The Holy Bible: Containing the Old and New Testaments; Translated Literally from the Original Tongues

[BIBLE] - SMITH, Julia Evelina (1792-1886, translator)

Edité par American Publishing Company, Hartford, Connecticut, 1876

A propos de cet article

(9 1/2 x 6 1/4 inches). [2], 892 pp. (Old Testament); 276 pp. (New Testament). Original publisher?s brown pebble-grain cloth, blind stamped boards, spine and upper cover lettered in gilt First edition of the first complete English Bible translated by a woman, a touchstone of American printing, feminism, and religious scholarship in the original publisher's binding. Born in Glastonbury, Connecticut in 1792, Julia Evelina Smith taught herself Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and French while earning a living as a schoolteacher and, later, as an outspoken abolitionist and suffragist. In 1843 she began to test the English Bible against the originals and soon resolved, as she writes in her preface, "to put the same English word for the same Hebrew or Greek word, everywhere.It may seem presumptuous for an ordinary woman with no particular advantages of education to translate and publish alone, the most wonderful book that has ever appeared in the world.It took me about seven years to accomplish the five translations." Working verse by verse, Smith produced five complete drafts, twice from Greek, twice from Hebrew, once from Latin, finishing in 1855. When commercial publishers declined to issue so unconventional a text, she underwrote the project herself, consigning it to Hartford's American Publishing Company in the nation's centennial year. The resulting volume is the first complete English Bible translated by a woman and remains the only one executed single-handedly without editorial committee or co-translator. Smith's method is uncompromisingly literal: Hebrew tense shifts and Greek word order are preserved even when the English prose becomes rugged. The translation therefore offers modern readers an unfiltered view of the underlying languages and stands in pointed contrast to the smoother, interpretive revisions then underway in Britain and America. Earlier centuries had seen only partial female forays into Scripture such as Anne Locke's 1560 sonnet-cycle on Psalm 51 and the Countess of Pembroke's masterly completion of the Sidney Psalter after her brother's death, but none covered the full canon. Smith's 1876 Bible stands today as both a landmark of American print culture and a quiet declaration of intellectual equality. Simms, The Bible in America, pp. 149-50; Stanton, The Woman's Bible, p. 151; Notable American Women, 1607-1950: A Biographical Dictionary. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971.

N° de réf. du vendeur 42309

Détails bibliographiques

• Titre: The Holy Bible: Containing the Old and New Testaments; Translated Literally from the Original Tongues
• Éditeur: American Publishing Company, Hartford, Connecticut
• Date de parution: 1876
• Reliure: 4to
• Édition: Edition originale