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Biblical Poetry In Our Translated Bibles

© alberto esmeralda

If we pick up a modern translation of the Bible like the NAB, RSV or the JB and look through its pages, we'd most likely notice that there are blocks of texts, sometimes short and sometimes spanning whole sections that break away, so to speak, from an alignment that is justified. These "irregularly" arranged blocks of texts that contrast with blocks of rigidly aligned ones signal to the Bible reader the presence of poetry.

One finds these "jagged"shaped blocks of text largely in the Psalms, the Wisdom Books, and the Prophets. But one also finds them interspersed in other books of the Bible as well. One finds it in Genesis 2:23, Adam's cry of wonder at the presentation of Eve. One also finds it, for the last time (at least in the RSV Oxford edition) in Revelation 19:6b-8a, the victory cry of the great multitude.  This typographical presentation of biblical poetry made possible in our modern translations warns the reader that here, truth will be presented in quite a different way.

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Some modern translations provide intelligent readers of the Bible with some information on Biblical poetry. Let me mention them here as these may be present in the very translation that you may be using:

• "Characteristics of Hebrew Poetry" in Metzger-May (eds.),  The New Oxford Annotated Bible, pp. 1523-1529 deals with the three main characteristics of Hebrew poetic form: parallelism, meter and strophic arrangement.
• Eugene Laverdiere's "Literary Forms of the Bible" in The New American Bible (1991 ed.), pp. 1458-1463 dedicates about two columns to biblical poetry.

Resources found in the WWW on the topic of Biblical poetry are provided in our Links section.

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The saying "traductor, traditor", "the translator is a traitor" is most true in poetic works. Among literary forms, poetry is the most intimately linked to its author's "I". Any attempt to "wrap" poetry in a language other than the one used by the author to express it, is just that, an attempt. Imagine a translation of Shakespeare's works into modern day English, and one would immediately realize that in translations, a lot of things from the original are lost. Fortunately, this applies to the form, not necessarily to the content. Otherwise, the works of a Dante Aleghieri would be totally lost to modern Italian and non-Italian readers. The same is true in the case of Biblical poetry. We won't be able to hear the galloping of horses in Jdg. 5:22, nor the sound of rising flood waters in Ps. 93:4, but a good translation can still be bring across the love of a father for his son, as in Hosea 11:4, or the sadness of a prophet at the impending doom of a people, as in Isaiah 5:8-25.10:1-4, or the thrill of discovering oneself under God's gaze as in Psalm 8.

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