Slang and Bible Translation

HE work of making a new translation of the Bible, on which I have for years been engaged, is bound sooner or later to lead to some reflections on the subject of slang: its essential characteristics, its merits and demerits, and the question of its possible use in translating the Bible. Not, of course, that anybody would think of filling the Bible with slang from cover to cover. The first chapter of Genesis or of Ephesians, the eighth chapter of First Kings or of Romans, are small samples of a. great volume of matter for which slang will never suggest itself as an appropriate treatment. But there are other sorts too. When the Bible is recording the words of a young child, of a street mob besieging the door of a too-respectable citizen, of a gang of wire-pulling politicians gleefully sneering at an opponent whom they now see safely nailed to the cross, of an ex-bandit who, after many years on the throne, finds himself without warning thrown back into the old conditions of his life as a leader of outlaws, of a paranoiac venting his insane suspicions that everybody, and particularly those naturally nearest to him, are plotting against him, there is no particular presumption that the translator ought to make them speak dignifiedly. Nay, extensive and important parts of the Bible are reports of the words of popular revivalist preachers who had avowedly had poor opportunities of polite culture in their earlier years; should the translator make them talk like D. L. Moody or like Billy Sunday, or one of them like Moody and another like Sunday? Against such temptations the main reply is that slang is essentially ephemeral. It hardly passes muster among its users when it is no longer the latest thing. To be sure, some phrases have lived for centuries on a level as low as slang; as I write this page, a lady says to me six of one and half a dozen of the other, to use a vulgarism, which I think is rather finicky of her. But typical slang is only of a day. Consequently, if slang were put into a translation of the Bible, the book would live only about ten years before it would begin to seem out of date. Then one could not afford to spend on it, for so short a life, the amount of painstaking that ought to go into a translation of the Bible. My reputation as a translator, what there is of it, was 188

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  Elizabeth Kelly Gray•American Nineteenth Century History•2009

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