Divine poetry

Of the ancient, foundational books of Western culture, the Psalms are unique; they’re the text with which readers have sustained an intimate relation. They have been so often sung into the ears of congregations, recited over the newborn and the newly wed and the newly dead that they seem not the products of individual, human makers but, rather, like spells, archaic and beautiful formulae that have always existed. Ask practically anyone to complete this phrase, “The Lord is my shepherd . . . ,” and you’re likely to get the correct answer. A great many people have heard the 23rd Psalm so many times, and felt the power of its assurances so profoundly, that they’ve committed the poem to memory, often without trying.

Of what other 3,000-year-old poem can this be said?

Such cultural validation and the authority that comes with it make it hard to think of the Psalms as a book of poems. This is precisely the use of a new translation, such as Robert Alter’s readable, scholarly renderings. A fresh look wipes away the patina of familiarity and allows us to see the poems not as the accumulated history of our relationship to them but as something made by human hands and breath. Poems are artifacts of the processes of thinking and feeling. Only history lends them the literary and theological weight that the Psalms have.

Not that you would want to take that tradition away, exactly -- rather, it becomes possible to see the texts in a fresh light, to engage with them more freely, without the lulling effects of language made safe by familiarity.

Indeed one of the best outcomes of Alter’s translation is a sense of an abrupt, muscular intensity; he restores to the Psalms a kind of strangeness that emanates from an encounter with a culture we recognize yet is distinctly alien to us, far removed in time and frame of mind. Here, for instance, is a passage from Psalm 29, in which the deity figures as a storm god:

The LORD’S voice is over the waters.

The God of glory thunders.

The LORD is over the mighty waters.

The LORD’S voice in power,

the LORD’S voice in majesty,

the LORD’S voice breaking cedars,

the LORD shatters the Lebanon cedars,

and he makes Lebanon dance like a calf,

Sirion like a young wild ox.

The LORD’s voice hews flames of fire.

The LORD’S voice makes the wilderness shake. . .

The LORD’s voice brings on the birth-pangs of does

and lays bare the forests.

There’s something primordial about those lines, the human awe in the face of ferocious natural power. And something very moving about its contrasts: implacable thunder god and childlike, dancing calf, ferocious male deity and birthing doe. That polarity, along with the unmistakably genuine wonder the speaker feels in the holy face of thunder -- well, these make the poem feel primitive in its forcefulness and very much alive. Here is the King James Version of those three opening lines: “The voice of the LORD is upon the waters: the God of glory thundereth: the LORD is upon many waters.”

There are obvious felicities in this version. The single sentence yoked together by two colons makes for a sense of unity. “Upon the waters” is more surprising and somehow more physical than “over the waters.” And that “many” in front of “waters” is simply a beautiful choice of adjective; it multiplies and amplifies the presence of a noisy God. And of course there will be those readers who take delight in “thundereth,” whose double “th” somehow comes closer to suggesting the sound of thunder.

But such comparison is probably unfair. The King James Version appeared in 1611 and promptly began to shape poetry in English, from Donne to Whitman, to Ginsberg to Bob Dylan to Anne Carson, with its parallel structures, its rhetorical doublings and its gorgeous trove of metaphor. It comes encrusted with veneration, both religious and aesthetic. And it can be much easier to feel the depths and dimensions of a poem if we aren’t told in advance it is (a) a masterpiece, (b) the source of much succeeding literature and (c) the word of God.

And depth and dimension are here in abundance. Surely one reason for the longevity of these texts is how acutely the psalmists portrayed despair; they’re peerless in their evocation of psychic depths:

Rescue me, God,

for the waters have come up to my neck.

I have sunk in the slime of the deep,

and there is no place to stand.

I have entered the watery depths,

and the current has swept me away.

I am exhausted from my calling out.

My throat is hoarse.

My eyes fail

from hoping for my God.

That is the opening of Psalm 69, and it is a splendid evocation of despair, the voice of a misery so wearying that it’s moving toward the exhausted stasis of depression. “But I am a worm and no man” cries the speaker of Psalm 22. The psalmists understood such states of mind intimately. They are also startlingly straightforward in their rage at enemies and their thirst for retribution and justice. Psalm 12’s assertion that “The LORD will cut off all smooth-talking lips,” for instance, feels brutal indeed. The poems invite us to read such outcries both in private and public contexts; the enemies of the self and the enemies of Israel blur together. Many psalms promise that the Lord will punish the wicked and reward the good in this life; others seem not so sure of this, anticipating the more complex moral economy of the Book of Job. “Far from my rescue are the words that I roar,” goes the second line of Psalm 22, and how potent those words are: the poet roaring and howling in pain, far from any hope of deliverance. There are many such lines in Alter’s volume, flashes of marvelous deftness. But, at other times, the translator also seems to possess an ear capable of turning entirely stony, as well. Here is the King James Version of Psalm 18, Line 46: “The strangers shall fade away, and be afraid out of their close places.” And here is Alter’s rendering of the same bit: “Aliens did wither, filed out from their forts.” Admittedly, there are gaps in the original Hebrew; the Psalms were copied and recopied, many texts are partial or damaged, and translators make what they can of the gaps. But why the awkward and archaic “did wither”?

Alter’s version of the most revered of the Psalms raises similar questions. He notes that he’s trying to replicate the knotty, condensed character of biblical Hebrew. Therefore, his rendering of its most memorable lines goes:

Though I walk in the vale of death’s shadow,

I fear no harm,

for You are with me.

Of course he’s right that there are fewer syllables here than in “through the valley of the shadow of death.” But if what you’re after is condensing, why not something a little wilder, like “deathshadow valley”? Or “death’s shadowvalley”? Why use the distinctly 19th century word “vale”?

But therein lies the problem, right? You can’t refresh the Psalms without making readers unhappy, since the old, loved words are so imprinted upon us, so much a part of our mental landscape. Alter is to be admired for making such a readable version of these poems, making their complications, human lights and shadows available to readers anew -- and for providing a marvelous introduction that provides historical background and some provocative theological understanding.

The poems come complete with extensive commentaries on the translations, many of which serve to illuminate the poems more deeply than the translated texts themselves. Remember in Psalm 23, for instance, when the poet says of the Lord, “He restores my soul”? Alter lets us know that “soul” isn’t a term in biblical Hebrew. The word in question is nefesh, or “life-breath.” How moving that is: After a rest in the grassy meadows, one’s nefesh, your deepest and most essential breath, would be restored.

That is poetry’s greatest power, the restoration of the life-breath, and it is evident in these beautiful poems in abundance.