A Poet's Bible

A Poet's Bible: Rediscovering The Voices of the Original Text is a 1991 partial translation of the Old Testament of the Hebrew Bible, and some related apocrypha, into English, by David Rosenberg. The book was received well by scholars and critics, receiving the PEN Translation Prize in 1992. However, it did not do well commercially and is currently out of print.

Contents

• Books Translated
• Comparison to KJV
• References

Rosenberg's philosophy in approaching the Hebrew text was to render into English not a literal translation of the Old Testament material for religious purposes, but to capture the essence of the art as viewed by the contemporaries of the authors. Rosenberg argues that most Biblical material has become overly familiar to us, and we are at a loss, for whatever personal reason we may have, to appreciate it as poetry, in and of itself (hence the "rediscovery" of the book's subtitle). To accomplish this, Rosenberg uses a modern poetic form, the triadic stanza favoured by William Carlos Williams, for the majority of the book, and also uses a great deal of modern slang and imagery. Rosenberg describes the latter as Doogri, which is a Modern Hebrew word for street idiom.