Review [book] : The Psalter According to the Seventy & The Book of Hours
Note: this review was written in 2015
The Psalter According to the Seventy of St. David the Prophet and King / translated from the Greek Septuagint by the Holy Transfiguration Monastery. — 236 pages; 16cm.. — Boston, Massachusetts: Holy Transfiguration Monastery, c2010.
The Book of Hours: Containing the Midnight Services for Weekdays, Saturdays, and Sundays; the Hours with Their Mid-hours and the Typica / translated from the Greek by the Holy Transfiguration Monastery. — 174 pages. — Boston, Massachusetts: Holy Transfiguration Monastery, c2014.
I recently purchased two pocket-sized liturgical books from Holy Transfiguration Monastery (HTM) in Boston, Massachusetts. This monastery is schismatic, but they publish some very good works, among them is: The Great Horologion, The Homilies of St. Isaac of Syria, and the larger-sized version of the Psalter, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, The Menaion, and many others.
Both books put content from works previously published by HTM into a portable sized book, so not much new is offered in the way of content, but the portability is something worth considering for purchase. HTM must have a monk that knows his books; in my opinion they make the most beautiful Orthodox books printed for mass consumption in the English language. The only competitors have been the Antiochian Liturgikon, second edition only (the first was a wretched book, even though it has Holy content), the other is the recent publication of the Hieratikon : Office Book for Priest & Deacon. — 322 pages; 16 cm.. — South Canaan, Pennsylvania: St. Tikhon’s Monastery Press, c2014. Now were talking baby!: guilded pages, rounded spine, exquisite engravings, high quality print on thin paper. These are all things, except for the thin paper, that HTM employs in making their books; they don’t use thin paper, but they use ANSI Z39.48 quality book paper (they don’t identity the paper as such, but I’m almost certain it is. The colophon in the Book of Hours says it is printed on acid-free paper) I’ve had several HTM books for over 15 years and they show no sign of yellowing. In my opinion, all Orthodox service books should be made like HTM books, they are a thing of beauty, and beauty is a thing that is important in the Orthodox Church. Another example of nicely printed books is Dumbarton Oaks editions; these are Orthodox books, but they are primarily academic.
Now a few comments about the HTM pocket Psalter:
Some people don’t like HTM’s translation of the Psalter because it employs archaic language, such as Thee, Thou, and Thine, much like the KJV translation of the bible. Their philosophy of translation and why they choose this approach is laid out in the Preface of the Horologion, which uses a similar style of English. It doesn’t really bother me that much, but sometimes it is a bit awkward. Services are laid out in a Byzantine style of celebration.
The book is bound with a rounded spine, which after a little breaking in (don’t bend a book backwards) it will lay flat on a table or stand by itself. The book cover is an extremely durable green fabric covered book board, suitable for a military chaplain to take on the battlefield, with a beautiful and sparse, gold-foil-stamped title on the front cover and the spine. Service books from HTM always have exquisite engravings interspersed throughout the pages, this book is no exception.
I have three criticisms of this book:
First, it doesn’t have a table of contents (TOC); you might not think that to be important, but it saves a lot of time and frustration. The book has lots of addenda, back-matter material that is valuable, but a person just has thumb through the book to get to it. In the back is a Prayer for the Reposed, which is used in-between kathismata when reciting the Psalter over the body of a dead person, a section titled Order of the Reading of the Psalter with tables for various times of the year, Numbering of the Psalms (Septuagint v. Hebrew), Psalms Assigned to the Services. To remedy this, I made a TOC by hand on one of blank pages at the beginning so I could find the starting page number for each kathisma; most of the time one is reading the Psalter in sections according to the day.
Second, there are no headings for the Stases divisions of the Kathismata; this would be so much more convenient. Although the end of each stasis is marked with Glory, Both now. Alleluia. which designates the prayers to be said at the end of the stasis when praying through the Psalms; these prayers are in their full form at the end matter, p.231, which again is a good reason for the inclusion for the table of contents, or a note in parentheses of which pages to turn to, even though most chanters or priests know these by heart.
Third, and final is a nit-picky comment, but it seems odd to me that every Psalm in the book is numbered with both Roman and Arabic numerals, e.g, Psalm XXXIX. 39. I’m not sure what the function of that typesetting device is, but if anybody knows, please tell me.
This Psalter is a good one to have in your pack for wherever you are.
Several comments about the HTM pocket Book of Hours:
In the Note to the Reader (page 9), it says that the prayers for The Book of Hours were lifted from The Great Horologion, (c1997), and that together with the Prayer Book for Orthodox Christians (c1987), the Book of Hours provides a complete cycle of daily services in a portable format. I have used the Prayer Book for Orthodox Christians, another beautifully made book, and my only criticism of it is the clunkiness of the archaic translation.
There are those who argue for contemporary-language translations because contemporary translations help us to pray in the language that we speak everyday, thereby settling those prayers more firmly into our minds. There are those who argue for the archaic translations because it provides a kind of language that is set aside for worship. This is not unlike the arguments for celebrating the liturgy and services in ancient Greek and Church Slavonic, but at least with the archaic v. contemporary language debate, you can understand the meaning of both for the most part if English is your first language. In the end, I don’t intend to die on one hill or the other; I can find merits in both ideas. Seeing that most of us seem to get used to whatever we pray on a regular basis, I find the most important thing about a translation to be that it should flow well metrically and poetically. There is nothing worse than a clunky translation that breaks the flow of prayer because the translator obviously doesn’t get the music and way of casting the meaning of the English language. It is somewhat like a classical pianist who can’t play simple hymns or jazz because the form doesn’t make sense to her. In the end, a beautifully flowing translation may implant itself in our memory and our hearts more easily and bring us joy because of the beauty of its articulation.
That being said, there a few things about this book that stand out; these are some of the same things that make the Great Horologion stand out as well.
First, one apt criticism of prayer books often made by beginners to prayer, is that they assume prior knowledge of certain prayers, and for example they just print one or two words that identify the prayer like Glory or Our Father instead of printing out the complete prayer as it is said. The supreme example is the Trisagion Prayers usually said at the beginning of many services of the Church. This book is no exception to that method used to shorten the amount of text included in a prayer book, however, it does include the Trisagion prayers in complete at the beginning of the first form of the Midnight service on page 11, at the very beginning of the book. The Great Horologion does this as well, and it includes “see” page references in the rubrics at the beginning of services where abbreviations for the Trisagion Prayers are used, such as the rubrics at the head of the First Hour on page 63; this makes it easy to quickly reference the full prayers in case of a memory slip or if you are a newbie to praying Orthodox prayers.
This leads me to another item for comment, the rubrics in this book and many of the HTM books are well done, giving notes that greatly assist the reader in the praying of the services throughout the year, such as during Great Lent when parts of the ordinary of the services are changed in addition to the movable parts of the services, or even differences due to the day of the week. Many other publishers & authors of prayer books could learn lessons from the rubrics of this HTM author. (note: oftentimes monks don’t take credit for their work as a form of humility) The one criticism that I have of the rubrics is a petty one, but I’m entitled to petty criticism being a librarian, this is the creeping in of archaisms in the rubrics. Most of the rubrics are in plain language but now and then, the author forgot to switch modes and puts a stray –eth, e.g. “He that is to lift up the Panegea saith” (page 144), or using “be” instead of is as in, “if a priest be present,” (page 11), instead of “if a priest is present.” Forgiveness is in order however; I suppose it is somewhat like switching back and forth from plain language to pirate language on Talk-Like-a-Pirate Day.
Another welcome item in this book is the mid hours for extended services, chanted in between the services of the Hours. Also worthy of a mention is the inclusion of prokemena and alleluias for the epistle and gospel readings each day of the week, and for the different types of saints on days when they are commemorated. This comes in handy if you don’t have a calendar listing the readings for the day. These can be used instead.
Finally, I have to mention the quality of the construction of this book: the bullet proof hard cover, durable smyth-sewn binding, the rounded spine, gold-embossed title stamp on the exterior of the cover, easy-to-read font, the use of drop-caps to set apart new paragraphs, and exquisite yet simple engravings. In the colophon it mentions that the printing run was done by Friesens in Altona, Manitoba.
If you have a few extra dollars, the value of this book far exceeds the purchase price of $14. I recommend it.
