[Milton-L] Paradise Lost -- Parallel Prose Edition

[Carl Bellinger]

Dear Nancy Charlton, 

Thanks for this felt and informative post! [the earlier post "I have to agree half-way..."]

And it's beautifully exampled.

 [O, for EXAMPLES in discussions of style and rhetoric and interpretation. ##] 

You write: 

"... the NIV often lacks fidelity to the spirit of the Hebrew, with its repetitions and its balances."

     The repetitions and balances express the spirit of the Hebrew as you say, but, further, they are devices of rhetorical composition which richly annotate and qualify that naked thing which the NIV deems the _only_ thing worth bringing into English, namely the thing it considers to be the "meaning" of the text. But the meaning of the Hebrew text is that qualified, annotated, nuanced thing which is represented _by_ the text, not some desiccated thing to be lexically exhumed _out of_ the text. 

    And further still, these repetitions and balances are generative of the verbal modulation and rhythm of the poetry, generative of the "number, weight, and measure" of the verse-craft of the psalmist's language, spoken or sung. Is the "meaning" of the text better represented when such intrinsic features of the expressed sense are stripped out and ignored? 

    The psalmist says "day unto day uttereth speech, night unto night showeth knowledge," and I sometimes fear that you can't come within a thousand miles of the LORD who is at the psalmist's side if you think a star is ball of flaming gas and the light of day a convenience on your drive to the local Bible Church.

You also write that the NIV

"... trudges along in linear fashion, in lines without meter or rhythm, without pause or caesura. It simply does not sing! And is that not what Milton prayed his Heavenly Muse to do?

He more than just prayed for that Mosaic Muse. The most pointed statements Milton makes about poetry places the heart of it in Hebraic sources and modes: 

. . .          All our Law and Story strew'd
With Hymns, our Psalms with artful terms inscrib'd, [ PR 335 ]
Our Hebrew Songs and Harps in Babylon,
That pleas'd so well our Victors ear, declare
That rather Greece from us these Arts deriv'd;
Ill imitated

And note that the compositional devices of rhetorical form, so far from being decorative nuisances for the translator, are not only intrinsic to the music heard, but live at its generative source :

But those frequent songs throughout the law and prophets beyond all these, not in their divine argument alone, but in the very critical art of composition may be easily made appear over all the kinds of Lyrick poesy, to be incomparable. [CG book two]

How musical is divine philosophy!

-Carl

[## It be a long time now but I read me a book once on somethin' like Ciceronian style in the Renaissance writ my somebody with a "g" in his last name which you ain't supposed to pronounce, and I swear weren't five sentences from my period put down so I could see what he's talkin about in that entire book. Said Milton was like Urquat and Brown or somebody but not one sentence quoted from any of 'em.]
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