BOOKS OF THE DAY
The Knox New Testament
The New Testament, newly translate4 'into English. By Ronald Knox. (Burns, Oates and Washbourne. 6s and lOs. 6d.)
A NEW translation of the New Testament by such a scholar as Mgr. Knox is a very important event. Commissioned by the Roman Catholic Hierarchy of England and Wales, it has inevitably been made not from the Greek but from the Vulgate (which is the only Bible recognised by the Roman Church). As, however, the Vulgate and the original Greek text are on the whole very close to each other (St. Jerome was considered by the translators of the Authorised Version " a most learned Father, and the best linguist without con- troversy of his age, or of any other that went before him "), this new translation can be compared with the English New Testament (whether A.V. or R.V.) used in Protestant Churches and with such other translations from the Greek as Dr. James Moffatt's (1913). For a reviewer who is not a biblical scholar to attempt such a com- parison from the angle of textual accuracy would be an imper- tinence, but I think I can claim the right of the ordinary educated reader to criticise English as English and to estimate the effect which it has on him personally. Let me begin by saying that, quite apart from the question of literal accuracy (Mgr. Knox is sometimes hampered by orthodoxy), the great virtue- of any new rendering of the Bible or part of the Bible is that it defamiliarises it. Our Autho- rised Version, especially, is so familiar that it tends to become an incantation instead of being read as narrative or ethical exposition ; this hypnotic effect is enhanced by its poetic rhythms and archaisms (the R.V. also archaises). Mgr. Knox, in offering us a straight, lucid and easily moving prose, encourages us to look for a meaning. We might almost be reading these things for the first time.
Any English version of a Greek or Latin classic tends, owing to the grammatical peculiarities of these languages, to use more words than its original. But this is not the only inevitable loss. Even the Elizabethans could not match either the monumental cadences of patristic Latin or the ease and deftness of the Hellenistic Greek. For all that, so far as glamour goes, our A.V. can compare with the ancients. No new English translation need, therefore, aim at glamour ; what we do need is clarity—and such stylistic virtues as subserve it. Mgr. Knox is a very considerable stylist in this less conspicuous manner. Like Dr. Moffatt he has aimed in general at a twentieth-century manner, but he has avoided Moffatt's gaucheries and in nine cases out of ten scores over him for both intelligibility and elegance. Where, e.g., the A.V. reads, " Let your speech be always with grace, seasoned with salt, that ye may know how to answer every man," Moffatt, retaining both the ancient metaphor of salt Wart iprtw(Poi—sale conditus) and the English ambiguity of " grace," produces the flat "Let your talk always have a saving salt of grace about it, and learn how to answer any question put to you," but Mgr. Knox makes the lines live again: " Your manner of speaking must always be gracious, with an edge of liveliness (italics mine), ready to give each questioner the right answer." Mgr. Knox's delicate sense of prose rhythm can be seen in passages such as the Magnificat (Luke, Ch. x), where, without even reproducing the emotive inversions of the original, he still has more impact than Moffatt, who falls between two stools, using inversions and laying out the lines like verse, yet achieving thereby none of the memorable dignity of the A.V. On the other hand, Mgr. Knox's diction here is more " poetic " or archaic than Moffatt's ; he uses " lowliness," " handmaid,"," wrought " and " conceit of their hearts" for Moffatt's "humiliation," "servant," " done " and " their purposes." But the only conclusion to be drawn from this is the old truism, that style (and therefore readability) depends more on a sense of touch than on formula. Mgr. Knox has certainly a sense of touch. Thus in passages where the familiar English renderings are quaint or obscure and the bringing back of the meaning requires an effort, Mgr. Knox, as compared with Moffatt (who also was making this effort), is preferable not a. ly for sound but for meaning. E.g., in Colossians 3, the famous passage about putting off " the old man with his deeds " which inspired Bunyan but which obviously needs modernising, where Moffatt has " you have stripped off the old nature with its practices," he puts—more precisely and more vividly —" You must be quit of the old self (italics mine) and the habits that went with it " (though it is a pity that he has dropped the original metaphor of expoliantes—arehluo-dyrrot). Again, in II Corinthians 5, where the Vulgate has lecundum carrion (Kara craptca), the A.V. literally translates " Wherefore henceforth we know no man after the flesh " —which is, nowadays at least, obscure and possibly misleading ; Moffatt substitutes " Once convinced of this, then, I estimate no one by what is external," and Mgr. Knox (again, I would say, with more impact) "Henceforward, we do not think of anybody in a merely human fashion." St. Paul does appear in this version of the Epistles as a serious thinker who demands the same kind of attention as is given to Plato, Confucius or Marcus Aurelius (who are also usually read in translation). The New Testanznt through this new translation—strictly "orthodox " as it is—seenV again to have raised
Previous page
