POEM #18: Purify Me With Hyssop Flowers
a new version of psalm 51
Hello, friends!
If you’re new at Sabbath Empire, first of all: Welcome.
And secondly: Thank you.
And third, you should know that my project with these versions of the psalms is, with the help of Jeff Benner’s Ancient Hebrew Lexicon of the Bible, to go back to the roots of their original Hebrew words—and even the meanings latent in Hebrew’s archaic pictographic script—and use them as a basis for conveying something like the same sequence of bright and beautiful, and also possibly disturbing, mental images the psalms might have conveyed to their original audience.
And if it takes a whole phrase, or even a whole sentence, or many sentences, to convey the vividness of a single original word, I’m OK with that: In my book, there’s no such thing as a psalm that’s too energetic, too alive.
And you should know that, when it comes to religious language, I mostly want to get rid of it. In this arena, I’m something of an “anti-abstractionist” in the sense that if nothing startling comes into my head when I hear a religious word, I strongly suspect it of not actually meaning anything—and to quote Sweet Brown totally out of context: “Ain’t nobody got time for that.”
You should know that mental imagery is the only dimension of each psalm where I have any ambition in terms of accuracy: Parts of speech, verb tense, verb mood, et cetera—all that might go out the window, along with the original baby and its bathwater, as subordinate to the imagery, as well as my own sense of what makes a poem earthy and breath-filled in English: My psalm versions are to scholarly translations, as totem poles are to textbooks on biology.
You should also know that, for this particular psalm (51 / 50 LXX), I’ve left off the last two verses, which I’ve always felt were very much out of the blue, a total non-sequitor, apropos of nothing. Having today read Robert Alter’s amply footnoted translation, now I know my feeling is shared: He says the last two verses were probably tacked on by a later, more religiously orthodox, editor, bothered by David saying outright—from personal experience! as if personal experience counts for anything!—that God has no desire for ritual sacrifice, which of course was the entire purpose of the Temple and its cult. Hence, the psalm couldn’t be used liturgically there, without first changing it to mean its own opposite, as the final word.
Well, I’ve already told you I’m not too bothered about accuracy. I do care about coherence, though!—and also David’s personal experience, even if it doesn’t fit someone else’s spiritual orthodoxy.
So here’s my version, without that ending, for what it’s worth (and let me know what you think in the comments). I do hope it honors that ancient harp-playing rascal lion-slayer who first sang it—and may his blessings be upon us.
love,
graham