Reynolds Price of Durham, NC (Novelist, Translator) died Thursday

Today on Terry Gross FRESH AIR (NPR arts & culture hour-long program) -- interview with the late teacher - writer.  Here's some critical analysis (March 12, 1978) of his Biblical translation (A Palpable God):

Reynolds Price is a considerable prose writer. "A Palpable God" must be taken as a serious testimony to a virtue rare among contemporary producers of fiction -- the compulsion to examine at intervals the rationale of his craft. All we novelists forget too often that our job is not to spin words to the greater glory of the complex, book-drenched, allusion-loving, ambiguity-adoring civilized sensibility, but to tell tales. The telling of a plain tale is, however, as hard for the contemporary writer as plowing with a plank and a nail would be to the contemporary agricultural operative. Sometimes we have to get back to see how the ancients did it, and Mr. Price's mode of self-refreshment has been to examine the Bible. (Price) schooled himself in the Hebrew of the Old Testament as well as the demotic Greek of the New. Here, in 30 stories out of the Bible, he seeks to recapture the physicality -- palpability, or feelability, is the right word -- of the ancient narratives. Neither the King James version nor the later, more scholarly renderings of Holy Writ have, in his view, caught the essential tones. Here is the opening of his "The Good News According to Mark":

" . . . John wore camel's hair and a leather belt round his hips, ate grasshoppers and wild honey and proclaimed saying 'He's coming who is stronger than I -- after me -- of whom I'm unfit stooping to loosen the strap of his sandals. I baptized you in water but he'll baptize you in Holy Spirit.'"
This is both English and not English. Where the tonalities of our tongue are strained, we divine that we are not far from the original Greek. The linking kai (or et of the vulgate), invariably rendered as "and" in the King James version (providing one of the traditional flavors of biblical English, as in Bunyan) he does not find in necessary always to translate: to the Greeks kai was not invariably "and." But the physical force of "unfit stooping" goes back literally to non dignus procumbons in the vulgate, which is a straight rendering of the Greek. . .
NY TIMES review by Anthony Burgess
http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/07/12/specials/price-god.html