Parallel Members – Parallelism, Translation, and Sacred Poetry, 1741- 1929

Abstract

Parallel Members. Parallelism, Translation and Sacred Poetry, 1741-1929 is a comparative study of English and German translations and poetics of the Bible from the late 18th- to the early 20th-century. With chapters on Robert Lowth, Johann Gottfried Herder, Gerard Manley Hopkins and, finally, on Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber, its goal is to trace the pervasive influence of biblical parallelism on modern European poetics. In his 1741 Oxford lectures On the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, the English man of letters, Robert Lowth identified parallelismus membrorum as a chief structural principle of the language of the Old Testament: 'a certain equality, resemblance, or parallelism between the members of each period'. While ecclesiastic, rabbinic as well as academic sources commented on biblical parallelism more than once before Lowth’s work, it is thanks to their abundant reception that Lowth's lectures have often been viewed as the ‘invention’ of parallelism. Recent scholarly work on the influence of Lowth's concept has drawn on the resources of biblical criticism and the history of exegesis, on historiography as well as on rhetorical criticism, none has, however, investigated the implications of Lowth's parallelismus membrorum for modern European poetics and poetry. Neither biblical criticism, nor historiography, my dissertation reads specifically translations and poetics of the Bible to argue that parallelism has allowed for a radical reconceptualisation of poetic language in European modernity. Closely following the figures of parallelism at work in some of the readers of Lowth, who are themselves also translators of the Bible, my readings draw out the consequences of the skirmishes between parallelism, figuration and versification. I demonstrate that ever since its ‘invention’ in the middle of the 18th-century, the parallelism of Biblical poetry has served, again and again, as a way of reading and writing poetic language. The goal of my inquiry is to initiate a conversation on parallelism that will set novel, if necessarily parallel, ways for writing the literary history of modernity as well as for translation studies and Biblical poetics.