let the dead bury their dead” is now “leave the dead to bury their own dead,” “maid” becomes “maiden” in “the way of a man with a maid,” hypocrites are “whitewashed tombs” instead of the familiar “whited sepulchres,” “O death where is thy sting, O grave where is thy victory?” yields to the just-out-of-focus “O death where is thy victory, O death where is thy sting?,” and Jesus’ “Can the blind lead the blind? Shall they not both fall into the ditch?” is capriciously rephrased into “Can a blind man lead a blind man? Will they not both fall into a pit?”
More numerous are the changes that involve a slight change in sense. But granting that Joseph really wore not “a coat of many colors” but “a long robe with sleeves,” that the Gaderene swine were really the Gerasene swine and