I must cast a dissenting vote against the favorable judgment made by certain critics and reviewers (including the reliably intelligent John Gross) on Stephen Mitchell's just-published translation (in fact, an adaptation) of Job. I do not care for Mr. Mitchell's translation and much prefer the King James version. My objection points to something more than verbal infelicities in the Mitchell text, some of which John Gross noted in his New York Times review. I am especially put off by the monotony of Mitchell's rhythmic schema, so much less interesting than the robust cadences of the King James text, cadences that have entered so importantly into American and British eloquence. I am thinking of Lincoln's and Webster's oratorical flights, to be sure, but also of poetic passages in D.H. Lawrence's novels, short stories, and travel books. The eloquence of The Man Who Died and of Mornings in Mexico is right out of the King James Bible. Ezra Pound hated these rhythms, and this particular - though purely literary - dislike of his was not without consequences, I think, to his political judgment. For my own part, I find the King James rhythmic schema an invaluable set of rhetorical devices, comparable in quality to those of English blank verse and of the French alexandrine. The Spanish dramatists, as Mario Praz has pointed out, suffered even during their Golden Century because they lacked a comparable poetic measure.
Take the renderings of Job's very first outcries. Here is the Mitchell version:
God damn the day I was born
and the night that forced me from the womb.
On that day - let there be darkness;
let it never have been created;
let it sink back into the void.
Let chaos overpower it;
let black clouds overwhelm it;
let the sun be plucked from the sky.
And here is a translation based on the King James text:
Let the day perish wherein I was born
And the night in which it was said: "There is a manchild conceived."
Let that day be darkness;
Let not God regard it from above,
Neither let the light shine upon it.
Let darkness and the shadow of death stain it;
Let a cloud dwell upon it...
Let it not be joined unto the days of the year...
To my taste, this version is in every respect superior to Mitchell's. Compared with Mitchell's, its rhythm is like the mighty swaying of a ship at sea as opposed to the rocking of a baby carriage by a fond parent.
And I am not keen on The Book of Job as a literary work, even in the best of translations. First of all, let me identify its form, or genre. Written between the first and seventh centuries B.C., in all probability by a non-Jew, it has all the appearance of a text inspired by Greek tragedy, very likely by Euripides,
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