By ANGE MLINKO [The Nation] – “Text,” the Oxford English Dictionary tells us, came into English usage as a signifier for the Gospels. It is related to texture and textile, establishing the written and the woven as related pursuits that join the useful and the comely. Thus wrote the fourteenth-century poet William Langland in Piers Plowman: “Dilige deum & proximum tuum, &c. [Th]is was [th]e tixte trewly..; [the] glose was gloriousely writen.”
The “gloriousely writen” text doesn’t seem to be the bailiwick of linguists. If there’s an offense that unites scientists and post-structuralists against a common foe, it’s belle-lettrism. Yet the concern with text as texture–what we’ve come to call its style–is fundamental not only to the pleasure of reading but to the understanding of what is written, which at its best is a fabric: composed of many strands. Discerning those strands requires knowledge–and judgment. Style is an apotheosis: it is the revelation of any author’s “construction of reality.”
We are coming on the 400th anniversary of the most authoritative English translation of Langland’s tixte: the King James Bible. “No book has had greater influence on the English language,” declared Alan G. Thomas in Great Books and Book Collectors, quoted on the first page of David Crystal’s new book, Begat: The King James Bible and the English Language (Oxford; $24.95). Naturally, such an influence would have to extend to the American language, a subject charted in Hebrew scholar and translator Robert Alter’s new book Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible (Princeton; $19.95).
These books could not be more different.
Continued at The Nation | More Chronicle & Notices.
