Lamentations: Preface

 

Another new version of Lamentations? Why? Don't we already have a superfluity of versions, translations and paraphrases? Variety enough, surely? What could yet another version possibly bring to an already over-populated table?

In brief: Alphabetic acrostics. And rhythmical qinah.

Lamentations is poetry. Not prose.

Arid brutality and vicious harshness are the hallmarks of both the text and message of Lamentations. Despite that, many English translations persist in deploying linguistic styles redolent of a gentle ramble through flowery meadows on an English summer's day in the company of pastoral poet William Wordsworth if he had accidentally brushed against a stinging nettle while picking one of his beloved daffodils.

Contrast this traditional, rather polite and somewhat expansive translation of Lam. 3:1–3 (New English Bible):

I am the man who has known affliction,
I have felt the rod of his wrath.
It was I whom he led away and left to walk
in darkness, where no light is.
Against me alone he has turned his hand
and so it is all day long.

with the tight, beat-driven, rhythmical version freshly offered here:

Agonies: I am the man seared
by the rod of his wrath;
Away—me he drove, force-marched
in blackout, no light;
Against me, he turns his hand
from day-dawn to dusk;

Commenting later on his own translation of the Hebrew Bible (our Christian Old Testament), a project well over twenty years in duration, Robert Alter writes that it "…was impelled by a deep conviction that the literary style of the Bible… is not some sort of aesthetic embellishment of the 'message' of Scripture but the vital medium through which the biblical vision of God, human nature, history, politics, society and moral value is conveyed."[1]

The medium is an inextricably intrinsic part of the message. Literary style is not merely an "also ran" relegation, trailing home in last place. It is inseparably interwoven.

And me? A lifelong, fruitless struggle to 'get' Lamentations. It wouldn't click. It wouldn't open. Alright, it opened just enough to be irritated that when our church songs and culture so blithely and prettily cited… and isolated… "the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases" from it, with a smothering of syrup, I knew that we were somehow egregiously misrepresenting the biblical book itself. With tragic irony, our cherry-picking "biblical" church culture, it seems, obstructs access to this biblical book.

But then Alter's new and fresh translation of Lamentations was published. Suddenly it opened up. It lived. It screamed. It worked. Other versions had stayed politely, calmly on the cleanly typeset page. But Alter's pounced off the page. It grabbed the throat. As it should.

The medium, the literary style, had been demonstrably restored to its rightful place as an intrinsic, essential component of the message itself.

And why my version? To attempt to take the best of the living-literary awareness of Alter and a couple of other translations and, vitally, to restore the usually discarded alphabetic acrostic. (The what? Read on…)

[1] Alter (2019), p.xiii.