Book Review: The New Testament
/The New Testament: A Translation
by David Bentley HartYale University Press, 2017Philosopher and translator David Bentley Hart promptly acknowledges in the Introduction to his new translation of the New Testament that the basic work itself can be done “without inordinate difficulty.” With a few exceptions, the Greek of the New Testament is raw, sometimes ragged, and not especially thorny for a competent translator. Such a translator will encounter opaque phrasings scattered throughout the texts and the occasional oddities that look very much like simple mistakes, but for the main task of bringing these writings into modern English, Hart has his eye on a bigger challenge:
More important than the small local matters of dealing with multivalent words or vague turns of phrase is the larger matter of rendering the entire text into modern English as gracefully as possible without sacrificing the literal meaning of the original. In the long twilight struggle between felicity and fidelity, the latter should always win out in the end; and, though in many cases a happy compromise between the two is possible, in many cases it is not.
It's a matter of quiet amazement that when Hart confronts that “long twilight struggle” between awe and accuracy, he not only sides with accuracy, he flatly states that the two aren't even related. He's giving his readers a version that admits its own distant and necessarily subordinate relationship with tradition – which isn't something you see a high-profile academic-press translation do every day. He refuses to dress up the plain Greek of the books he's translating, and he assures his readers that the loss of “high or mellifluous diction” isn't costing them much, since the “power and beauty of the New Testament are, for the most part, largely unrelated to its literary quality, which is often meager.”Rather, he writes, there's “a deeper truth about the texts,” something that can be discerned by looking at the very same lack of high and mellifluous diction that ought to debar it. Hart seems to be saying that the authors of the New Testament were almost flailingly desperate to tell something, not to make a literary impression:
[The Gospels] are not beguiling exercises in suasive rhetoric or feats of literary virtuosity; rather, they are chiefly the devout and urgent attempts of rather ordinary persons to communicate something “seen” and “heart” that transcends any language, but that nevertheless demands to be spoken, now, here, in whatever words one can marshal.
It's a fascinating methodology, and it produces a uniformly fascinating new translation, one that stomps and veers and coughs at the oddest moments, one that ultimately produces a vastly different impression than does, for instance, the glorious stained-glass eloquence of the King James Bible. Hart keeps up a discreet running commentary of footnotes, but his Gospels and Acts and Epistles scarcely need elaboration; they're starkly plain, which serves time and again to highlight the small, debate-sparking tweaks Hart imposes on even the most familiar moments. The climactic moment in the Gospel according to St. Mark, for instance, is positively bristling with minor subversions:
And, when the sixth hour came, darkness fell over all the land, until the ninth hour. And at the ninth hour Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?” – which, being interpreted, means, “My God, my God, why did you forsake me?” And some of those who were standing there, hearing this, said, “Look, he calls Elijah.” And one of them – having filled a sponge with vinegar and placing it around a rod – ran and gave it to him to drink, saying, “Leave off, let us see if Elijah comes to take him down.” But Jesus, letting out a great cry, expired. And the veil of the sanctuary was rent in two, from top to bottom. And the centurion who was standing by opposite him, seeing that he had thus expired, said, “Truly this man was a god's son.”
It would be difficult to imagine a better example of Hart's demystifying etsi doctrina non daretur approach, but similar examples abound in this blunt, oddly appealing New Testament. Scholars and future translators will want to consult this edition before they're tempted to high and mellifluous diction, and ordinary readers expecting to find those things will find their complacency productively challenged.