Biblical Translation and Poetry in English (Fulton)

Fulton, Thomas. “Biblical Translation and Inspiration.” In The Oxford History of Poetry in English: Volume 5. Seventeenth-Century British Poetry, edited by Laura L. Knoppers, 55–67. Oxford University Press, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1093/9780198930259.003.0006.

Abstract

Along with their prefaces and marginal notes, English translations of the Bible played a significant cultural role in early modernity. Before the appearance in 1611 of the King James Version, which slowly asserted its dominance over the course of the century, the Geneva and the Bishops’ Bibles represented forms of English Protestantism, while the Douay-Rheims Bible provided English Catholics with different readings. Meanwhile, translations of biblical poetry from the Book of Psalms proliferated in separate volumes. As this chapter shows, this translation history had a profound impact on English literary production, which often imitated, drew from, and even participated in its own biblical translations, particularly from the Psalms. The chapter investigates how poets such as Aemilia Lanyer, George Herbert, John Milton, and Richard Crashaw wrote and translated biblical poetry, often with a sharp eye to the different texts and paratexts of the English Bible.

From p. 67:

“...seventeenth-century poetry participates in the arts of biblical translation and interpretation by a combination of close attention to and deviation from the vernacular and Latin translations that suit each poet’s confessional, political, and aesthetic needs, with occasional efforts at translation from the original languages. Both the practical habits and props of interpretation (in particular the biblical glosses, numbers, and alternate readings) and the more theoretical forms of interpretation (such as the hermeneutic arts of collation) play a vital role in the production of literary texts.”