Every afternoon in England, between about three and six o’clock, candles are lit in the great cathedrals and abbeys and college chapels, and the antique rite known as Evensong is observed. “Sung” would be more accurate than “observed”; the choir, boys first and then men, shuffles in at chain-gang pace, enters the carved stalls, and proceeds with what might be a brief concert. There is no need for anyone else, except an organist and a precentor, which is just as well, since often the shadowy nave and transepts are void of worshippers; perhaps a few tourists hover at the very back of the church, foggily attempting to gauge the event’s exact religiosity.
This service is mostly music, and the foundation of its repertory is Elizabethan and Jacobean: Thomas Tallis, William Byrd, Orlando Gibbons. Yet the language that is sung—especially the mid-sixteenth-century language of Thomas Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer, and the early-seventeenth-century language of the King James Bible—is itself a great music. That these words and this formality of rite endure suggests how traditional the Church of England has remained. But it is a living tradition, too. Just as a Byrd anthem, to our ears, is freighted with all the music it has influenced (one hears not only later English gentleness but a dissonance that has had an impact on twentieth-century composition), so the language of the early Church of England now seems loaded with all its historical bequests.
Suppose the choir happens to sing a setting of Psalm 90, with its grand, desert evocation of life’s ephemerality: “For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night. . . . For all our days are passed away in thy wrath: we spend our years as a tale that is told.” It will be hard not to hear in those words Macbeth’s last soliloquy, “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,” with its bitterness about “all our yesterdays” having lighted fools the way to dusty death, and its likening of life to “a tale / told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing.” (Shakespeare would probably have read earlier versions of the psalm, such as those of Miles Coverdale and the Geneva Bible, which the King James translators adapted very closely and in places word for word.) Or if the reading is from Job, with its verse “Men shall clap their hands at him, and shall hiss him out of his place,” and we hear the wonderful oddity of the verb’s transitive use and its unexpected preposition “out,” a reader of D. H. Lawrence might be prompted to recall how fond that intensely Biblical writer was of similarly strange prepositions and pungent transitive verbs: “Again the flash went through him dazing him out”; “Banford turtled up like a little fighting cock”; “following so submissively, gloating on him from behind.” Or if the reading that day happened to be from Ruth 1:16—“for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge”—some keen listener might hear Gabriel Oak in “Far from the Madding Crowd,” who proposes to Bathsheba, his future wife, saying, “Whenever you look up, there I shall be—and whenever I look up there will be you.”
The pleasure is not so much in finding Biblical deposits in obviously Biblical writers like Shakespeare, Hardy, and Lawrence as in finding the same on apparently stonier ground. Philip Larkin, an English poet of decidedly secular leanings, disdained ecclesiastical liturgy, once calling it “that vast moth-eaten musical brocade.” His beautiful poem, “Cut Grass,” first appeared in 1974. At first sight, it appears to be simply a small offshoot from the big branch of lyric elegy:
But, once one has encountered Psalm 90, with its verse about how humankind’s passage is like grass (“In the morning it flourisheth, and groweth up; in the evening it is cut down, and withereth”), the broadly elegiac theme of Larkin’s poem has a suddenly sacred basis; and what of that psalmlike colon at the end of Larkin’s first line, or that compound, “high-builded,” with its archaic inflected verb, one that appears frequently in the King James version (Psalm 122, for instance: “Jerusalem is builded as a city that is compact together”)? The poem speaks of “lost lanes,” but even if these English lanes have been lost, the English linguistic lanes have not, and doesn’t the poem’s diction, its history-cocked ear, in fact reclaim them?
How the King James Bible came about is the theme of Adam Nicolson’s fine book, “God’s Secretaries” (HarperCollins; $24.95). It is a popular book as popular books used to be, a breeze rather than a scholarly sweat, but humanely erudite, elegantly written, passionately felt, and jauntily unfootnoted (alas). It is also written with a love for the language of the King James Bible. Nicolson is excited by this verbal monument—“England’s equivalent of the great baroque cathedral it never built,” as he puts it—and his excitement is contagious.
He begins by reminding us of the ever-peculiar fact that its delicate style was the creation of a committee, or several committees. At Hampton Court, in January, 1604, King James I, newly enthroned, agreed to the proposal of one of his advisers that the new reign deserved a new Bible in English. Of course, there had been translations, or attempts at translations, before, and Nicolson unwisely slights the towering examples set by such men as William Tyndale, in the fifteen-twenties, and Miles Coverdale, in the fifteen-thirties. One scholar has reckoned that “approximately 60 per cent of the text of the English Bible had reached its final literary form before the King James version was produced.” Tyndale’s rhythms pulse throughout the King James version, and many phrases of Coverdale’s, such as “the valley of the shadow of death” and “three score years and ten”—where the Hebrew has simply “seventy”—are ensconced in the King James version, whose translators themselves announced in their preface that what they had produced was not so much a new translation as a final revision of all the previous English Bibles.
But Coverdale’s Bible, the first complete one to be printed in English, had been translated in part from Latin (the Catholic Vulgate edition) and German (Martin Luther’s translation); the King James version would need to take on all the Hebrew of the Old Testament and the Greek of the New. To this end, the King set out to assemble an extraordinary panoply of the country’s finest linguists, divided into six “companies” of nine men each, “a body of men nearly four times the size of any previous Bible enterprise.” In retrospect, we can see that this project fell into propitious arms: the English language had reached a high point of flexibility and rhetorical power—the King James version was composed between 1604 and 1611, thus coinciding with the writing of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies and his last plays. This was the age of the antiquarian, the amateur scholar, the ecclesiastical polyglot, the obsessed bibliophile. James I was himself a learned man, reared in Scotland by one of Montaigne’s tutors, and capable, Nicolson says, of translating any passage of the Bible from Latin into French and then into English.
Many formidable minds were involved in the translation. Nicolson, whose previous books include an account of the restoration of Windsor Castle and a portrait of life on the Shiant Isles (the tiny Hebridean islands off the northwest coast of Scotland), is a skilled storyteller, and he compacts large amounts of research into alluring anecdotal packets. His book is really a long gaze at the gallery of men who made up the six companies, and readers will learn a good deal about the ecclesiastical and university cultures of the early seventeenth century. The most prominent of the translators was Lancelot Andrewes. Now probably known best—if at all—from T. S. Eliot’s essay about his prose, Andrewes was the Master of Pembroke College, Cambridge, and the Dean of Westminster. He was also the greatest preacher of his time, and a remarkable linguist who spoke fifteen modern and six ancient languages. Andrewes was in charge of the First Westminster Company, whose mission was to translate the first twelve books of the Old Testament.
Nicolson shows how Andrewes’s combination of unworldly faith (he spent five hours every morning in solitary prayer) and mastery of churchcraft (he was adept at pulling strings, soothing royal tempers, and maintaining power) was characteristic of the Bible project. In an age of the divine right of kings, devotion to God and devotion to temporal power were united. Likewise, the King wanted a Bible that would both honor its sacred sources and emblazon the new unity and humanism of his reign. To that end, he forbade marginal notes, except for the explanation of Hebrew or Greek words “which cannot without some circumlocution soe breifly and fitly be expressed in ye Text.” The Geneva Bible, produced by English Puritans in exile, was spattered with contentious notes, and the King, with an instinct for the via media that the English Church had trod since the Reformation—fighting Rome temporally but often cleaving to it spiritually—wanted a Bible that smoothed contention into majesty. It was the job of the translators’ rhetoric to elide doctrinal differences. “This is the heart of the new Bible as an irenicon,” Nicolson writes with typical shrewdness, “an organism that absorbed and integrated difference, that included ambiguity and by doing so established peace. It is the central mechanism of the translation, one of immense lexical subtlety, a deliberate carrying of multiple meanings beneath the surface of a single text.”
Each of the translators worked alone on the portion assigned to his company before conferring with his eight colleagues. Once a company had finished a book, it circulated it to the other five groups, so that they might consider it “seriously and judiciously: for His Majestie is verie carefull of this poynt.” From notes taken at one of these final meetings, we know that, as befits an essentially oral text, the proceedings were oral. One man read aloud while the others listened, speaking up only when they found fault. They were a various crowd, and Nicolson’s delightful sketches bring them to life. Among them were Richard Thomson, a celebrated translator of Martial, a linguist with correspondents in Italy, France, and Germany; William Bedwell, a mathematician and Arabist; Miles Smith, who described himself as “covetous of nothing but books,” and who kept no books in his library that he had not read; George Abbot, the Master of University College, Oxford, who once had a hundred and forty Oxford undergraduates arrested for not removing their hats as he entered St. Mary’s Church; the dashing Sir Henry Savile, Provost of Eton, who was the first English translator of Tacitus, and who also worked for years on a vast edition of the writings of St. John Chrysostom, the fourth-century archbishop of Constantinople; and John Bois, a prodigy to rival John Stuart Mill, having written Hebrew by the time he was six and become a student at Cambridge by the age of fourteen. He told people that he had every extant Greek text on his shelves. One of Nicolson’s most interesting passages concerns John Layfield, a Greek scholar who had accompanied the Earl of Cumberland on an expedition across the ocean to the Caribbean, and had written a fine account of what he saw. Quoting from Layfield’s description of Dominica’s lushness, lingering over the marvellous phrase “the trees doe continually maintaine themselves in a greene-good liking,” Nicolson hints at the nicely scandalous idea that the Caribbean was in Layfield’s mind when he helped to translate the account of Eden in Genesis.
What did they do? How and why did they get so much right? Here Nicolson pushes against the rather too heavily mortgaged boundaries of his genre; one feels him curtailing literary criticism in the interest of narrative. Yet he is an excellent critic, and another fifty or so pages would have made his book scholarly as well as popular. It has been said that FitzGerald’s version of “The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám” is obviously too good a poem to be a good translation. Yet often the King James translators secured that great, supposedly unachievable paradox: they were both faithful and unfaithful. They announced in their preface that they would not be held to a “uniformitie of phrasing, or to an identitie of words,” so that, for instance, they would feel free to translate the word for “purpose” sometimes as “purpose” and sometimes as “intent.” In fact, they were fruitfully inconsistent. At once conservative and radical, they honored a uniformity of phrasing when it seemed thematically appropriate, and expanded into diversity when meaning seemed to sanction it. The Hebrew texts in particular feature what have been called “key-words,” words or phrases repeated and subtly modified in a passage, as a kind of threaded meaning. The English translators were sensitive watchers of these words, and the King James Bible is considered superlative for the pursuit of such threads. The scholars Robert Alter and Gerald Hammond have discussed the technique as it appears in II Samuel 3, in which the phrase “and he went in peace” undergoes a series of variations analogous to those of the original Hebrew:
Hammond notes that later versions of this passage, like the Jerusalem Bible and the New English Bible, smother the effect by varying their translations of the key-phrase too drastically. Repetition and its close family of varieties is at the heart of the King James triumph. Jacobean English was not merely unafraid of repetition; it cherished it. This love of repetition and muffled repetition also meshes well with the Hebrew of the Old Testament, which is characterized by a kind of “semantic parallelism.” As Alter points out, if “hearken” is used in one verse, “listen” may be used in the next. One of his examples is from II Samuel 22 (in his translation): “For with you I charge a barrier, / with My God I vault a wall.” This extends into the New Testament, of course. Hebrews 12:6 has: “For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth.”
The English translators are masters of repetition, often using a musical form of the key-words technique to signal minuscule changes in intensity even when the words themselves do not change. There are the great words from Isaiah 61, for example, some of the loveliest in the Bible: “For as the earth bringeth forth her bud, and as the garden causeth the things that are sown in it to spring forth; so the Lord God will cause righteousness to spring forth before all the nations.” Nowadays, no writer would risk the potential bathos of ending a passage with a repetition of its predecessor. But isn’t the phrase changing even as it is being repeated? At first, it is only the earth that brings forth flowers or causes other flowers to spring forth; by the last phrase, it is the Lord God himself who now causes righteousness, and not merely buds, to spring forth.
So there is a one-word answer to the question of what the translators got right. It is music. And here music is meaning. Take the well-known words from Matthew 11:28: “Come unto me all ye that labour, and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” Tyndale had “Come unto me all ye that laboure and are laden and I will ease you.” The Jacobeans retained Tyndale’s rhythm; but it was they who added that simple, brief word—to our modern ears a marvellous half-adjective and half-adverb_—heavy_ laden. Their desire, made explicit in the preface, was to use as many English words as possible, “commodiously,” for the greater glory of God. Often, they strove for the widest possible meaning, the most ambiguous resonances; the musical equivalent might be the organ stop known as a “mixture,” in which tones of related pitch are played simultaneously by a single key. A famous example occurs in I Kings 19:12: “And after the earthquake, a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire, a still small voice.” Coverdale’s earlier rendition had “a still soft hissing,” and the so-called Matthew’s Bible, of 1537 (which closely followed Tyndale), had “a small still voice.” The later translators, by changing “small still voice” to “still small voice,” retained the literal meaning of Matthew’s Bible while playing on the double sense of “still,” adding the extra suggestion that the voice has always been small and will continue to be (is still small).
At times, there was too much music. The translators’ determination to use as many English words as possible sometimes results in versions that, by modern scholarly standards, can be somewhat free and inexact. Nicolson loves the King James version too much to criticize it, but the Princeton New Testament scholar Bruce M. Metzger complains in his book “The Bible in Translation” (not found in Nicolson’s bibliography) that the word katargeo, which occurs twenty-seven times in the New Testament, is subjected to an anarchy of different English approximations, eighteen in all, including “abolish, cease, cumber, deliver, destroy, do away . . . fail, loose, bring (come) to naught, put away (down), vanish away, make void.” And, of course, there were errors, many of them. In I Kings 13:27, the wrong pronoun prompts unwitting comedy: “And he spake to his sons, saying, Saddle me the ass. And they saddled him.” Modern translations have changed “him” to “it,” but my copy of the King James Bible, at least, still proudly bears “him.”
Many people have commented on the mixture of simplicity and grandeur in the King James version, so that we can go without apparent difficulty from “a drop of a bucket” or “the apple of his eye” or “give up the ghost” to the larger tremolo of “I water my couch with my tears” and of Job’s “Hast thou given the horse strength? Hast thou clothed his neck with thunder?” Even amid the furies and billows of Isaiah, we come upon a simple speaking voice: “I will mention the loving-kindnesses of the Lord . . . according to all that the Lord hath bestowed on us.” It is the sort of movement that is also found in the Psalms, where deepest lamentation can lighten into almost colloquial address: “As for me, I will behold thy face in righteousness: I shall be satisfied, when I awake” (Psalm 17).
The great master of such combinations is Paul. In his letter to the Romans, a rhetorical supremacy is reached, whereby an inherited Hebrew parallelism, the colloquialism of an elder addressing new congregations, an almost legalistic restraint, and an intense, rising repetition all newly converge. A series of rhetorical questions closes that epistle’s Chapter 8:
And then come these final verses:
Again, one is struck by the daring of ending a passage of rising exhortation with the calm, almost finicky precision of “For I am persuaded that.” But Paul’s discourse often sounds a note of excited reticence; he is very good at taking the already resonant Old Testament words such as “satisfy” and “acceptable” and pulling from them a kind of controlled, ironic fervor. He writes, for instance, also in Romans, “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.” All the weight of suppressed emotion falls on those desperately restrained words “acceptable” and “reasonable.” The English translators could measure the gravity of a word, its buried anchor, and they knew—indeed, they believed, of course—that Jewish and Christian messianism warranted both exultancy and stoicism, an endlessly suppressed anticipation. One waits in great anticipation; but one waits and waits and waits, and so one learns how to measure the longevity of one’s excitement. Thus the decorum of these quietly quivering words: “satisfy,” “acceptable,” “persuade,” “reasonable.” Among modern writers, T. S. Eliot, who wrote of what he called “relevant intensity” in the prose of Lancelot Andrewes, knew best how to get this King James atmosphere of controlled passion. In “The Waste Land,” how severely but carefully his lines fall on the word “patience”:
