Creating a Mood

Modern translation theory does not allow for creating a mood. The translator is simply supposed to communicate in language most relevant to the new audience. Well, that is not all that the translators of the King James Bible, did, 400 years ago. They sought to also create a mood.

Other famous translations have done the same.

Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton did so when he translated The Arabian Nights from Arabic into English in 1885. Rabindranath Tagore did, thirty years later, when he set out to translate his own work from its original Bengali into English. Tagore’s Gitanjali, which brought him a Nobel Prize in 1913, at times reads as if phrases were lifted directly from the KJV. “Here is thy footstool,” one verse begins. Another begins, “If thou speakest not …” and “Thou hast made me endless,” begins another. Neither Burton nor Tagore worked for what we might call a “modern” or “contemporary” idiom; instead, they deliberately retained what was older, and therefore alluring, about the original. Both of these became quick bestsellers in their first English translations precisely because they used language that was more, not less, florid and fantastic. They created a mood. Our newer translations today certainly communicate the text more clearly, but they don’t evoke as much of what it might feel like today to overhear Moses, David, Mary, Jesus, or Paul, speaking in Hebrew, Aramaic, or Koine Greek.

Another aspect of this mood in the KJV goes beyond idiom and language and enters into the arena of setting and scene. This is why great writers like Toni Morrison have fondly remembered the KJV being read in their family homes—precisely because the language, mood, and scenery were distinct from the world outside.

If you prefer to imagine Jesus talking with a crowd outside one of today’s shopping malls or with use of PowerPoint in a lecture hall, then the most contemporary English translations are your thing. But if you want to experience more of what it might have been like to be standing by the Sea of Galilee or in the Temple in Jerusalem, I believe that the older the English the better.