Translating Psalms in a Culturally-Sensitive (Ethical) Way, With a Particular Focus on Rhythm

With the strong interest nowadays in translating Psalms, it is imperative that all concerned give attention to the local cultural forms (of poetry and music) in the translation. This paper focuses on one important element of translating poetic text, viz. rhythm. Associated with this is the ‘poetic line’, the way in which the poem is divided into line-units. This has been found to impact the rhythm of the poem, and therefore also the meaning and the emotional response of the listener.

For many years, an isochronic view of poetic text was followed. This asserted that lines are divided into equal rhythmic portions: stress-timed, syllable-timed, or mora-timed. However, since the development of cognitive poetics (from the work of Tsur 2002 and 2008, in particular), it is now understood that the poetic line is perceived psychologically, and the poetic line is more often of variable length than regular.

Some examples of psalm translations from three communities in Africa are included in the paper, thereby illustrating the principles discussed. It is hoped that an awareness of recent study in poetics will help consultants to be careful to not impose ideas of poetry from their own language background on the text of another language.