by Archimandrite Maximos Constas, Distinguished Professor of the Humanities, University of Austin; formerly Dean of Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology
- The Psalter according to the Seventy: Greek-English. Translated by Peter A. Chamberas. Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2019. 518 pp. isbn 978-1-935317-71-5.
- The Psalter of David the Prophet and King with the Nine Odes. Translated by Nicholas Roumas. n.p. Great Light Publishing Co., 2022. 250 pp. isbn 979-8-9861143-0-9.
- The Holy Psalter with the Troparia and Prayers of the Cell Vigil. Translated by Ephrem Lash and Christopher M. Morgan. Zeeland, MI: St Ignatius Orthodox Press, 2022. 334 pp. isbn 979-8-9865301-0-9
- The Orthodox Psalter with Explanatory Notes. Translated by Silviu N. Bunta. McAllen, TX: Cherubim Press, 2022. x + 285 pp. isbn 979-8-9860633-1-7
As part of the Bible, the Psalter or Book of Psalms has been translated into nearly two thousand languages, and translations of the Psalter in English alone are available in hundreds of versions. The impulse behind the proliferation of translations aims in part to render the psalms more intelligible, to clarify the insights of their message, and to enhance their ease of use in Christian prayer and worship.
Translations are therefore responses, even if only implicitly, to the question of how fidelity to the original text might be best achieved. The optimal correlation between the text and its translation is itself an old question and has been debated for more than two thousand years. Modern theories of translation, following a distinction established in Greco-Roman antiquity, generally reduce the range of methodologies employed by translators to an opposition between literal vs. free, word-for-word vs. sense-for-sense, or formal equivalence vs. functional (or dynamic) equivalence. There is a third class of translation in which the original text is reworked into a new idiom or genre, employing extensive paraphrase and highly free and allusive renderings, in the way that James Joyce’s Ulysses (1920) and Derek Walcott’s Omeros (1990) respectively rework Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad.
Originally published in St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 67.1-2, pp. 199-215., 2023.
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