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לַשֶּׁמֶשׁ שָׂם־אֹהֶל בָּהֶם
וְהוּא כְּחָתָן
יֹצֵא מֵחֻפָּתֹו
יָשִׂישׂ כְּגִבּוֹר
לָרוּץ אֹרַח
מִקְצֵה הַשָּׁמַיִם מוֹצָאֹו
וּתְקוּפָתֹו עַל־קְצוֹתָם
וְאֵין נִסְתָּר מֵחַמָּתֹו
God has made a home in the heavens for the sun.
It bursts forth like a radiant bridegroom after his wedding.
It rejoices like a great athlete eager to run the race.
The sun rises at one end of the heavens
and follows its course to the other end.
Nothing can hide from its heat. (NLT)
For the sun he made a tent in them;
he is like a bridegroom
who exits his wedding canopy.
He rejoices like a champion
the course to run.
His point of exit: heaven’s end,
his circuit, against its extremities;
nothing is hidden from his heat.
The third and final part of 19:5 belongs with 19:6-7. NRSV and NJB format accordingly. In so doing, they follow in the footsteps of Robert Kraft, A. H. van Zijl, and R. Durlesse. More recently, Peter Craigie, Pierre Auffret, Jan Fokkelman, and Beat Weber independently came to the same conclusion.[1] The whole consists of three lines, the first and last of which are tripartite.
NLT is a translation which leaves nothing to the imagination. Pronouns are replaced by the intended referents. Details implied by the text but deliberately left unsaid are supplied. For example, it is left unsaid in the original that the sun, like a bridegroom, beams after tying the knot under the chuppah, or wedding canopy, still in use in Jewish weddings today. The original implies that, but does not come out and say it. In other instances, NLT does not supply details but suppresses them. Images may be reduced to a semantic component they contain. For example, the parallel pair ‘tent’ / ‘canopy’ is replaced by ‘home’ / ‘wedding.’ The trope of parallelism is lost in the process.
I understand the value of such a translation. In the process, however, the poetry of the original is effaced.
Poetry deliberately subverts the rules of prose. Prose supplies the necessary amount of detail. Poetry either provides more than enough, or what might seem to be too little. Poetry is designed to surprise, and requires an active reader. For that reason, poetry reaches into our soul in a way that ordinary prose does not.
NLT seems to proceed on the assumption that poetry is beyond the grasp of its target audience. Its translation of biblical poetry does not allow the tropes of the original like parallelism and metonymy to work their magic. It is also lacking in rhythm and meter. Of course the original’s rhythm and meter cannot be reproduced one for one. But attention might still be given to phonological flow and proportion, key aspects of poetry in any culture. The better English translations do so (KJV and REB, for example).
I reject the assumption that poetry is beyond the grasp of NLT’s target audience. My youngest, Anna, is four years old. Her older sister, Betta, has repeated nursery rhymes for her, the same ones I taught her, every evening in the bathtub for years now. Anna beams when she repeats one. Her diction and prosody are flawless. If I asked her what a ‘roller bed’ is (‘he bumped his head on the roller bed, and couldn’t get up in the morning’), she wouldn’t be able to tell me. Heck, if you asked me, I wouldn’t be able to tell you. Yet we all understand the poetry perfectly.
The goal of a poetic translation of biblical poetry must be to have the same property of comprehensibility of a non-analytical kind.
A forced aspect of my translation is the attempt to preserve the concordance between the bridegroom who ‘comes out’ from the tent / canopy, and the later continuation, in which it is said that the ‘place of his coming out’ is at heaven’s end. In Hebrew, the sun ‘comes out’ (יצא) in the morning and ‘(re-)enters’ (בוא) at night. I don’t like the sound of ‘exiting’ and ‘point of exit’ to express this, but can’t think of anything better.
NAB has an excellent translation here, and maintains and redoubles the concordance of the parts:
God has pitched there a tent for the sun;
it comes forth like a bridegroom from his chamber,
and like an athlete joyfully runs its course.
From one end of the heavens it comes forth;
its course runs through to the other;
nothing escapes its heat.
The imagic flow of the Hebrew might be characterized as cinematic. The succession of images is rapid, the juxtaposition artful. God has set up a tent in the heavens for the sun, we are told, and before we can catch our breath, the generic tent has become a wedding tent, and the sun is said to come out of it like a bridegroom. The bridegroom image is then dropped, and replaced by the image of a powerful runner who delights in the course before him. All the images then coalesce. The tent / wedding tent / point of departure for the bridegroom / runner is said to be at heaven’s end. His circuit is against its extremities, his heat reaching everywhere. By this last metonymy (‘heat’ = ‘sun’), the one who is the bridegroom and runner is named and characterized by a compact allusion.
[1] For alternative subdivisions of Psalm 19, and a fuller list of those who divide as proposed here, see Pieter van der Lugt, Cantos and Strophes in Biblical Hebrew Poetry with Special Reference to the First Book of the Psalter (OTS 53; Leiden: Brill, 2006) 222-23.
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