Aiming for Emotional Accuracy when Translating Psalms: The Process and the Practice, from Recent Research

Poems (such as psalms) lend themselves to oral translation as, in poetry, sounds play as large a role as words, and sounds are aurally received. Through their sounds and their words, psalms are able to convey and evoke emotion. Thus, for an authentic translation of a psalm, the translator needs to feel the poet’s emotions, and enter as fully as possible into his thinking, i.e. to internalize the poem.

Internalization requires first listening carefully to the psalm as it is read aloud, and then applying analytical thinking, to remember the key ideas and themes, their logical relationship, the divisions, the moods, and the poetic devices which add beauty or rhetorical power to the poem. Various exercises can facilitate this process. These include enacting the backstory and/or the psalm; creating an emotional map; using drawings, key words, colours, or gestures to remember the main ideas in each section; and sharing personal stories along the same theme as that of the poem. The goal is to hold in short-term memory the key ideas (usually based on emotions) conveyed in each stanza so that the translation that emerges is natural and culturally-sensitive. Examples of internalization exercises are included for various psalms of different genres.

To support the process motivated in this paper, insights from research are incorporated. These include how to facilitate creativity and memory (storage and retrieval), and how to evaluate a literary oral translation communicated through performance. Finally, some excerpts of psalms translated following this approach are assessed for their emotional accuracy.