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By Root 1130 0

the second (rhythm being the chief sensuous element in poetry), and almost never the third. “Poetry differs from prose in the concrete colors of its diction. It is not enough for it to furnish a meaning to philosophers. It must also appeal to emotions with the charm of direct impression, flashing through regions where the intellect can only grope. Poetry must render what is said, not what is merely meant.” So writes the prince of modern translators, Ezra Pound, who might have made a much better job of the new Bible than the Dean of the Yale Divinity School and his learned but unliterate colleagues.

“Our conversation [compared to that of the Elizabethans] is direct and tense; our narrative...swift and unadorned,” the Revisers state. “Our words are likely to be shorter and our sentences, too....Therefore in this translation, it has been a constant purpose to make every word and sentence clear, to avoid involved constructions, and to make the current of the central thought flow in such a straight sure channel that the minds of the listeners will be carried forward unmistakably and not dropped into verbal whirpools by the way....The style is, as nearly as possible, such as the rank and file of Bible readers today will understand with as little difficulty as possible...so as to permit the attention of the hearer or reader to center on the message and not be diverted by the language.” But style is not mere decoration, and it is precisely the function of language to “divert” the reader; form, in a work of art like K.J.V., cannot be separated from content, nor can the central current be separated from “verbal whirlpools.” It is true that today K.J.V. is harder to read than R.S.V. This difficulty, though, is not a defect but the inevitable accompaniment of virtues that R.S.V. has had to remove in order to remove the difficulty. The difficulty in reading K.J.V. is simply that it is high art, which will always demand more from the reader, for it makes its appeal on so many planes. Ulysses and The Waste Land, while modern works, are more difficult in this sense than an eighteenth-century newspaper. It is the price of artistic quality, and the Revisers are unwilling to pay it. Probably the main obstacle in K.J.V. today is its archaic style—the obsolete grammatical usage, the inversions, and all the other devices of Elizabethan English. But our culture is lucky—or was until R.S.V. came along—in having in K.J.V. a great literary monument to which, because it also happens to have a religious function, practically everybody, no matter how unliterary or meagerly educated, was at some time exposed, in church or Sunday school or at home.

And why this itch for modernizing anyway? Why is it not a good thing to have variety in our language, to have a work whose old-fashioned phrases exist in the living language, to preserve in one area of modern life the old forms of speech, so much more imaginative and moving than our own nervous, pragmatic style? As it enriches us to leave beautiful old buildings standing when they are no longer functional or to perform Shakespeare without watering his poetry down into prose, so with the Bible. The noblest ancient fane must be trussed and propped and renovated now and then, but why do it in the slashing style of the notorious Gothic “restorations” of Viollet-le-Duc? In any event, I think the Revisers exaggerate the difficulty of K.J.V. Almost all of it is perfectly understandable to anyone who will give a little thought and effort to it, plus some of that overvalued modern commodity, time. Those who won’t can hardly claim a serious interest in the Bible as either literature or religion.

Writing of the 1885 revised version, Allen Wikgren observes, in The Interpreter’s Bible, “Purchasers found themselves in possession of a text in which the number of changes far exceed all previous estimates. Of some 180,000 words in the New Testament, alterations amounted to an estimated 30,000, or an average of 4½ per verse....It was not long, however, before the number and character of the changes provoked a strong reaction....Charges