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5.0 out of 5 stars
A Good Variation on the Good Book, September 4, 2002
This review is from: The Poets' Book of Psalms: The Complete Psalter as Rendered by Twenty-Five Poets from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Centuries (Paperback)
The psalms are at once poetry, music, prayer, liturgy, and song. Their universal appeal comes from their capacity to express what we feel and that for which we yearn. In their original Hebrew, the psalms taken together were Israel's poetic and musical repertoire and served not only an expressive, but a sacred, purpose. In their manifest forms, the psalms give voice to the deepest human emotions and spiritual aspirations.
In the "Poets' Book of Psalms," poet Laurance Wieder has tapped into the enormous poetic resonance of the psalms and produced a unique psalter, an anthology of the 150 psalms translated by twenty-five English poets from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. His selections are interesting. They range from the obvious -- Milton, Donne, Herbert -- to the less so -- Burns, Coleridge, Vaughan -- to the virtually unknown -- Mary Sidney Herbert, George Wither, and George Sandys.
Wieder brings suitable talents to the enterprise. He is himself the author of "One Hundred Fifty Psalms," the first complete psalter written in English since Christopher Smart wrote the "Psalms of David" in 1765. He also is the co-editor of "Chapters into Verse," a magisterial two-volume anthology of poetry in English inspired by the Bible.
Like anyone who knows poetry, I wondered about some of Wieder's choices. He provides a cogent answer in his Introduction by clearly enunciating his criteria for inclusion: 1. that the works stand as poetry, not just translation, 2. that the poems be without anachronisms, 3. that the version should imitate the form, not just the content, of the original, 4. that the plain be preferred to the fancy (hence the underrepresented metaphysics!), 5. that the language be accessible to modern readers, and 6. that anonymous works and versified songs be excluded. With these criteria in hand, I could understand why there were more poems by Mary than George Herbert, more by John Hall than John Milton, and only one by John Donne.
A useful feature of the collection is its appendix containing The Book of Psalms from the King James (or Authorised) Version of the Bible, probably the best known psalter in English. Wieder, quite rightly in my estimation, regards these poems as having "authority but not a living person's voice." Personally, I think he might have done just as well, if not better, if he had included Miles Coverdale's translations in the Book of Common Prayer as his counterpoise. They have both authority and a living presence as poems read and spoken today.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Old Wine in New Bottles. No seams split here. Buy it Now., June 23, 2010
This review is from: The Poets' Book of Psalms: The Complete Psalter as Rendered by Twenty-Five Poets from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Centuries (Paperback)
Laurance Wieder, editor and author, The Poets' Book of Psalms (Oxford, New York, Oxford University Press, 1999) First published in 1995 by HarperCollins, San Francisco
This is the kind of book you want to find when you are in search of quality material for `alternate' or `casual' or even `contemporary' worship services. The main body of the book contains 152 new poems, 150 of which are new treatments of the ideas expressed in the 150 Psalms in David's Psalter. Two poems are introductory, including the only one from the greatest of English Christian poets, John Donne, who wrote a poetic `appreciation' of the translation of the Psalms by Sir Philip Sidney.
These poems may not work well in `contemporary' services, since the majority of poems were written in in the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. The most familiar names from this era include several of the most famous poets in English, such as Robert Burns (1 poem), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1 poem), George Herbert (1 poem), John Milton (6 poems), Philip Sidney (10 poems), and Henry Vaughn (3 poems). There are also several poems by people whose greatest fame does not come from poesy, such as essayist and scientist, Francis Bacon (3 poems) and the Biblical translator, Miles Cloverdale (3 poems).
I cannot stress too hard that none of these works are translations, even in the sense of the very loose `thought for thought' translations such as the Good News translation. These are all `new' poems inspired by the psalms. What may add confusion to this issue is that each poem begins with the same superscription you will find in the Bible. One thing this means is that one may need to exercise a bit of care when using these poems in a service, especially those written by the two poets, David Rosenberg (5 poems) and the editor, Laurance Wieder (16). What seems odd is the great gap in the dates for these two authors, and the next latest poet, P. Hately Waddell (1817--1891) who wrote 7 poems. And the only other 19th century poet is Coleridge. Thus, 121 out of 150 poems were written over 200 years ago.
The editor points out that for many psalms, there was more than one poems from which to choose. For 21 psalms, especially the 23rd psalm, there were many choices. For some, the only sources were the collections of poems from psalms by the Sidneys, George Sandys, George Wither the Puritan, Christopher Smart, and P Hately Waddell (who wrote in Scots). The editor chose that poem which was the strongest, and which could best stand on its own merits. The editor also avoided anachronisms and modernized the spelling. There are no notes, but the editor took care that every word in the poems could be found in a dictionary (he doesn't say which one. I suspect it was smaller than the OED). In order that you don't need to have a copy of the Bible open to compare the poems with the psalms, all 150 psalms from the King James Version appear at the rear of the book. This is quite appropriate, as virtually all of these poets would have used this translation (or its precursor, the Great Bible) as their inspiration.
All this effort by the editor makes an excellent resource. The one remaining question is the quality of the poems. Since there are twenty-five poets, one can expect that the quality will be uneven. A second dimension is whether the adaptations are even as good as the original psalms. In the case of the 23rd psalm, we discover that the psalm is clearly superior to George Herbert's gloss on that classic. Witness the first four lines:
The God of love my shepherd is,
And he that doth me feed:
While he is mine, and I am his,
What can I want or need?
Part of the problem is the Elizabethan style which Herbert does not transcend. In contrast, look at Robert Burns' rendition of the first psalm:
The man, in life wherever placed,
Hath happiness in store,
Who walks not in the wicked's way,
Nor learns their guilty lore!
To my eye, the original psalm may be superior theology, but Bobby Burns wrote superior poetry. Halfway between these is Thomas Carew's take on the 51st psalm:
Good God unlock thy magazines
Of mercy, and forgive my sins.
O wash and purify the foul
Pollution of my sin-stained soul.
Even though the verses of old 51 are familiar, Carew breathes new life into the thoughts by both crisper expression and a (probably inadvertent) use of words (magazine in the sense of a storehouse for munitions) which were unfamiliar to Biblical writers.
Regarding a theology of using these poems, they are artistically different from the KJV but they are spiritually no different from an idea for idea Biblical translation. They may be superior for a modern audience by being less closely connected with a land, a king, and a people from 2800 years ago.
Other reviews refer to these as translations or paraphrases. Neither is entirely accurate. I prefer to consider these poems written on the same subjects as the Psalms, and some authors come close to paraphrase while others, like Robert Burns, simply use the psalm as a starting point for fresh inspirations.
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