The Poetics of Tyndale's Translation

Abstract

YOU would expect me to say at the outset how great an honour it is for me to be asked to contribute to this expression of the nation's debt to a great man and to a great achievement. I will not disappoint you, because it is for me a profound honour. And I want to start this little address it isn't a lecture because I'm not an academic, merely a bigoted poet who expects to be acknowledged as a legislator of the world with some observations on the nature of paying honour. If we honour the living it's like most of our transactions, we expect something back for it. More normally though we wait for a person to be tidily out of the way before we say the proper things. But who gains then? The dead couldn't care less, however vain they might have been in life, however hungry for compliments. And to be sure the dead can't do the living much good. Yet there is a profit. In honouring the worthiness of another, I lift my own aspirations; in a sense I acquire some of the honour I myself have paid. The more I honour others, the more honourable I become. It's what we might call a reflexive virtue. And we are all in this conference gaining a little in self-respect in the act of honouring William Tyndale. It is a good thing to be doing, and we should be feeling the benefit of it. As in other forms of love, one gains by giving. Professor Daniell invited me to speak in the hope I would cast some light on the working ear of Tyndale. It was anticipated that, as a practising poet (a calling which, I hasten to add, I practise only in private) and as one who has recently wrestled with the twists and turns of the Psalms, I would have something significant to add that was not obvious to others. I think I am about to disappoint. What I will try to do instead is relate what we have in Tyndale's performance to the overall task of translation, the poetics of recomposition, and that includes, beyond the patterns of phrase-making and setting word against word, the whole idea of composition, rhetoric, melody, cadence, prose and speech, drama, vocality and, finally, the vatic. That's because the Scriptures Tyndale is rewriting are not quite prose; and though we are used to them presented in numbered units called verses, they are not verse either. In fact the writing moves from discursive prose to historical narrative, crystallizes into proverbs, bursts into dramatic episodes, spins a good yam, cracks an outrageous joke, and then sings a most lyrical cadenza; and all this in the space of a single chapter in the Gospels. Whatever the style a translator adopts, it needs to be pretty versatile, subtle, able to modulate from register to register; a flexible and brilliant and above all a controlled and well-judged medium. Anyone fancy trying his hand at it? If we look at Shakespeare modulating from comic prose to majestic blank verse, using short speech statements as a bridge which nevertheless form a broken but complete iambic pentameter, we can see something of the kind of skill the Gospel translator has need of. By Tyndale's poetics, therefore, I understand not just words, phrase, sentence, rhythm, cadence, image, sound, but more a feel for the whole architecture of the Scriptures, the grand design as well as the detailing, the practical passageways as well as the decorative