The American Literary Version

Why use a 125-year-old translation as a basis?

The American Standard Version (1901) is a revision of the King James Version (1611), staying true to its distinctive style but making improvements to the translation where three centuries of textual criticism and advances in lexicography had shed light.

We chose the ASV as our base translation because, compared to all the prevalent postwar and contemporary translations of the complete Bible—including other revisions of the ASV like the Revised Standard Version (RSV) and the New American Standard Bible (NASB)—it is exceptionally literal; that is, much more of an attempt is made at transferring into English the idiom, concreteness, ambiguity, repetition, and precise grammatical structures inherent to the original languages.

“This endeavour after faithfulness was indeed the ruling principle of the whole work. From first to last, the single object of the Revisers was to allow the written words to speak for themselves … without any admixture of gloss, or any suppression of roughness.”

Firmly rooted in the tradition of the King James Version and Tyndale’s seminal first translations of the Bible into Modern English, this “formal” approach to translation naturally allows the meaningfully employed literary articulations of the biblical writers to remain better intact when rendered into English.

By contrast, most mainstream translations published since the mid-twentieth century, beginning with the 1952 Revised Standard Version, all but discarded the longstanding formal approach, prioritizing instead a semblance of contemporary, “natural” English. This style of translation is commonly referred to as “thought for thought” or “dynamic equivalence,” and with the intent of being easy to read and immediately understood, the necessary result is paraphrastic and explanatory. The literary articulations that might be perceived and appreciated in a formal translation are inevitably muffled or obscured beneath smooth, idiomatic English.

It’s a trade-off.

We laud the merits of the older, more literal approach, but we don’t mean to suggest there’s one correct way to translate the Bible, or that less formal translations are fallacious or misguided. On the contrary, we believe that having at our disposal a wide variety of translations, each with different aims, contributes to a healthy and nuanced understanding of the Bible. In our case, we simply felt that a highly formal translation was best suited to the literary vision we set out for Bibliotheca.

Over the last several decades, scholars like Robert Alter and Everett Fox have persuasively demonstrated that a decidedly formal approach to translation—one that attempts to convey the peculiarities and structural intricacies of the literature into the target language—grants readers the ability to decipher layers of meaning and artistry in the text that would otherwise be impossible to perceive.

To be sure, this kind of translation demands more of readers, but if we’re up to the challenge, it has the potential to draw us into a deeper appreciation of the literature as literature. Rather than pulling the biblical writers entirely out of their native forms of expression and into ours, we are invited to meet them halfway, to begin to interact with the rigorous literary artistry of their work on their own terms.

“For a reader to attend to these elements of literary art is not merely an exercise in ‘appreciation’ but a discipline of understanding: the literary vehicle is so much the necessary medium through which the Hebrew writers realized their meanings that we will grasp the meanings at best imperfectly if we ignore their fine articulations as literature.”