"IN THE BEGINNING: THE KING JAMES BIBLE AND HOW IT
CHANGED A LANGUAGE, A CULTURE AND A NATION"
Just finished reading this Chrsitmas present on the way home on the train today. It's a good read, and a fine story, well told. However - it's not as good a book as it shold have been, given the matter in hand and the credentials of the illustrious author. One of McGrath's skills is his ability to pitch his writing at various levels, and this one is certainly 'popular' in approach. His attempts to assume little or no background knowledge and to explain terms as he progresses is well intentioned, but occasionally awkward. The story rattles along well, and builds nicely with the post-Medieval, Renaissance background, and mechanics of printing described in detail. The religious ferment of the Reformation is briefly sketched and the ongoing debates from Henry VIII, Edward VI and Elizabeth's reign examined alongside Mary Tudor's counter Reformation. The various translations of scripture from this era are also assessed in a lively fashion.
What then ultimately dissapoints is the second half of the book. It is subtitled "how it changed a culture, language and a nation" - but the book is so weighted towards the background and production/translation questions that the influence of the book is compressed into a mere chapter and afterword. The book ultimately fails to satisfy because of this serious imbalance. To be honest, it looks as if the author got carried away with the research into the first half of the book and ran out of the time and space to do equal justice to the following four centuries promised on the title page! Perhaps McGrath has fallen victim to an overly ambitious publication rate? !
Whatever the answer to that speculation, I still haven't recovered from reading his self-confessedly outrageous comment on the nature of the translation of texts:
"Translations are like women, if they are faithful they are not beautiful, and if they are beautiful they are not faithful".
No comments:
Post a Comment