Eloquence By Accident: Accuracy Of Translation As The Primary Goal Of The King James Bible
ELOQUENCE BY ACCIDENT: ACCURACY OF TRANSLATION AS THE PRIMARY GOAL OF THE KING JAMES BIBLE
There was virtually universal agreement in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that the King James Bible had made a massive contribution to the development of the English language in general, and English prose in particular. The “noblest monument of English prose” was recognized as being of decisive importance in the molding of English.
Yet there is no evidence that the translators of the King James Bible had any great interest in matters of literature or linguistic development. Their concern was primarily to provide an accurate translation of the Bible, on the assumption that accuracy was itself the most aesthetic of qualities to be desired. Paradoxically, the king's translators achieved literary distinction precisely because they were not deliberately pursuing it. Aiming at truth, they achieved what later generations recognized as beauty and elegance. Where later translations deliberately and self-consciously sought after literary merit, the king's translators achieved it unintentionally, by focusing on what, to them, was a greater goal. Paradoxically, elegance was achieved by accident, rather than design.
The central objective of the king's translators was scholarly accuracy—the finding of proper English words and phrases to render the original Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic. Sense and meaning took priority over elegance. The achievement of prosaic and poetic elegance that resulted was, so to speak, a most happy accident of history. Yet this outcome must not divert us from the fact that the idea of “the Bible as literature” was unknown to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which saw accuracy as the supreme goal in translation.
One possible contributing factor to the elegance of the King James Bible is its refusal to adopt a purely mechanical approach to translation, in which a Hebrew or Greek word is woodenly rendered by exactly the same English term throughout. The translators clearly felt themselves free to use a range of English words and phrases, as they judged appropriate—a clear sign of a growing sense of confidence in English as a living language. This principle was set out in the preface to the work:
We have not tied ourselves to an uniformity of phrasing or an identity of words, as some peradventure would wish that we have done… But that we should express the same notion in the same particular word, as for example, if we translate the Hebrew or Greek word once by “purpose,” never to call it “intent”… we thought to savour more of curiosity than wisdom.
This decision allowed the translators to achieve a wider lexical range than would otherwise have been possible. On the one hand, this led to a lack of strict accuracy where it might have been expected; on the other, it allowed for a greater richness of the text than a more mechanical approach to the issue might have engendered.
To note with approval the grace and refinement of the translation is not to say that there is a total absence of inelegancies in the King James Bible. It is a relatively easy matter to identify passages in which a certain lack of elegance is all too obvious. The following will serve as examples:
The noise thereof sheweth concerning it, the cattle also concerning the vapour (Job 36:33).
For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, except they wash their hands oft, eat not, holding the tradition of the elders. And when they come from the market, except they wash, they eat not. And many other things there be, which they have received to hold, as the washing of cups, and pots, brasen vessels, and of tables (Mark 7:3–4).
O ye Corinthians, our mouth is open unto you, our heart is enlarged. Ye are not straitened in us, but ye are straitened in your own bowels. Now for a recompence in the same, (I speak as unto my children,) be ye also enlarged (2 Corinthians 6:11–13).
Yet these clumsy lines (the apparent inelegance of which is often enhanced by the use of words that are now archaic) may be seen as relatively rare exceptions. More generally the King James Bible achieves a degree of elegance that has been the envy of its successors.
Yet the shaping of a language has to do with more than the modeling of written eloquence. A living language develops a vocabulary and turns of phrase that both enrich and illuminate its forms of expression. So what contribution did the King James Bible make to the shaping of the English language?