Thoughts on Translating Psalm 22

First, two warnings. I’m not going to go into detail on the numerous translation difficulties in Psalm 22 and this post results from a book currently in the final stages of release from my company, Energion Publications. So if you want to avoid the potential commercial side, skip this one. On the other hand, that’s the book cover to the left!

The book is a collection of responses to the Psalms written by various members of my home church (First UMC, Pensacola). One of my contributions was a translation, and I chose Psalm 22 because of the numerous translation issues.

This process underlined for me the number of different possibilities there are in translation. We accept pretty readily that a piece of literature has particular circumstances and purposes for which it is written. It has a setting. It has a background. This could be said of any act of communication, but especially of something written.

Similarly a translation has a purpose, or perhaps multiple purposes. In this case, my translation was to fit into a collection of reflections. The ideal would be that it be in some way a reflection of what the Psalm has meant to me. Would that be a translation? In my opinion, yes.

But my personal bias would suggest I make every effort to reproduce the original form of the Hebrew text and reflect the forms of Hebrew poetry in my translation. I suppose that would have been an acceptable approach—it would have reflected me as well as the historical text.

But then I also thought about the uses of the Psalms in Christian worship. While I’m translating a Hebrew Psalm, I’m doing so in the context of a collection created by and for a Christian congregation. This may not be used in the liturgy of the church, but it might well reflect the church at worship.

Thus I made a choice to allow the LXX and the Vulgate to have a greater than normal impact on my final translation, and while I reflected the sparseness of some of the Hebrew expressions, my effort was much more intended to make it easy for the modern reader to understand. At the same time I intentionally did not take all the foreignness and roughness out of it. Some of it sounds abrupt.

Readers of the New Testament will find the passages the church has traditionally read christologically translated in fairly traditional terms. They’ll find a few mildly obscure passages still obscure. I felt a certain freedom in this regard since I can be certain that nobody will be using this particular translation as their standard, authoritative translation of the passage.

I would again note that I find any claim that all translations must aim at just one thing to be unjustified. There is room for a variety of translation approaches and even the translation of a variety of texts. If my translation reflects the LXX in places, I remember that the LXX was the Bible of much of the early Christian community.

What do I think of my own translation? That’s hard to say. It was an effort of several days and I could have spent a good deal more time on it than I did. In fact, it’s hard for me to decide that I’m done with such a translation. I guarantee that if I went over it at this moment I’d wind up making changes.

My wish is that we could judge translations in terms of their aims and how well they accomplish them rather than against some ideal plan that all translations must follow. I like Clear Accurate and Natural, and generally commend that approach for people’s reading and worship Bibles. I like a close reflection of the forms and culture of the source for serious study.

Approach must match occasion and purpose. Or am I allowed to use the word “must”? 🙂