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The Book of Job: Its Place in Literature |
| Section: BOOK WORLD / FEATURED BOOK: Stephen Mitchell's The Book of Job |
| Author: Lionel Abel |
| Publication:
The World & I Online |
| Issue Date: 12/1/1987 |
| Size: 1,708 Words, 9,066 Characters |
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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 Mexic...
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...y be amended. The belief in another world, as certain Christians have claimed, is at least somewhat more rational than the hope for a Kierkegaardian repetition, having a second go-around of all that was taken and given up in the first round. There may be no eternal life in fact, but the Kierkegaardian promise of a repetition on earth, as Jean Wahl said long ago, is only an ersatz eternity.
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(The World & I Online) |
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