A more interesting question to ask is: is the elevated status of the KJV mere caprice or snobbery or herd-instinct, or is there a reason that so many people who specialize in studying literature esteem it so highly?This is indeed an interesting question, and one which should not be lost in a long comment thread.
I would suggest (and already have in a further comment) that there are other non-literary factors here, not just "mere caprice or snobbery or herd-instinct" but also tradition, and originally royal and ecclesiastical sponsorship. But is there in fact any genuinely literary reason for the high esteem for KJV? Is there any objective sense in which it can be judged as having a high literary quality?
Indeed, are there any objective criteria, aside from technical ones of adherence to orthographical and grammatical norms, by which any work can be judged as of higher literary quality than any other? This question has been asked several times in recent comments on this blog, but no objective criteria of literary excellence have been put forward. So, should I conclude that in fact there are no such criteria, and therefore that the existing canon of supposedly excellent literature is defined by a combination of tradition and "mere caprice or snobbery or herd-instinct"?
Thank you, Ian.
ReplyDeleteThanks especially for the link to the CS Lewis article. Lewis makes some telling points, such as:
Except in a few passages where the translation is bad, the Authorised Version owes to the original its matter, its images, and its figures. Our aesthetic experience in reading any of the great Old Testament stories or, say, the liberation of St. Peter and the shipwreck of St. Paul, depends only to a small extent on the translator. - This presumably applies at least in principle to any accurate translation, and implies that aesthetic experience is independent of literary style.
The history of the English Bible from Tyndale to the Authorised Version should never for long be separated from that European, and by no means exclusively Protestant, movement of which it made part. ... For when we come to compare the versions we shall find that only a very small percentage of variants are made for stylistic or even doctrinal reasons. When men depart from their predecessors it is usually because they claim to be better Hebraists or better Grecians. The international advance of philology carries them on, and those who are divided by the bitterest theological hatreds gladly learn from one another. Tyndale accepts corrections from More: Rheims learns from Geneva: phrases travel through Rheims on their way from Geneva to Authorised. Willy-nilly all Christendom collaborates. The English Bible is the English branch of a European tree.
I believe that our embedded quotations from the Authorised Version ... are nearly always either solemn or facetious. Only because the surrounding prose is different―in other words, only in so far as our English is not influenced by the Authorised Version―do they achieve the effect the authors intended.
But then Anon can get some comfort from this: It contains good literature and bad literature.
Lewis ends with a predictive comment about "the believing minority who read it to be instructed and get literary enjoyment as a by-product." While I would be cautious about "minority", I agree that any literary enjoyment to be expected from any Bible translation should be simply a by-product.
Whenever people talk about the beauty of the KJV, they always mention its cadences; I suppose they have the idea that it flows well when read aloud in a loud voice, i.e., when you thunder it from the pulpit. But this may be a reverse influence -- i.e., its cadences may strike the ear this way simply because they were used in sermons, one of the most common forms of oratory to which most of us are exposed, for centuries.
ReplyDeleteThank you, Brandon. I can see that this could be an objective measure by which KJV could be compared, and perhaps favourably, with modern translations. But I can also see that it could just be a matter of familiarity. So, if I am to take this one seriously, I would need to see some objective way of assessing "cadences".
ReplyDeleteI was hoping that our anonymous commenter would answer this. Instead, it seems, he has deleted his past comments and, at least for the moment, disappeared. It is not the first time he has responded to being put on the spot by disappearing.
Thank you, Ian. It seems like we are getting somewhere here. I'm still not quite sure how objectively it is possible to say that one text sounds better when read aloud than another does, but it is at least likely to be a matter on which most people's subjective assessments would be similar.
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