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By Root 1060 0

into academese. “In doing our work,” the translators state in their preface, “we have constantly striven...to render the Greek into the English of the present day...the natural vocabulary, constructions, and rhythms of contemporary speech.” On the contrary, despite a panel of literary advisers, they have taken the New Testament farther away from natural speech than it was in 1611. They are addicted to officialese: “this proposal proved acceptable,” “these facts are beyond dispute.” “A just man” is inflated into a “man of principle,” “in all goodness and honesty” into “in full observance of religion and the highest standards of morality,” “the proud” into “the arrogant of heart and mind,” “blameless” into “of unimpeachable character.” They write that they “have sought to avoid jargon” but I wonder whether “his heart sank” is less jargonish than K.J.V.’s “sorrowful,” or “we are placing the law on a firmer footing” than “we establish the law,” or “rescued me from Herod’s clutches” than “delivered me out of the hand of Herod.” I also wonder whether this allegedly simpler version is not actually longer than K.J.V. And where those literary advisers were when “stomach” was substituted for “belly”—nice girls have stomachs—or when Jesus’ “O fools!” was stepped down into a Noel Coward line: “How dull you are [my dear Cedric]!” True, they did preserve “Jesus wept.” But I’m sure there was strong support for “Jesus burst into tears.”

The Camford-style Sermon on the Mount might be pastiched, using only phrases that appear in this translation:

When he realized how things stood, Jesus held a meeting to look into the matter. It was no hole in the corner business. He went up the hill and began:

“And now, not to take up too much of your time, I crave indulgence for a brief statement of our case. How blest are those that know that they are poor. You are light for all the world. If a man wants to sue you for your shirt, let him have your coat as well. I also might make bold to say that you cannot serve God and Money. Do not feed your pearls to pigs, and be ready for action, with belts fastened and lamps alight. Thank you for giving me a hearing.”

He then went to lunch with some distinguished persons.

We may expect even greater wonders when the Camford Old Testament appears. (The excuse given for modernizing the New Testament—that it was written in a colloquial Hellenistic idiom and not in the classical Greek that the K.J.V. translators assumed it was—won’t serve for the Old Testament, whose Hebrew is uncompromisingly archaic and elevated.) I suggest the following for the opening verses of Genesis:

In the first place, God made the sky and the earth. The latter was empty and shapeless. It was quite dark on the ocean, where God’s spirit was reconnoitering. Then God ordered some light, which he rather liked. He thought Day would be a good name for it.

To conclude on a personal note—the Oxbridge style is catching—I was told, by an official of the Cambridge University Press, that a dozen copies of my R.S.V. review were distributed among the panel of literary advisers on the present project. It’s discouraging.[2]

[1]This is barely grammatical. The American R.S.V. also destroys the rhythm of Luke 16:3—“I am not strong enough to dig, and I am ashamed to beg”—but it is slightly preferable to the Oxbridge version. I should have thought it impossible to produce a worse version than R.S.V., but they have done it in England.

[2]Stop Press, as of March 21, 1962: The A.P. reports that world sales of the New English Bible have reached four million copies since its publication a year ago, which is 750,000 more than the second-place British bestseller of the past year, Lady Chatterley’s Lover....add, Sept. 15, 1962: The R. S. V. Bible is still selling one million copies a year, ten years after publication. Over 16,000 churches have installed it in their pulpits. What hath God wrought!

The String Untuned

The third edition of Webster’s New International Dictionary (Unabridged), published in 1961, tells us a good deal about the changes in our cultural