Thursday 8 September 2011

State of the project

Patient readers, I have now drafted and scheduled all the posts for Poetry of Christ. They are scheduled to run till the end of March. I have essentially treated the Songs of Ascent as a single thought and release a post every day. That saves a month. Some of them are quite brief (like today's on psalm 78). I may beef them up a bit as I consider them in advance... But the real point is to read the psalms themselves and not keep them at arms length.

As far as the translation is concerned, I will continue to work with it and need now a way to test my work against a wider vocabulary.  Any ideas how to do this?  I could redo Job - or maybe there is a bit of narrative I should try?  I will sleep on it. Maybe several nights. I am having a hopefully mild relapse of a childhood disease and I have some other medical things to attend to that must have fostered some stress in me.  What happens to faith during illness?  I am on trial.  I know I will fall apart eventually - it's in the genes as it were. So given my joy, can I remember, or am I as transient in my memory as I will have been some day in body?  Perhaps I am being cast in a hyper-dimensional amber, ready for the great assize.

Anyway, my project to translate the psalms is now completed for the third, or is it fourth or fifth time. Nothing stopping me from rereading them too.  I am now going to think about how to present and document what I have learned over the last 5 years.  Maybe a little book.  The Story in the Psalter?  But if for some reason, I really retire to a waterfront home and stop all this religious stuff and swim and drink and eat and be merry, still the posts will keep on coming till the end of March 2012. (I'm sure you remember psalm 73: If I had said, This is how I will recount it then I would have betrayed a generation of your children.)

I don't expect to leave quite so suddenly. (But there was this rather nice house for sale ...)

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