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- Verified Buyer
This is a splendid book on a subject of vast religious, aesthetic and cultural importance. Nicolson has produced a lovely study, particularly in light of the fact that there are few materials at hand. We know that there were approximately 50 translators divided into six companies. While some remain relatively shadowy figures, a number are very well known, particularly Lancelot Andrewes, the great sermon writer and one of T.S. Eliot’s favorite writers. We know a bit about the review process in which individual translations were subject to a hierarchical form of peer review, with one ultimate committee holding responsibility for final decisions. We know that the text from which the companies worked was the Bishops’ Bible and we know that William Tyndale’s words had a particularly strong influence on the translators.What we lack is documentary evidence. Only a few pieces survive, in part because of a great fire in Whitehall shortly after the publication of the KJB. What we have, however, is Adam Nicolson, who is able to look at the sparse collection of extant documents and draw conclusions based on trenchant analysis. The translators were very, very conscientious, debating over the structures of sentences and the appropriateness of each word therein. They were attuned to the sounds of those sentences, reading them aloud (as they would be read aloud in churches) and paying close attention to the rhythm, clarity and gravity of each.Hence (lacking a vast amount of documentary evidence), Nicolson comes at this from a different direction. He looks, in depth, at the individual experience of individual translators and demonstrates the manner in which those experiences participated in the contemporary zeitgeist and formed the basis for the final results, in English biblical prose. For example, he will talk about gardens and men who loved them, of plants, flowers, vegetables and all that Shakespeare described as ‘great creating Nature’. He will then take the individual experiences, form them into a Jacobean perspective and then demonstrate how that perspective played out in individual passages of the KJB. He then reinforces the point by contrasting the dramatic, magic, nearly mystic power of the Jacobean voice with the flat, uninspired banalities of modern translations. Ben Jonson once said that Spenser ‘writ no language’, that the language of the Faerie Queene was a Spenserian construct, studiedly archaic but aesthetically appropriate. Nicolson sees the language of the KJB as, in some ways, similar; it is like the language of the mid-16th century, not the language of 1611, and it is designed to be both clear and also commensurate with the grandeur and importance of its subject. It is poetic, lapidary, unforgettable and the result, in its totality, is the greatest monument of English prose.It should also be noted that the KJB was printed in incredibly sloppy fashion and that one cannot really talk about ‘editions’, ‘issues’, etc. in the manner of standard bibliographical analysis; each volume is ‘unique’ (in a bad sense); hence another layer of difficulty for modern students to penetrate.Adam Nicolson is a very special writer—a learned and erudite individual who has also immersed himself in the realities of the material world. He is a farmer; he is a sailor, e.g. This helps equip him for the challenges of writing this book. In writing it he has also demonstrated that he is an exceptional literary critic, one who is capable of analyzing prose (for which we have the most limited academic vocabulary) and finding unexpected but apt words to describe the aesthetic phenomena that have had a profound effect on all KJB readers (and listeners).Bottom line: a most impressive book, fascinating in its details and strategies.Highly recommended.
