from Chapter 12, "A Romance of Translation":
When I retired from the University in 1937, my friend and former student S.V. McCasland suggested that I should translate the Apocrypha. . .I was about halfway through the job and was in the midst of [Ben Sira / Ecclesiasticus] when I came upon a verse so utterly different in the Greek from the standard "revised edition version" that I exclaimed, "How could anybody ever get that English out of the Greek?"
Why, of course, no one ever did! The Revised Version made in 1894 from the Authorized King James Version rested on previous versions such as those in 1572, 1539 , and Coverdale's Bible of 1535 which was "faithfully and truly translated" out of . . .not original tongues but only the German and Latin versions, two of which he employed. . .Was it then possible that the Apocrypha as a whole had never before been translated throughout from the Greek? The idea astounded me.
When I made my translation of the Greek New Testament, I was well aware that it had been done at least 150 times before. Among [t]hose who were translators of the Septuagint (Greek language Old Testament version) were carefully leaving out all the Apocryphal books [Goodspeed elaborates on these scholars' efforts : Charles Thomson, Lancelot Brenton, R.H. Charles] or were so indifferent to the task. . .
Here I stumbled blindly into it, never dreaming that it was a new undertaking. I proceeded with my task with renewed energy, publishing in 1938.
this autobiographical memoir published by Harper & Brothers, New York in 1953
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