Speaking of Psalters

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Haruo's picture

I see that Kethe's text "All people that on earth do dwell" says (in its authority page) that it is a translation of a French original. While I have no doubt that the French Genevan Psalters were a model on which Kethe based his text, I'm not at all sure that Kethe translated from the French. What (if any) is the evidence that he did so? I would think that, given the high regard of the tradition for literal translation to the extent possible within the constraints imposed by meter, he would have translated the psalm from the Hebrew (with possibly a glance at the Greek); if he had been translating "Vous, qui sur la terre habitez" the result might have been more along the lines of "Ye that upon the earth do dwell" rather than involving the change of grammatical person implicit in "people"... My guess is that the original of the text was for both the English and the French translators a Hebrew one, or conceivably Greek or Latin.

I guess this is more a hymnological inquiry than an editors' question, but I was just merging the FieldSB instance into the authority and was struck by the thought that perhaps I should have changed "French" to "(NULL)" when prompted.


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No source, but according to Wikipedia most of Kethe's Psalms were translations from French.

{{citation needed}} in the article, with a tag saying "(looking for documentation Kethe's texts are from French texts, not just French metrical models, rather than ancient languages or English Bible versions)". Will see if anyone notices. I didn't study the history to see who wrote that paragraph. May do so sometime if I remember to follow up on this. No time this morning (gotta get to church...)