Content area
Full Text
10. Richard Gwyn, The Psalms in Haiku: Meditative Songs of Prayer (Berkeley: Seastone, 1998), pp. 346, paper, $14.00, ISBN 1-56975-096-3.
Fr. Gwyn, after forty years as a member of the Christian Brothers, became a priest and since 1978 has lived at the Cistercian abbey on Caldey Island. His new Psalm version is not a scholarly work, such as that of Bonaventure Zen (1978), although, like Zerr's, it is intended to help readers to pray. The strict haiku form imposes brevity, and Gwyn's translation is unadorned, even abrupt. He holds on to all of the ideas, omits many conjunctions and copulative verbs, but still preserves the tone. He also always respects the structure of the Psalm and often conveys something of the parallelism of Hebrew verse form, every individual stanza being made up of precisely seventeen syllables, most of...