Imagine the Tao Te Ching translated into Islamic terms, the Rg Veda reworked as a Judaic text, the Diamond Sutra translated as a Christian text; you are imagining something similar to these reworkings of the Psalms by Stephen Mitchell. While Norman Fischer in his Opening to You: Zen-Inspired Translations of the Psalms tried to translate the psalms into the universal religious concepts shared with Zen Buddhism, Mitchell recreates the psalms with Zen-specific terminology and contemporary scientific terminology which may clash with the images of the original psalms.

Example: from Psalm 148 "Praise him, you bodhisattvas, / you angels burning with his love. / Praise him in the depths of matter; / praise him in atomic space. / Praise him, you whirling electrons, / you unimaginable quarks."

The result is a set of poems which are sometimes "selected & adapted" as the book title implies, but which are often "inspired by". In those poems which speak from a consistent viewpoint, in which the mix of Judaism, Zen and science does not clash, there are excellent poems - the quality and sensativity one associates with Mitchell. Otherwise, this is one of his weaker efforts. It may be read as poetry but does not serve as a way into the psalms.

When you open to Psalm 1 and find that it begins: "Blessed are the man and the woman / who have grown beyond their greed," you know that this is not your fathers' Psalter.

Fair enough. Stephen Mitchell gives fair warning in his title (it's "a," not "the" Book of Psalms) and his short introduction (in which he states his intent to "[s]ing to the Lord a _new_ song" by following the spirit rather than the letter).

And like all of Mitchell's work, these are lovely poetic renderings. But be aware that quite a few of them are (or at least include) improvisations that depart radically from the original text. Then, too, the local references to Jerusalem and/or the Temple have been erased and replaced with more universal allusions. (Other portions of the text are rendered even more politically correct.)

My biggest beef is that Mitchell has turned most of the "complaining" Psalms (when he includes them at all; there are only fifty "psalms" in this volume) into statements of spiritual acquiescence. And he characterizes that acquiescence itself in terms that are foreign to the Psalms: e.g. Psalm 133's "my heart is not proud" is Buddhized to "my mind is not noisy with desires."

But it's excellent poetry, and Mitchell at least has the good sense not to stray too far from the text when he renders perennial favorites like Psalm 23.

As poetry, then, this book is one of Mitchell's better works. Just don't expect the biblical Psalms.

Regrettably this author only treats us to a selection of psalms, not the whole psalter, but his translation from the Hebrew into contemporary idiom is strikingly beautiful, as one might expect from a poet. This book opened my eyes to new meanings in some of my favorite psalms.

I really tried to finish this book, but there is only so much preaching one can take. The feeling reading this is that there is less of a translation being presented than the author's interpretation of the work. After being told several times what God thinks, or must have thought, or what God really meant but was misstated as the stories were passed along and re-written, the entire basis for a "new translation" seemed suspect. Most people will be better served by reading mainstream translations (with study notes for in-depth analysis). Many of these are written by scores of biblical scholars collaborating together and working with original texts. NIV, NASV, or other respected translations should be baseline reading...then interpretations such as this one can be read critically.

If you asked Stephen Mitchell to translate the telephone book, he'd probably come up with a brilliantly lucid work bristling with insights into the nature of spiritual reality. But you'd have to wade through an introduction that reads: "I found that the entirety of K-N was a later interpolation by a talented but spiritually inferior redactor, and moreover J is clearly a doublet of I just as V is a doublet of U. I have therefore taken the liberty of rearranging the alphabet in a way that felt authentic to me, following the spirit rather than the letter."

_Genesis_ is probably the clearest example of this tendency, as it's one of very few Mitchell works that's _supposed_ to be a complete and literal translation rather than a poetic rendering. And the translation, as always, is very, very good -- and very, very clear.

Unfortunately he chops the text to bits -- relegating the allegedly inauthentic bits to the appendices and notes, and explaining in the introduction all the things he thinks are wrong with the "redacted" version of Genesis. It's almost as though there's a conservation law at work: when Mitchell can't mess with the translation itself, his editorial views emerge somewhere else, with a vengeance.

I do not at all mean to imply that he has nothing important to say. On the contrary, some of his commentary is most helpful. He explains some very nice touches in his translation, and he does offer what seem to me to be some deep and genuine insights. (And he also does a nice job of showing how his translation is different from those of others.)

But I do find myself almost gasping for breath when I see the credulity with which he buys into the JEDP "documentary hypothesis" -- and, for that matter, the sheer chutzpah with which he determines just which bits of the text are later additions by "second- and third-rate writers" [p. xxxv] and even "dullard[s]" [p. xl]. I'm not terribly impressed with the usual arguments that the text is full of contradictions and awkward "doublets" in the first place; nor does Mitchell even pretend to make any effort to resolve them. (And neither have I found two authors who would divide the texts in the same way based on these features.) But as I noted long ago in my review of Kikawada and Quinn's _Before Abraham Was_ (which see), if all these alleged problems didn't bother the alleged "redactor," why do we think they would have bothered a single original author? Why not assume they are there for pedagogical reasons rather than inadvertently left there through mistake or stupidity?

Mitchell is also inclined to make little "arguments from moral indignation," in some cases even based on the _silence_ of the text on certain points. For example, he is properly repulsed by the manner in which the supposedly virtuous Lot offers his virgin daughters to the crowd beating on his door. But it is beyond me why he imagines -- for it must be imagination he uses here -- that the biblical author did _not_ object to this action.

But the reader interested primarily in Mitchell's own spiritual progress will be happy to hear that the "stories took on a stunning clarity" for him after he had removed "coat after coat of lacquer" [p. xxxv]. In other words: as usual, when Mitchell removes the parts he doesn't agree with, he is quite unaccountably stunned and amazed to find that he likes what's left.

On the whole, his translation is well worth reading. But be sure to keep the aspirin handy, and to put any breakable objects somewhere out of reach.

As someone who has recently been fascinated with new translations of the book of Genesis, I found Mitchell's to be one of the best. I call it 'very necessary' because I believe that whether or not one reads the Bible as literature or religious truth, this translation does a superb job in recovering the text from centuries of doctrinal interpretation and positioning the reader for an honest assessment of Genesis. The God of these stories is a complex, capricious, and ultimately unpredicatable character. The Lord is not a likeable deity. And, in my opinion, for a Christian or Jew who has problems with this portrayal of the Lord, read the older versions again. They more or less can reveal the same interpretation to an intelligent reader, and even provoke an interest in how these stories have been read and misread through the discourse of doctrine, of everyday media, and why. This is how I find Mitchell's translation and interpretation valuable, because it questions this Lord. Mitchell looks at the stories of the rejected Cain, the slighted Esau, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and others and reevaluates them with a critical but fully appreciative approach.