ROBERT ALTER'S PSALMS TRANSLATION is reviewed by Joel M. Hoffman in the Jerusalem Post. Excerpts:

Alter, however, wants to "turn ancient Hebrew poetry into English verse that is reasonably faithful to the original and yet readable as poetry." He acknowledges the eloquence of the KJV, but faults that translation for ignoring "the rhythms of the Hebrew almost entirely"; that is, for achieving only one of his two goals.

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Grammatical Hebrew syntax ought to become grammatical English syntax. (Again the issue can be tricky. "Working hard" is not "hardly working.") But Alter stumbles with some aspects of Hebrew syntax, mimicking them rather than conveying what they mean. Word order is more flexible in Hebrew than in English. So while Hebrew permits both "I was a lad" and "a lad I was," English allows only the former. Yet surprisingly, Alter's rendition of Psalm 37:25 reads, "A lad I was/and now I am old." He has taken ordinary, grammatical Hebrew and turned it into odd English. Rather than capturing the beauty of the original, he has destroyed it by mimicking it too closely. "A lad I was" is no more correct than "sing a song new."

Alter acknowledges that he grappled with this issue. In the introduction he discusses "syntactic fronting" (one technical name for the Hebrew construction "a lad I was") and specifically notes that "Biblical syntax is more flexible than English." But he justifies the "reversal of normal English word order" because, he says, it is so common in poetry, and, besides, he continues, the psalms incorporated an "archaic stratum" of Hebrew.

While some English poetry allows some words to be reversed, Alter has missed the point. English "syntactic fronting" is a jarring word order used for striking effect. By contrast, the same order in Hebrew is common and unobtrusive. He has turned the nicely poetic into the bizarrely foreign. And there is scant evidence that the language of the psalms is archaic or otherwise ungrammatical.

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I haven't read Alter's translation, but I think I do have to raise two points in his defense. First, English poetry is more flexible in its word order than English prose, both for emphasis and to accommodate rhyme and meter. Also "a lad I was," at least to my ear, can be acceptable poetic language whereas "sing a song new" can't. Second, biblical Hebrew poetry does follow more archaic grammatical rules than Hebrew prose. It rarely has the definite article and almost never (I'm tempted just to say never) has the definite direct object marker (את) or the vav-consecutive verbal tense inversion. Some of the Psalms are more archaic still: Psalm 29, for example uses the very archaic "enclitic mem," but the language of Hebrew poetry in general, including the Psalms, is archaic (but not grammatical).

In spite of the errors that occasionally mar the work, The Book of Psalms is a marvelous translation, unsurpassed in its accuracy and poetry, replete with insights into the psalms' meanings, and graced with beautiful renderings of the ancient words.

Translation is always a compromise, and publishing a compromise is not easy. Readers of the Bible are indebted to Robert Alter, and fortunate that he struggled with the ancient text and coerced it into modern English form. The publication of The Book of Psalms is a watershed event, and from the seeds Alter has sown we all reap in joy - maybe even in glad song.