Sixty-One Psalms of David (review)

Hebrew Studies 38 (1997) 155 Reviews hymns as they wrote? An unspoken assumption is that certain types of hymns stopped being composed even though they could be reused; unaddressed is why a writer could not continue to pen new variations on the old themes. The extensive deductions from a limited amount of data are finally more optimistic than warranted. "Even though only a few [according to the author at least two, perhaps three] Ugaritic psalms and prayers are extant, it is still possible to characterize the themes, patterns, and style of the Ugaritic psalms and prayers in general terms" (p. 35). To put the limitations in perspective, one could generalize very little about the "themes, patterns, and style" of Hebrew psalms and prayers from a random sampling of only two or three psalms from the Hebrew Bible. Samuel A. Meier The Ohio Slate Universily Columbus, OH 43210 SIXTY-ONE PSALMS OF DAVID. By David R. Slavitt. Pp. xvi + 120. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Cloth, $18.95. David Slavitt is a sensitive and knowing poet, novelist, critic, and translator. He has taught at Princeton and Pennsylvania. In this book, he offers a poetic rendition of sixty-one Psalms from the Hebrew Psalter. He intends them to have "child-like directness" for the sake of "directness of spirituality." The playful, venturesome quality of these translations is epitomized in his decision to offer sixty-one Psalms "because it happens to be my age." We might have waited a few years and then we could have had sixty-five or even seventy! Slavitt knows what he is up to with a book of child-like playfulness; thus he does not take his own work with too much seriousness, but wants us to engage the poems in this form for what can be received afresh. The brief work consists only of a short orienting introduction plus the rendering of the Psalms without any additional commentary or guidance. The great gain of the translation, precisely what Slavitt intends, is to make the Psalms accessible as "re-enactment" for "the modem American idiom." The translations are a remarkable attempt to stay reasonably close to the story-line and imagery of the poem while making it "contemporary." Hebrew Studies 38 (1997) 156 Reviews For example, Slavitt renders verses 12-13 of Psalm 22, in which the voice of the poem expresses something like paranoia, in a graphic way: Great beasts surround me; monstrous bulls of Bashan, snorting fire, paw the earth, while the lion's ravenous jaw gapes wide, and my bones' marrow chills... The language brings us close to the hot breath of the threatening monsters. Among the most remarkable of his achievements is the well-nigh impossible rendering of an acrostic Psalm, reproducing the alphabetic sequence in English. Thus for Psalm 34, he offers for the opening verses: Always, I shall bless the Lord, Roast of His love, and demonstrate hlearly to those who have not had Qeliverance from affliction the great gasing he offers. Let us as one frame prayers of praise and thanks to Him. {lod is more radiant than the sun. His rays can penetrate to the dim... While the idiom is fresh and accessible, it is clear that this is an urbane poet making an offer to urbane readers, not for "the man on the street." What the book seeks to do it does well indeed. My reservation is one that the translator would expect from the direction of the guild of biblical scholarship. What disappears in this rendering (that pays attention to rhythm and rhyme, issues that do not concern the old shapers of the Psalter) are attention to matters of form, genre, and rhetorical convention. In the service of "the modem," each Psalm thus reads like a fresh, ad hoc start without reflecting the recurrence and constancy of form that to modems is "repetitious and boring" but in the ancient community must have been an offer of both stability and membership. This concern is not an old fashioned one in defense of ancient literature. Rather it is a concern that is post-modem, insisting that the rhetoric is "thick" and offered only to those who know the codes...