"Most famous of the translators who worked on the Jerusalem Bible, J. R. R. Tolkien also contributed the least text, the Book of Jonah. That the Oxford don, busy with his academic projects and his fictional writings, participated at all in the translation is a tribute to the remarkable editor of the Jerusalem Bible Fr Alexander Jones. While an early draft in Tolkien’s own typescript can be consulted at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, the published version of Jonah incorporates changes suggested by Jones and the other editors. (...)
Alexander Jones, the principal editor and translator of the English Jerusalem Bible, who signed his letters ‘Alex’ and was known to his family as ‘Alec’, was born in 1906 and lived to the age of sixtyfour. He was ordained in Rome in 1933, after studying at the Venerable English College, a Roman Catholic seminary founded in 1579. After a year of graduate studies at the Jesuit-run Pontifical Biblical Institute, which he found to be overly conservative in its approach to the Bible, he returned to England to teach Scripture at St Joseph’s College, the seminary of the Liverpool RC diocese, located at Upholland (helpfully explained on its letterhead to be near Wigan). His nephew, (later Sir) Anthony Kenny, who studied under him in that time, remembered him thus:
He was a witty and imaginative teacher, who entertained but also puzzled students who could not always tell when he was being serious. He worked hard to make us love the Bible: he firmly believed that Catholics should give it no less attention and respect than Protestants did. But he was also anxious that it should be interpreted as liberally as was consistent with the Catholic doctrines of inspiration and inerrancy. He strove, not always successfully, to show that the official Catholic expressions of these doctrines were compatible with a non-fundamentalist exposition of the Scriptures.
He published a number of volumes of Biblical study, directing his talents to popularization rather than original research. In 1947 he authored The Kingdom of Promise with Robert Dyson SJ the third volume in a series called Scripture Textbooks for Catholic Schools. A series of Old Testament-themed articles in the Catholic Gazette led to Unless Some Man Show Me in 1951. In 1963 Jones’ text-focused commentary The Gospel According to St Mark was released, followed in 1965 by The Gospel According to St Matthew.
According to his nephew, Jones’ academic heroes were the Dominican monks of the École biblique et archéologique française (EBAF) in Jerusalem, especially the school’s founder Marie-Joseph Lagrange. When the EBAF published the Bible de Jérusalem between 1948 and 1953 (in a single volume in 1955), Jones greeted it with admiration. He enthused in a letter to Tolkien:
[T]he new Bible de Jérusalem [is] the best Catholic edition of the Bible in the world and likely to remain so for years to come. The Introductions, Notes, system of cross-reference etc. represent the most up-to-date Catholic scholarship. I know from experience that it is useless to expect anything from Catholic England comparable to it – at least for the next twenty years at the very least.
Although he implies in the same letter that he has been approached by the EBAF and English publishers about undertaking the project of translating the BdJ into English, his nephew describes him as rather more proactive: ‘Even before the single volume French edition had appeared, he began to canvass the possibility of an English translation of the French Commentary. (...)
It must be emphasized because it has been often misreported that Tolkien in particular, although he learned some elementary Hebrew to consult the original text of Jonah, based his translation upon the French text. Jones defended this unorthodox plan in a letter to Tolkien dated 7 March 1957:
That a translator is at a disadvantage when he has no immediate contact with the originals is a sad truth and I do feel that I am asking too much of all the gallant co-operators. But these disadvantages are comfortably outweighed – or so it seems to me – by the difficulties of any other course. Thus, very few who read Hebrew can write English; of these, fewer still are Catholics; of these fewer few still fewer will attempt it – the Westminster Version from the originals is not nearly half-done (and never will be finished) after thirty years! Secondly, the work of translation from the Hebrew would have to be preceded by an enormous amount of textual criticism for which our few Catholic Scripture scholars in England have not the equipment (not having a theological university is an immense drawback – we are all hacks in seminaries). And so on. So don’t be discouraged. I’m sure it’s work very well worth while. As you know, we are not trying to oust any existing version; we just want to provide a good, reliable alternative. The ultimate issue is in God’s future.
(...) Tolkien’s draft translations of Jonah are preserved in manuscript and typescript in the Bodleian Library. A large amount of editorial intervention separates these from the final version printed in the Jerusalem Bible. Still, the changes were made in consultation with Tolkien, and the printed text represents his work. In the first instance, Alexander Jones offered criticism and suggestions, often highlighting where the French version had departed from the Hebrew, indicating that Tolkien was free to follow either. Later on, according to Anthony Kenny, the publishers engaged two literary editors, one for the Old Testament, and one for the New (the Old Testament editor, responsible for Jonah, was Alan Neame, a Roman Catholic novelist). These editors were in charge of improving and regularizing the style of the various contributions into a coherent whole. Jones later asked Tolkien to serve in a similar capacity, and mentions (in a letter dated 26 January 1957) that he had sent him a copy of the translation of Job. (What became of this we do not know.)
A certain number of key changes between Tolkien’s typescript in the Bodleian and the printed text are identifiable as part of the regularization of the Jerusalem Bible. For example, while Tolkien translated the French ‘Lève-toi’ in 1:2 and 3:2 as ‘Arise’, this common Hebrew imperative (qum) has been rendered ‘Up!’ throughout the Old Testament. Other changes eliminate excessive Gallicism: the beginning of Jonah’s psalm of salvation in 2:3 was originally translated, ‘Out of the affliction in which I was I called upon Yahweh’, an awkward formulation subsequently improved to ‘Out of my distress I called to Yahweh.’
Tolkien took special care over the name of the plant that shades Jonah in chapter 4, copying out the entry for ‘castor’ in the OED, exchanging notes with Jones on the subject, and ultimately opting for ‘colocynth’. Nevertheless, the reviser replaced this word with ‘castor oil plant’.
Although Tolkien translated Jonah’s psalm (2:3-10) into stanzas, dividing the verses into three to five lines, he did not attempt any poetic embellishment even as slight as in his earlier effort with Isaiah. The line division appears intended to indicate pauses in speaking aloud, and does not follow any syntactic or metrical structure. Indeed, there is nothing especially distinctive about the translation as a whole, and one would be hard pressed to link it to the author of The Lord of the Rings or the verse translator of Gawain and the Green Knight.
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https://www.jstor.org/stable/48616119)
