IN THE POST I DID THE OTHER NIGHT in which I talked so enthusiastically about the poetic parphrase of Scripture, The Message, I said it was composed by Edward Patterson, mixing up the novelist I knew of with the actual translator, Eugene Peterson who is also a novelist and poet. That's what comes of relying on hearing a name spoken instead of reading it on a page and writing before doing much real research. I apologize for that lapse in my usual practice.
I've been looking more at The Message and the man who produced it and am even more encouraged after hearing him and reading some interviews with him.
Here's one of the best of the recorded interviews, one with the ever reliable Krista Tippett.
I was especially interested to see that he shared one of my enthusiasms, for the poetry of the too little remembered Denise Levertov. Here is what some of the program notes say.
“Prayers are tools not for doing or getting, but for being and becoming.” These are the words of the legendary pastor and writer Eugene Peterson, whose biblical imagination has formed generations of preachers. At the back of the church he led for nearly three decades, you’d be likely to find well-worn copies of books by Wallace Stegner or Denise Levertov. Frustrated with the unimaginative way he found his congregants treating their Bibles, he translated it himself — and that translation has sold millions of copies around the world. Eugene Peterson’s down-to-earth faith hinges on a love of metaphor and a commitment to the Bible’s poetry as what keeps it alive to the world.
I will be interested in reading his rendering of the Psalms, which even in the translations I like many of the just don't do it for me like they're supposed to.
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