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.
