Spiritual Songs and Lamentations

Many English poets have translated Psalms, but surprisingly few have translated other parts of the Bible. This collection includes John Donne's outstanding translation of the book of Lamentations, together with versions of all the other songs in the Hebrew Bible and some other Biblical prayers, translated in the same era by Michael Drayton and George Sandys: the Song of Songs, the songs of Moses, Deborah, and Habakkuk, the prayers of Hannah, Jonah, and Hezekiah, and passages of Isaiah. Simple yet stylish, utterly personal without being idiosyncratic, these renderings have qualities that no standard prose Bible can match.