Reviews

Enthralling.
—George Steiner, The New Yorker

An extraordinary poetic achievement. I will keep it next to my Bible on my bedside table.
—Oliver Sacks

The thoughtful reading of this astonishing translation has been for me a rare experience combining poetry and enlightenment.
—Erik H. Erikson

Stephen Mitchell’s Book of Job is a very forceful and direct translation, and conveys very well the vigor of both language and thought in the original. The unobtrusive but thorough and conscientious scholarship also makes the book extremely valuable.
—Northrop Frye

Stephen Mitchell’s version of Job succeeds in conveying a rush, a momentum, that are insistent, at times awesome, and often the bearers of a new insight into the meaning and power of the unique original. A fresh current and pace, throughout, and here and there a new (perhaps ageless) immanence.
—W. S. Merwin

Stephen Mitchell has succeeded in making a splendid English poem ou t of the Hebrew of Job. I find myself simply amazed at how he has managed to create equivalents for the terrific muscularity and immediacy of the original — something that no previous translation has done, including the King James version, with all its fine old grandiloquence. I would add that as a work of painstaking yet imaginative Hebrew philology the translation is equally impressive.
—Robert Alter

Mr. Mitchell has done a magnificent job of turning a majestic but confusing masterpiece into a marvelous poem which has point, lucidity, drama, and power. Only by reading it along with the translation we have all been brought up on does one realize the full measure of his achievement: I was never aware of just how incomprehensible many of the verses in the King James version are, and I am dazzled by Mr. Mitchell’s ability to compress and clarify without either distorting or trivializing. Many of the verses now have meaning as well as music. And the contemporary idiom works, sometimes with shocking and brilliant effects. This is, in all, an important original work of art, as well as a scrupulous and erudite translation, and it deserves the widest possible public.
—Joel Conarroe

If Mr. Mitchell gives an eloquent account of the effects of Job’s poetry in his introduction, in the translation itself he does even better: he makes those effects come alive. Writing with three insistent beats to the line, and hammering home a succession of boldly defined images, he achieves a rare degree of vehemence and concentration.
—John Gross, The New York Times

Here at last is the text for all who wish to read and teach one of the greatest of all poems in a version that captures the vigor and intensity of the Hebrew. Even those who cherish the King James version will welcome the clarity and force of Mitchell’s text, the driving rhythmic energy of the poetry: this is now a great English poem. Moreover, there is an exemplary Introduction, a deliciously written essay on the significance of the poem for our time; it alone is worth the price of the book.... We need the scholars to point out the radical and endearing details. We need the poets to renew our own literary inheritance. Scholar-poet Stephen Mitchell has put us all in his debt.
— The Beloit Poetry Journal

Stephen Mitchell’s splendid new translation is so strong and vigorous that it would be possible to praise it by saying it seems wholly original.
—Rachel Hadas, The Threepenny Review

Mitchell’s translation is magnificent poetry, an outstanding recreation of a terrifying and inspiriting story that is thousands of years old.
—The Bloomsbury Review

Where the text is intrinsically moral, criticism becomes a moral act. Stephen Mitchell’s superb translation of The Book of Job is moral in just this way — it puts us on the closest terms with the Old Testament book that many commentators regard as the crucial post-Holocaust parable.
—David Lehman, Newsweek