K.J.V.

Although English has, in the centuries since the K.J.V., lost “thou” as the intimate or singular form of “you,” Alter’s second line is an attempt at capturing a blunter form of address and inserting, as he often does, some alliteration or wordplay to suggest the linguistic life of the original.

Alter renders perhaps the most famous poetic lines in English with an admirable deference to the K.J.V. and a free hand with the particulars:

Something of the lulling Jacobite music is gone; it is difficult to imagine someone reading aloud the Alter version to a lover, as so many have read aloud the K.J.V. rendering.

The experience is of going back to school, where a superb professor is paraphrasing the text from the original as he comments on it: “You might say that it says . . . but that doesn’t quite capture it, so perhaps the best equivalent would be . . .” The K.J.V. rose to meet a moment when growing literacy and Protestant feeling made the individual connection with the text matter: it was for men reading on their own or preachers seeking a passage to elucidate.

Where the K.J.V. has “The light of the eyes rejoiceth the heart: and a good report maketh the bones fat,” Alter has the memorable and crisp “������ brightens the eye gladdens the heart, and good news puts sap in the bones,” a phrase in itself both odd and brightly idiomatic.