Providence in action...

While reading for my preparations to teach Hebrew poetry, I ran across this little gem in Derek Kidner's Psalms commentary, written about the parallel structure of Hebrew poems:

It is the striking fact that this type of poetry loses less than perhaps any other in the process of translation. In many literatures the appeal of a poem lies chiefly in verbal felicities and associations, or in metrical subtleties, which tend to fail of their effect even in a related language. The programme-notes of any Lieder recital are enough to prove the point! But the poetry of the Psalms has a broad simplicity of rhythm and imagery which survives transplanting into almost any soil. Above all, the fact that its parallelisms are those of sense rather than of sound allows it to reproduce its chief effects with very little loss of either force or beauty. It is well fitted by God’s providence to invite ‘all the earth’ to ‘sing the glory of his name’.

• Kidner, D. (1973). Vol. 15: Psalms 1-72: An introduction and commentary. Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries (17). Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.