The Curmudgeon

YOU'LL COME FOR THE CURSES. YOU'LL STAY FOR THE MUDGEONRY.

Wednesday, January 04, 2012

A Good Book

While the four hundredth anniversary of the Authorised Version has been marked in Britain with grovels to Mammon and crass political posturing, a new Norwegian translation of the noted collection of X-rated fairy tales has become a bestseller. Thirty translators, priests and academics were involved in rendering the original Greek and Hebrew into Norwegian, which was then given a stylistic polish by a team of twelve literary authors. Stine Smemo Strachan of the Norwegian Bible Society, who worked on the project, has attributed its success to the translation's readability, and "the fact that its publication is seen as a cultural event": the original printing ran to twenty-five thousand copies, but the book has already sold more than three times that number since mid-October, despite lacking an introduction by Michael Gove.

Me at Poetry-24
To Ronald Searle

4 Comments:

  • At 7:13 pm , Anonymous Madame X said...

    If it's any comfort, for a bestseller, it's practically never read. People buy them to display on their shelves to impress visitors.

     
  • At 9:16 pm , Blogger Philip said...

    I wish it were read more widely. Not only are many of the stories rather good, but their being practically never read might easily be one of the reasons for the widespread persistence of worship for an omniscient yet loving Bronze Age djinn who disapproves of homosexuals and likes to prove a point by having his children nailed to things.

     
  • At 7:57 pm , Anonymous Madame X said...

    I'm sure if more people read the New Testament, you would witness quite the stampede away from Christianity.

     
  • At 5:44 pm , Anonymous Anonymous said...

    A child's school project led me to look at the bits of the Old Testament after the Israelites crossed the Red Sea to leave Egypt. As far as I could work out, there followed many years of bloody warfare, which is presumably why the popularised version of the story normally ends just after the crossing has been completed.

    Guano

     

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