In his translation of the Bible into German, Luther worked with the vulgate Latin and the Greek, and he collaborated with scholars who knew the pertinent languages of Bible translation, including of course, Hebrew. I love the plain musicality and muscular movement of Luther’s German translation more than the gorgeous (and to me) wonderfully poetical strangeness of the King James Version in English; and I wanted to bring that strong rendering of Luther’s into my own English to hear what that might sound like. But whereas Luther’s translation is in prose, and creates a kind of poetry in the prose through rhythm, parallel construction, and internal rhyme, I thought it would be interesting and worthwhile to bring the energy of a full verse movement into the English—that is, capitalizing on the power of suspense & release, restraint & surge, that comes with sentences moving as lines that pause, stop, and enjamb. Those who know the Bible well--whether Luther’s version, the KJV, or the Hebrew—will also detect some free interpolations, especially at the end.

Luther’s translation was not only radical in bringing the Bible into a kind of German accessible to everyone, but his doing so would stand as a great unifying cultural invention of his time—in other words, the work that culminated in 1534 helped to create the modern identity of Germany as a nation through the creation of a standard version of the German language; it had far-reaching influences, not only in the areas of theology and politics, but also in the art of translation. Unfortunately, Luther’s vicious anti-Semitism, unleashed in many of his screeds against the Jews for not converting to Christianity, streamed, 400 years later, into Nazi ideology (like, it wasn’t bad enough on its own . . . ? ) I imagine the divine vantage of witnessing human (self) destruction as more or less indifferent to religious identification.