Literary critic James Wood has written a long and laudatory review of Biblical scholar and Hebrew Studies professor Robert Alter’s new translation of The Book of Psalms for The New Yorker, his new home. An excerpt:

Robert Alter’s new translation, The Book of Psalms, is radical, at least to a reader brought up on the early-seventeenth-century King James Version. Alter has previously translated a good portion of the Old Testament: the five books of Moses (the Pentateuch, or Torah) and the two books of Samuel. His work has been characterized by eloquence, scholarly scrupulousness, and a desire to convey in English the concrete ferocity of the original Hebrew. He is particularly alive to formal aspects of ancient Hebrew poetry and prose such as repetition, internal rhythm, and parallelism (in which a phrase amplifies and almost repeats a preceding phrase, as in “He shall come down like rain upon the mown grass: as showers that water the earth,” from Psalm 72). Because the Psalms are poems, he wants to preserve in English what he calls the “rhythmic compactness” of the originals, “something one could scarcely guess from the existing English versions.” His helpful introduction is more polemical than the exegeses he has provided for his other translations: he argues that even the King James translators, whom he, like everyone else, has always admired, pad out their versions with filler.

Related: Listen to a recent Nextbook podcast with Robert Alter.