The Psalter in Clean Week Services Here

Clean Week is quite an adventure here at St. Tikhon's. The intention of Clean Week is to start Great Lent well, with your utmost effort. Part of that adventure here at St. Tikhon's is the full cycle of services, including the reading of all the kathismas (or the "sections") of the Psalter. That means, we heard the whole Psalter twice through, with extra doses of Psalm 119 (118), since it is read, in its entirety, during Midnight Office.

I was surprised by the Psalter we used. We used an in-house, monastery-use-only version. It is in a draft form, so much so that many of the psalms had never been used in church before this past week. And it got me to thinking about Psalter translations all over again.

There are not a lot of English Psalters using the Septuagint (LXX) out there. The one from Holy Transfiguration Monastery (HTM) is the most common to see used in Orthodox churches, in my experience. I know there is also one from Holy Trinity Publications in Jordanville, A Psalter for Prayer, which is based on the Miles Coverdale wording (though Septuagint-ized, I guess).

The HTM is a "new" version (meaning, not centuries old), but has language forced into an older style. So, it would feel somewhat like a King James experience, but, in my opinion, with more oddities to the language. The syntax is sometimes excessively odd, which probably is due to being worded to fit Byzantine chant...but I am not the guy to ask about that. I just know the wording is weird to read aloud. And anything based on the Miles Coverdale Psalter—he lived in the 15th century—will also be linguistically antiquated, but at least, genuinely so...since he actually lived then.

For myself, I still keep coming back to Donald Sheehan's The Psalms of David. It is modern, in the sense that he is not going use syntax or wording that is so archaic that the modern readers stumble through the sentence. And for something that you would have to go to the King James Psalter to find, Donald Sheehan is a poet, and the the wording of the Psalter translation is written to the standard of someone with a poet's ear. I never stumble through this version, yet it retains a classic "feel".

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