I bought the Knox Bible

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BartholomewB said:
Yes, I agree that it makes sense. But the usual word order, following the Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, also makes sense. It’s not a question of not making sense. It’s a question of a translator introducing improvements of his own.
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To Knox’ mind, it was about conveying the text Bible not just in English but as if it was written by an Englishman, as if it was native English, and the stress and power belonging to the original languages carried over into literary English.

It wasn’t intended as a theological improvement, it was intended to take the literary quality of the originals and carry that over into English, which is a very different language.

I have plenty of literal interpretations on my shelf for a reason, mind. But in recent years there has been a bias for the literal overall. I think there’s something to be said about the literary approach to translation, something that’s recently been underappreciated (imo).
 
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Ah, but how many of us non-lettered laity read those languages? And even those are translations!

Jesus spoke a Hebrew dialect - Aramaic. Which documents do we have in Aramaic?

My point.
 
I just want to be clear I understand something is always bound to be lost in translation. Genesis 1:1 loses the obvious symmetry with John 1:1 with Knox.

But I stand by my point that reading Knox’ thoughts on translation have given me greater appreciation for what he was trying to preserve and do.
 
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BartholomewB said:
It’s a question of a translator introducing improvements of his own.
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Just like the translators to RSV, NBR, Douay-Rheims, etc. They are all someone else’s interpretation of a mixture of text written in a mixture of languages. Is one better than the other? That’s just a matter of opinion. Is one more accurate than the other? That’s a matter of opinion also. No doubt if you were able to read and understand the original foreign text your interpretation too would be based on your “improvements”.

I appreciate Knox didn’t introduce inclusive language or try to rewrite the Bible. He simply wrote it in English staying true to the spirituality of God’s word, the Bible.
 
@Wesrock, would you say that Knox’s bible is an example of dynamic equivalence? If so, to what extent?
 
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tafan2 said:
@Wesrock, would you say that Knox’s bible is an example of dynamic equivalence? If so, to what extent?
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Yes, and to a large extent. I’m not an expert, mind you, on this type of thing, but compared to my RSV and Knox’ own thoughts on translation, I think it is correct. Knox doesn’t use the term “dynamic-equivalence,” he calls it a “literary” translation.

Note that Knox’ idea of translation isn’t to lower the reading level for the lowest common denominator or to use the simplest language possible, and he isn’t anachronistic. He very much has classic English literature in mind. It’s more like Tolkien or Dickens (my own comparisons, not his) than Harry Potter, if that makes sense. (No slight to Harry Potter intended.) and actually he does use a lot of the old singular pronoun (thou, thee, thy) and putting the appropriate case endings for those pronouns at the end of verbs. And that may be for the better, since Greek and Latin had that distinction (not sure about Hebrew).
 
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Thanks for the answer. I have actually splurged and ordered a Knox bible this morning because of this thread. As to comparing him to Tolkien or Dickens vs Harry Potter, I will find this interesting. Having read some of his detective stories, I find his fiction would have been half way in between your range. Not the simple reading of a pop novel, but not like reading Tolkien or Dickens either.

I just looked up on Wikipedia a list of Bibles translated by dynamic equivalence vs formal equivalence (my understanding of a more literal translation). It has the Knox bible listed as dynamic. Perhaps its just my admiration for all thinks Knox, but I have to wonder if his ideas had held sway, the dynamic equivalence would not have received such a bad rap in recent years. I am certainly no expert either on languages or translatinos. IIRC, Pope Benedict in his Jesus of Nazareth books talks about the various translation techniques and sees benefits in both.
 
I hope you enjoy it. If I could choose only one Bible it’d be difficult, but I’m not limited to that, thankfully.
 
Here is a snippet from On Englishing the Bible, in which Msgr Knox describes his experience in this project. There is a lot more he says besides this, as long as it is, and this is taken from the middle of his discussion on the topic, but I think this will help with where Knox stands in general on literal VS dyanimc equivalence. (I hand typed this from a book, so any mistypes must be blamed on me).
Two alternatives present themselves at once, the literal and the literary method of translation. Is it to be ‘Arms and the man I sing’, or is it to be something which will pass for English? If you ware translating for the benefit of a person who wants to learn Latin by following the gospel in a Latin missal when it is read out in church, then your ‘Arms and the man I sing’ is exactly what he wants. If you are translating for the benefit of a person who wants to be able to read the word of God for ten minutes on end without laying it aside in sheer boredom or bewilderment, a literary translation is what you want—and we have been lacking it for centuries.

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For instance, he says, if you are faced with the French sentence, “Il y avait dans cet homme je ne sais quoi de suffisance’, you do not want to write, ‘There was in this man I know not what of self-sufficiency’; you want to write, ‘There was a touch of complacency about him.’ So with ‘Arms and the man’. You have not translated the phrase when you have merely corrected the preposterous order and written, ‘I sing of arms and the man’. ‘Sing’ is only used like that by English poets when when they are imitating Virgil, and you must not translate Virgil by imitating Virgil. The opening is also too abrupt, there is not time to give the words ‘I sing’ a proper emphasis. You want something like, “My song tells of arms; tells of the man’, and so on. Anybody who has really tackled the business of translation, at least where the classical languages are concerned, will tell you that the bother is not finding the equivalent for this or that word, it is finding out how to turn the sentence. And about this, the older translators of the Bible took no trouble at all. Take this sentence: ‘The Pharisees, and all the Jews, except they wash their hands oft, eat not, holding the tradition of the elders’. No, do not exclaim against the cumbrousness of the Douay; that comes from the Authorized Version. The Authorized Version is supposed to be the fountain of pure English; but there it gives you an English sentence which would get any man the sack, and rightly, from Fleet Street. ‘For the Pharisees, and indeed all the Jews, holding to the traditions of their ancestors, never eat without washing their hands again and again’—there is the English of it.
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Continued from last post.
Incidentally, let us never be taken in by the people who talk to us about the ‘effective inversions of order’ which brings out the emphasis so well in the Bible. There are, indeed, such things as effective inversions of order. But what they mean is a sentence like, “If I by the finger of God cast out devils’. Here, the operative words, ‘by the finger of God’, have been taken away from the end of the sentence, where the emphasis would have fallen on them, and shipped them around to the front, leaving the whole emphasis of the sentence wrong; “If I by the finger of God cast out DEVILS’, as if somebody had been accusing our Lord of casting out angels. There, of course, the Authorized Version knew better; it was the Douay, feverishly keeping the order of the Latin, that gave us the piece of false rhetoric to which our ears, by annual repetition, have grown accustomed.

I say, then, that the first thing demanded of a new translation of the Vulgate is that it should break away from the literal translation of sentences. What could be flatter than the first verse of St. John, as usually translated, ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’? That represents a very subtle chiasmus in the Greek, closely followed by the Latin; ‘Et Verbum erat apud Deum, et Deus erat Verbum’. To restore that chiasmus, you must have something like ‘God had the Word abiding with him, and the Word was God’. Latin and Greek leave the end of the sentence unemphatic, English emphasizes the end of the sentence. Therefore the English for ‘De tribu Juda duodecim millia signati’ is not what we are accustomed to. It is, ‘Twelve thousand were sealed of the tribe of JUDA.’ You must play cat’s cradle with almost every sentence in the New Testament, if you want to decide how an Englishman would have said the same thing.
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And I do understand arguments in favor of the literal (Robert Alter’s Hebrew Bible may be my next OT Bible purchase) . I am not here to play one against the other. As I’ve said, I think literary translations often get a hard knock, at least in my experience, and I have a greater appreciation for them and quite like the Knox Bible for personal reading.
 
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