best committee that ever sat, The

Spectator, The, Apr 5, 2003 by Hensher, Philip

POWER AND GLORY: JACOBEAN ENGLAND AND THE MAKING OF THE KING JAMES BIBLE by Adam Nicolson HarperCollins, L18.99, pp. 288 ISBN 0007108931

There are two literary facts in English which it is almost impossible to examine, to see clearly. They are Shakespeare and the King James Bible. In both cases, the impossibility derives from the same point; that critical standards of what great English writing means stem so completely from Shakespeare's peculiar virtues and from the values of the prose in the King James Bible that all commentators and, indeed, all English-speakers subsequently have lived within their limits, and have been unable to step outside and discuss their subjects with any clarity, as one can step outside Spencer or Wordsworth, and see their world whole and distant, with an awareness of alternative models of excellence. For the English, King Lear is not a work with particular characteristics and specific flavour; it is just what all other plays fall short of. The great climaxes of the King James Bible, similarly, are quite simply what English prose is, or ought to be. They have set the standard, and the standard itself is almost impossible to judge.

There is no English writer subsequently who can be trusted not to lapse into those characteristic rhythms at elevated moments. Dickens is full of its music. Wordsworth's plainness, his insistence on rocks and stones and trees, is straight from the version of Ecclesiastes. Tennyson has no idea how a poem like 'Ulysses' might rise to its thunderous cadence other than on the model of the Psalms. The influence of the King James Bible is so pervasive in English literature, even in Waugh or Martin Amis, that it is hardly worth writing a book about; it is as limitless as the universe.

If imaginative literature finds it impossible to escape from it, imagine the problem faced by any subsequent attempt to translate the Bible into English. Adam Nicolson has a great deal of fun with the absurdities of subsequent translations, all of which is quite deserved; the 18th-century translator who replaced Peter's `Lord, it is good for us to be here' with `Oh, sir! What a delectable residence we might establish here!', or the insanity of the New English Bible, improving the simple and beautiful `Cast the net on the right side of the ship, and yee shall finde' into `Shoot the net to starboard, and you will make a catch.' These bathetic and inadequate updatings are very funny, but it is important to understand why they are so hopeless. The King James Bible came to demonstrate and embody the principles of expressive English, and any deviation from it can never hope to rival its beauty and perfection. Here is the permanent definition of beauty and perfection in English prose. Other definitions are conceivable. Perhaps, in different circumstances, we might consider that graceful and precise employment of 'delectable' a masterly and elegant stroke - after all, the French have no apparent problem with a translation which contains, in the Beatitudes, the memorable and rather agreeable sentiment, `Blessed are the nonchalant'. We can imagine those different circumstances; in practice they are impossible to enter into. We have learnt to consider the decisions of the King James Bible as beyond discussion.

And yet the translation was produced in particular circumstances, by individual men, who made a series of exact and debatable decisions. This is the subject of Adam Nicolson's book, which, though I have no previous knowledge at all of the vast subject, seems to me unobtrusively learned, rich in curious and purposeful detail, an ideal balance between fervent enthusiasm and elegantly witty detachment. The story of the translation's origins and production is a subject which, one always felt, would be nice to hear from a really sparkling and sharp guide. This volume strikes me as exactly that, a brilliantly entertaining, passionate, funny and instructive telling of an important and gripping story.

The coincidence of Shakespeare and the King James Bible is suggestive and interesting. The age was, as Nicolson stresses, divided between a concept of the artist as a wild, individual genius and a wider conviction that wilful individuality in any sphere was deplorable. Very few of the Bible's translators sought to leave any mark on posterity, and perhaps only Lancelot Andrewes, of all of them, is still a name which rings the faintest bell. The Bible was the work of a vast committee, and no one believed there was any room in it for the individual voice which, in the secular sphere, the age so delighted in. Andrewes, interrogating a suspected heretic, put the knife in with the awful judgment, `This savoreth of a pryvat spyrit.'

And yet, as Nicolson richly demonstrates, this translation of the Bible was the work of many individual voices. That is the basis for its extraordinary power. The translators were men of great boldness and fiery conviction, and their minds were formed in many different ways. There were people like Richard Thomson, 'a debosh'd English Dutchman who seldom went one night to bed sober'. Unimaginably, between his labours on the Bible, Thomson turned out some brilliantly lewd versions of Martial's epigrams. England readily provided scholars of Hebrew, but oriental expertise did not stop there: William Bedwell's mathematical studies had led him into a profound acquaintance with the great Arabic writers. John Layfield was a fine Greek scholar, but Nicolson has turned up a tantalising and strange aspect of his contribution; he was one of the earliest men to describe the British empire's ventures into the Caribbean, and left a marvellous description of Dominica; as Nicolson says, something of that dreamy evocation of tropical orchards must, for him, have underlain his rendering of the story of the Garden of Eden.