The Complete Psalms
The Book of Prayer Songs in a New Translation
Pamela Greenberg
In this new and complete translation of the Book of Psalms, poet Pamela Greenberg captures the honesty of these “prayer songs,” as they overflow into wild jubilance or deeply wrenching despair. Greenberg’s translation is moving in its immediacy and piercing in its literary beauty. She aims to restore the poetry and vibrancy of the psalms as a prayerful act, replicating their emotional passion while wrestling with the text as living liturgy and yet remaining as true as possible to the original. Her desire in this new translation is to rekindle the psalms’ relevance, to bring to life what makes their words cry and breathe and shout—a labor of yearning, necessity, and love.
From the Foreword:
As Pamela Greenberg writes in her introduction to the extraordinary new translation of the psalms, these are poems written not to formulate religious doctrine, but to give voice to religious emotion—all emotion, from anguish to exaltation, loneliness to thanksgiving, yearning to rage. Where our hearts go, the psalms sing with us….A great gift to her readers.
Read more about The Complete Psalms at www.thecompletepsalms.com
Published by Bloomsbury USA
Praise for The Complete Psalms
Pamela Greenberg’s delicious new translations of the Psalms …favors beauty over theology, capturing the human ardor and agony…. How fresh the resulting language is. For this reader, Greenberg has lifted the old language from spider webs and mothballs, breathing new air into the songs.
— Mary Karr, Washington Post
Greenberg’s version speaks with a directness and simplicity that distinguishes it from the magniloquence of most other versions…
— Publishers Weekly