"9The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun. 10Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us."
Ecclesiastes 1:9-10
One of the things I'm beginning to love about the King James Bible is its stubborn determination to preserve every last grammatical artifact of the original Hebrew. Ecclesiastes is a book of poetry. To translate the first two phrases as "What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again" as the NIV did kills the parallelism and shifts tenses about.
I translated this passage a couple weeks ago for a class, but I was in a hurry and didn't really have time to appreciate the opening chapter of Ecclesiastes. I think my translation ran something along the lines of:
"Anything that was, it will be; and anything that is done, it will be done. There's nothing new under the sun.
It is said: 'See, this is new.' But it already was in ancient times, which were before us."
But even this hides the poetry of the verse, and moreover the translation is stuffy and long-winded. The only way it could be worse is if I replaced the "It is said:" with what is literally written: "There is a phrase that is said"! There's really no way to bring all the repetition and parallelism of the original verse into English without making it sound ugly.
They say, "All translators are traitors." And it's true. There's a common misconception among people, mostly monolingual people, that all that's involved in a translation is a mapping from one word to another. If it's true, though, that there's nothing new under the sun, then surely we can find some perfect word to translate each word in the Bible in its proper meaning. Maybe God has a copy of the One English Bible on his shelf next to THE BOOK. But of course we'll never see those pages, so like the verse says all we can do is echo the bad translations of the past.
These lines of Ecclesiastes are in the middle of the opening words of the preacher (from which Ecclesiastes gets its title; in Hebrew, Qohelet, from qahal "to assemble"). Ecclesiastes 1:2-11 are perhaps the most depressing verses I've read in the Bible to date (though to be fair, I haven't read much of it). Not even the worst translation could ruin the alliteration and assonance of "Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity" (Ecc 1:2).
Ecc 1:3-8 is the most disturbing depiction of determinism I've read since Fichte's The Vocation of Man; the sun, the wind and the rivers, are all described as being locked into this eternal cycle of rising and setting, blowing north and blowing south, and so on. Finally we come to Ecc 1:9-10, which says that not only is humanity locked into this same cycle, there is nothing that can be done to change it. Moreover, as Ecc 1:11 continues, we can't be satisfied living in a world where everything's been done because we can't remember that everything's been done, so we're constantly redoing it.
What a horrible, grief-stricken, heart-rending verse. There's nothing new under the sun; history is without progress, humanity is without purpose. | 
