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Gerald Hammond, THEMAKING OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. Manchester : Carcanet New Press, 1982. 249 pp. £ 9.95
At once conclusive and provocative, Hammond's study of the English Bible will take its place beside the pioneering work of C.C. Butterworth and B.F. Westcott, for this book is not simply another history of the Bible in English. It is rather an examination of the oftentimes subtle kinship between the style of an original and that of the original in translation. While restricting himself largely to the Old Testament translations of the Authorized or King James Version and its sixteenth-century predecessors, Hammond, nonetheless, reminds all of us who read from or hear from the pulpit twentieth-century renderings that the socalled new and improved is not always the best. When, for example, the New English Bible translates meaning while ignoring the way meaning has been aiticulated, it offers « not a translation at all but merely a replacement - murdering the [Hebrew] original instead of recreating it » (p. 2).
One's casual response, perhaps, is « So what ? » But we have only to call to mind that the 1611 translation of the Bible is native to the spirit of the language and the feeling of English-speaking people. In it we find what George Steiner, After Babel : Aspects of Language and Translation (1975), calls a native presence, « not so much an import from abroad but a part of one's tradition that has been...