The Guardian: leer schrijven met de bijbel

Hoe groot is de invloed van de bijbel op het taalgebruik van schrijvers? Groot, volgens The Guardian. In een artikelreeks interviewt de krant een groot aantal auteurs over de invloed van The King James Bible (de Engelse Statenvertaling, zogezegd) op hun eigen taal en werk. Alexander McCall Smith: "It is a book of great poetic power, and for centuries it was one of our culture's greatest assets. It still is." En Jeanette Winterson: "As every poet knows, words begin in the mouth before they hit the page, and it is our experience of learning language. The King James karaoke nights, common to households where long familiarity with the stories meant that everyone joined in the refrains, built a confidence with language that the educated classes prefer to imagine as their own." Voor de Jamaicaanse dichter Linton Kwesi Johnson was de bijbel niet alleen een bron van vreugde, maar ook van onderdrukking: "This book, a most effective tool of colonisation, was the only one in my illiterate grandmother's house when I was a child in Jamaica. She would have me read it to her from time to time, and I got to like the language of the Old Testament and the Psalms in particular, her favourite book. That was my first real introduction to written verse. I was seven years old and could recite some Psalms from memory, having learnt them at Sunday school in the Baptist church of which my grandmother was a member. So it's not at all surprising that my verse has some biblical references."