Some fun with the ESV

These days I often read (and post) over at www.betterbibles.com. There’s a lot of good discussion about what makes an English Bible translation good or bad.

Recently, someone quoted this poem from another site:

Flirting With NLT
Today the pastor flirted
With a little NLT.
It made the sermon real;
It spoke so much to me.

But then he shifted back
To old favorite: NIV.
The pastor ended up
Explaining words to me.

Why explain God’s Word
When the explanation’s here–
Waiting to be read
From NLT, the Truth made clear?

Which initiated some of the usual discussion about which version is the best. Someone else made a reply:

When preacher used NLT
The word was so simple to me
The big words got tossed
But the meaning was lost
He should’ve just used ESV

So, being the aspiring poet that I’m not (about once every year or so), I thought I’d have a crack at communicating something about ‘literal’ translations that might be easier to get across in a poem, rather than logical, step-by-step explanations of the insufficiency of ‘literal’ translations, which seem to fail more often than not. We’ll see.

Anyway, here it is:

Koine
A fellow one time told me he had bought an ESV
Word-for-word, not thought-for-thought, its claim – acc’racy
It borrowed terms, inserted forms, and things I’d yet to see
Apparently the standard language of the bourgeoisie

But why now in their Intro did they not stick to that mould?
No ‘grinding’ women, no goats in charge, no trembling loins, I’m told
It seems they plied a different rule when wanting to unfold
Their message to their readers than the Message from of old

This standard English Bible teaches us that good translation
Is a word-for-word from Hebrew/Greek to English imitation
But what about the other language parts and their relation?
Like discourse, culture, figures, focus, style, and collocation

It were that would but wither here that thither God would speak
Archaic forms of Aramaic, Hebrew, and of Greek
That He might once for all obscure the meaning that we seek
And justify the English of the ESV technique

Should Bibles now be written in the language of today?
Or do old words and foreign forms do better to convey
The ‘antiquated’ language that we find in the Koine
For what’s the meaning of that good ol’ Greek word anyway?

Anyway, the point was that Bible translations should be done in normal language, not in language marked as being spiritual, and not in language that simply imports features from other languages into English. In the Introduction to the ESV we read normal language. In the actual ESV we read very strange forms of English, that can only be explained by copying them word-for-word from the Hebrew/Aramaic/Greek. Just about every field translator knows that this is bad translation, but translators of the English Bible don’t seem to have grasped that concept yet.

By the way, Koine means common. The New Testament was written in Koine Greek.