A new translation of a book exploring the Bible’s foreign and divine language is a spirited defence of the sacred, poetic Word, says Nick Ripatrazone.
Michael Edwards – a London-born professor and poet – was elected to the prestigious Académie Française in 2013. There he serves as a defender of the French language. In this volume, The Bible and Poetry, Edwards is a defender of the Bible as an extant text; a living, rich representation of the Word.
The book originally appeared in French in 2016 as Bible et poésie, and is translated into English for the first time by Stephen E Lewis, an American theologian who has translated works by Jean-Luc Marion. Anglophone speakers are in luck: Lewis’s translation is fluid and deft, and is one of the finest works to be published this year.
Edwards puts down his stake with the first sentences: “We do not read the Bible as it is meant to be read. Theology always risks leading us astray by elaborating its own discourse, with the biblical texts merely as a point of departure.” The Bible, Edwards notes, teems with poetry – both moments that are poetic in mode as well as outright verse. He is certainly not the first to make such an observation, but he does so with such style and verve that his discussion is essential reading. In fact, this is part of a long project of Edwards (Towards a Christian Poetics, an important touchstone, was published in 1984: “Christianity foregrounds language by its doctrine of the Word, and literature by the centrality of the Scriptures.”); but this book is Edwards at his finest.
He challenges us with questions. What are the spiritual and literary effects of Biblical poetry? In what ways might they reframe our understanding of Biblical and literary traditions? More directly, perhaps, why poetry? As Edwards puts it, why did the inspired writers of Scripture “in a sense, complicate their task by devoting so much care and exactitude to the form of their writings, and so leave us ‘meanings’ or ‘messages’ to be sought in the very movements of their language?”
Concurrent with Edwards’s argument for a more poetic appreciation of Biblical language and narrative is this other concern – one that is perhaps even more ambitious and important. “The Bible asks us to recognise the strangeness, the foreignness of Christianity, and to put into question our European manner of approaching it,” he writes. Here Edwards implies both a cultural and intellectual strangeness—a word that might cause some to pause. Rather, I suggest they heed the observation of Charles Baudelaire: “Le beau est toujours bizarre” (the beautiful is always bizarre).
Edwards wants us to “listen to the Bible’s very words”, to allow “their strangeness to teach us, to move us outside our reassuring habits of thinking”. This is not mere academic concern. He asks: “Do we not see all that we are losing?” He bemoans attempts to make the Bible modern, through both linguistic and cultural lenses. We must hesitate to ask the Bible “to elucidate everything”. Edwards believes “the effort to systematise revelation” is dangerous. After all, the New Testament “does not deliver a meaning, does not construct a conceptual system, a structure of thought. Word of God and not human hermeneutical essay, it guides us at every moment to the person of Christ, to the cross and the empty tomb, so that faith may come to us by listening.”
These are beautiful thoughts. They are also connected to Edwards’s argument about the pleasant and revelatory strangeness of the Christian vision. The “strange body”, “modified syntax”, “unexpected associations of words” present in poetry “changes everything it touches”, therefore “it calls to mind the possibility of a deeper change; it awakens the other within the same”. “In permeating ourselves with poetry,” he claims, “in penetrating its domain by leaving behind us the prose of our daily life, we cross a threshold, we find ourselves amid the strange.”
Such strangeness is essential when we are confronted with one who speaks a foreign, divine language: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life,” Christ says. Often what Edwards says of poetry is true of Christ: “It burns up appearances, it uncovers the invisible.” He cautions us against exegesis that, in rhetoric or ideology, overtakes the text itself.
In Christ’s words, Edwards explains, “we recognise behind these very simple words a sort of hinterland of meaning that we must explore as one explores the depths of a poem.” Christ’s words “shake the habitual and reasonable representations of religious life”; to understand, we must give ourselves over completely.
Elsewhere, Edwards considers the Magnificat as “a citational poem: in almost all its verses we find an echo of one or another of the books of the Old Testament.” Mary’s prayer “resembles the Anglo-American modernist poetry of TS Eliot or Ezra Pound; it departs completely from a certain Romantic idea of authenticity by showing that true emotion can be discovered not so much in listening to one’s own impulses, but instead in opening oneself to the voices of others”. The Bible and Poetry is a spirited defence of the sacred, poetic Word.
The Bible and Poetry (NYRB Classics, £16.99) is published on 15 August
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