Fronting in the Hebrew Psalms: Translatable or Untranslatable?

The fronting of elements before the verb in Biblical Hebrew is a complex marked word-order feature which received attention in some recent works on the information structure (Heimerdinger, 1999; Van der Merwe and Talstra, 2002/3; Shimakazi, 2002; Floor, 2003, 2004, 2006; Mochavie, 2009). The most comprehensive study of marked word-order in Hebrew poetry is that of Nicolas Lunn (2006). Lunn reported that marked word-order in Hebrew OT is somewhat productive in narrative (13%), but a lot more productive in poetry (34%) - a third of all poetic lines in his sample. However, in spite of the frequent occurrence of this feature in Hebrew poetry, it is often not reflected in translation. This paper will give an overview of fronting in a sample of 40 Psalms in Hebrew, doing two things:
1) Observe how these marked structures were generally (but not always!) left untranslated in some more recent translations in European and African languages.
2) Analyze the pragmatic functions of marked word-order in these 40 Psalms from an information structure approach that goes beyond the clause and sentence level to poetic discourse and theme analysis.

It will be argued that in the light of these higher-level factors, something of the meaning in some cases will be lost if fronting is left untranslated. The paper concludes with a suggestion of a range of devices that may help translators to actually translate, or at least “compensate” for fronting in the Hebrew Psalms.