"MIRED IN TRANSLATING APOCRYPHA":

The Gospel according to Czechs
With Bible translation, Alexandr Flek seeks to restore 'cultural literacy'

By Paul Voosen
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
August 15th, 2007

Sixteen years ago, Alexandr Flek lay upon the floor of the church where he worshipped, and he was in agony.
It had been four years since he converted to Christianity and became a preacher, and two years since the Velvet Revolution. And still, there was no project under way to translate the Bible into Czech. In the past 400 years, there had been only two Czech translations—one archaic if revered, and the other denuded of its figurative force by the taint of communism.
“On the carpet, this groaning and travailing overwhelmed me,” says Flek of that day. “I was desperate. The years were passing. There was no Bible.”
There lay Flek’s passion, harkening back to the Protestant Reformation, hundreds of years earlier: That people read the Bible firsthand, in language current and powerful.
But there was no new translation. The country’s scholars — perhaps removed from the glowing evangelism that enfolds Flek’s late arrival to religion — were mired in translating apocrypha.

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I'm glad the Czechs are getting a new translation of the Bible, but I wouldn't knock translating apocrypha. I hope those scholars are still at it.