SPRING BOOKS 1

Moses in a lounge suit

ANTHONY BURGESS

In James I's reign the two conceivably greatest books in the Western world appeared—the Authorised Version of 1611 and the First Folio of 1623. The reign of Elizabeth H still has, one trusts, a long way to go and, though it is hardly likely to pro- duce a comparable secular work, at least and at last the Queen has—twenty-four years after its first being proposed by her father's Church in Scotland—her own religious monument: the New English Bible (Oxford and Cambridge University Presses, 35s with Apocrypha), a great work of scholarship and a not inconsiderable work of literature. But our resigned acceptance of inability to produce a new Shakespeare is matched by diffidence in a literary field where individual genius is not expected to operate. The language of the Authorised Version is, says the Handbook to the NEB, Incom- parable'. All today's organisation of scholars and literary advisers could be expected to produce was 'a Bible containing the highest scholarly authority with an English style which would not put it at too great a disad- vantage when set beside the classic English Bible'.

The layman assumes that the scholarship is more considerable than anything that the Jacobeans could muster, and that the texts available for translation have a greater authenticity than those the six 'companies' worked on from 1603 to 1611—for one thing, we now have the Dead Sea Scrolls. He will be no more inclined to question the competence of the reverend doctors involved than he will be to disagree with a celestial report from Jodrell Bank. Of the distinction of the members of the Liter- ary Panel he will be better able to judge. Thus, there is the Rev Adam Fox, author of Meet the Greek Testament and God is an Artist, there is Sir Herbert Grierson, very well known for his work on the metaphysical poets; there are Professor Sir Roger Mynors (Catulli Carmina etc), Sir Arthur Norrington (joint editor of A. H. Clough's poems), Walter Oakeshott (author of 'various semi- popular books on literature and mediaeval art'), Professor Basil Willey, expert on the English Mind; there is one woman member —Mrs Anne Ridler, who as a poet may claim to be a literary artist as well as a literary scholar. The names are acceptable ones, but none is exactly formidable.

The translators themselves are 'men who

. hear the voice of God speaking to them in Holy Scripture'. That is a just and modest claim, but the voice of God has presum- ably not spoken so eloquently as it did between 1603 and 1611. Why is God's English not so good as it was three and a half centuries ago?

For one thing, we (let us leave God out of it) are frightened of rhetoric. Language full of the daughters of music is admissible as an eccentric idiolect—spoken by a poet or by a mad Nabokov narrator—but it can no longer be allowed to issue from a rational and sober collective. Devices like assonance and headrime must always add a touch of irrational persuasion to prose, along with antithesis and chiasmus and the rest of the rusty oratorical apparatus, and prose should always be rational. This is regarded as true even of the imaginative prose proper to fiction.

A popularly reputed master of fictional narrative was Nevil Shute, who would sometimes head his novels with a poetic epigraph but strenuously kept things plain in the works themselves. This comes from On The Beach: 'They stayed that night in the calm waters of the harbour just off Santa Maria Island, watching the shore lights through the peri- scope. At dawn they got under way on a reverse course, and immediately ran aground upon a mudbank. The tide was ebbing and within a couple of hours of low water; even so there should have been a fathom of water underneath their keel according to the chart.'

It is precisely the tone of the NEB version of Genesis:

'After forty days Noah opened the trap- door that he had made in the ark, and re- leased a raven to see whether the water had subsided, but the bird continued flying to and fro until the water on the earth had dried up. Noah waited for seven days, and then he released a dove from the ark to see whether the water on the earth had sub- sided further.'

There is nothing wrong at all with either passage: both represent lucid factual con- temporary narrative at its best. But the AV continues this story with a quaint but exact and homely touch somehow foreign to the spirit of twentieth-century reportage: 'But the dove found no rest for the sole of her foot'. The NEB has 'But the dove found no place where she could settle'. The first is almost Shakespearian; the second is cer- tainly Shutean.

In the narrative books of the Bible, where it is the story that counts, such a Jacobean felicity can be regarded as a discardable bonus. The NEB never does badly when it is merely chronicling Jewish history, though the 'Once upon a time' beginning of the Tower of Babel story seems to cast doubt on its veracity: either the whole Bible is true or it is all a fairy story. And the clarity of the new Leviticus, removing a dimension of remoteness and magic from the long tale of prohibitions, brings the Law home to the suburbs:

'You shall not have intercourse with your father's sister: she is a blood-relation of your father. You shall not have intercourse -with your mother's sister: the is a blood-' relation of your mother. You shall not bring' shame upon your father's brother by approaching his wife: she is your aunt.'

It is when the translators come to prophecy and poetry that their language is lacking. Take the opening of Ecclesiastes. The AV has 'Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity'. Obviously that saith has to go. The NEB gives 'Empti- ness, emptiness, says the Speaker, emptiness, all is empty'. There is only one Speaker, it might be objected, and he is in a House of Commons without a quorum. What we have here is a gloomy sermon, and sermons re- main the work of preachers. If emptiness may he taken as a fair synonym for the 1611 of vanity, yet rhetorically it is an inferior word. An initial labiodental bites hard; an initial vowel (or glottal stop) doesn't bite at all. And listen to all that hissing.

One thing we think we know about scien- tifically today, which the Jacobeans under- stood only instinctively, is the reason why certain sound-combinations are, in a given context, more effective than others. In the AV Song of Songs, this music chimes right: 'The voice of my beloved! behold, he cometh leaping upon the mountains, skip- ping upon the hills.' The NEB has: 'Hark! my beloved! Here he comes, bounding over the mountains, leaping over the hills.' (Note., incidentally, that the beginning of the new is more archaic than that of the old.) Leap- ing is right for mountains and skipping for hills, because leaping has the highest pos- sible front vowel to match the height of the mountains, and skipping has a vowel some- what lower, and also shorter, to go with the lower or shorter hills. Bounding will not really do, for its diphthong is the same as that in mountains, suggesting bulk rather than lightness and speed.

As is to be expected, it is the new Song of Songs that suffers more than any other of the poetic books, though some of the gorgeous mysteries of the Av seem to be based on misconceptions, and it is right that modern scholarship should first consult the claims of exact translation. The Bride is not, after all, the rose of Sharon but an asphodel in Sharon. The phrase 'as one that turneth aside by the flocks of thy com- panions' is changed to 'that I may not be left picking lice as I sit among your com- panions' herds'. In the following the con- junction is wonderful but perhaps nonsense: 'Behold, thou art fair, my beloved, yea, pleasant: also our bed is green.' Now we have: 'How beautiful you are, 0 my love, and how pleasant!' That is the Bride speak- ing; the Bridegroom responds:

'Our couch is shaded with branches; the beams of our house are of cedar, our ceilings are all of fir.'

The 1611 version has, of course. 'our rafters of fir'. Ceilings are, surely, a bit too modern and urban, and they call forth a kinky homonym in fir. 'Take us the foxes, the little foxes' is now 'Catch for us the jackals, the little jackals', and a footnote says these jackals may be read as fruit-bats. Now the largest kind of fruit-bat, as any dweller in the East knows, is the flying fox, so fox is still in order. 'Stay me with flagons, com- fort me with apples: for I am sick of love' is now the Bride's reminiscence of the mul- tiple kindness of the Bridegroom: 'He re- freshed me with raisins, he revived me with apricots; for I was faint with love.' That is probably good Hebrew, but I regret those flagons. The whole statement has become less bucolically robust: it somehow sug- gests an afternoon in a Bayswater bedsitter, with a plastic fruitbowl on the G-plan table The Psalms are good, though good in the manner of Shaw rewriting Cymbeline: 'God is our shelter and our refuge,

a timely help in trouble; so we are not afraid when the earth heaves and the mountains are hurled into the sea, when its waters seethe in tumult and the mountains quake before his majesty.'

(A pity about his majesty, which has become set into an honorific.) Wherein does the superiority of the following lie?

'God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea; Though the waters thereof roar and be troubled, though the mountains shake with the swelling thereof.'

Very present is more immediate, more now, than timely. There is a bigger range of vowel-music (no rhyme of earth and hurled, for instance, or of sea and seethe), and there is a flavour of personification in the image of the earth being removed and the moun- tains carried (by whom?), as well as a sug- gestion of a living beast in 'the waters there- of roar and be troubled'. In Jacobean writing there is usually an animistic quality, as though the distinction between animate and inanimate was not clearly understood. Every- thing is alive and active: this is the Shake- spearian quality.

Let me finish with captiousness. This new Bible is a remarkable piece of work, beauti- fully printed on strong thin paper that makes it portable if not pocketable, a triumph of the scholar's and bookmaker's craft. But it is not just the mumpsimus spirit, the attitude of long unquestioning love, that prevents its usurping the place of the King James ver- sion. (I may say now that, as a Catholic, I came to that version very late, long after I had read the whole of Shakespeare, and there was no associative magic in it for me). The New Testament, which came out in its new form in 1961 and sold even better than Lady Chatterley's Lover, released unexpur- gated at about the same time, has relevance to our age and that age needs the message in plain, not in an antique code. The Old Testament works best in a remote and magical language; with its taboos, savagery, and violent poetry, it is awkward in modern dress, like Moses in a lounge suit.