Reading through different eyes, praying in strange tongues

I recently purchased the First Nations Version, an English translation done by and for First Nations people in North America. It's a thoroughly disorienting translation for me, because it is so far from the usual run of English translations and it's not written for me at all. It transports me to a different world, one in which Creator Sets Free (Jesus) talks about the spirit-realm, the Creator Spirit, and our bad hearts and broken ways. If your gut reaction is to condemn this as syncretism, I encourage you to read the translation's preface and think again.

One of the things about the Scriptures, and language (& culture) is that I think two impulses ought to be operating, in opposite directions. At the same time, good bible translation should also carry us in that same direction, it ought to make that which is so foreign become domestic for us, to see and feel the rhythms of our own time, culture, place, and language. An English translation should genuinely feel like it was authored by a contemporary speaker and writer of English. The FNV does this, except it's not my English, and it's not trying to speak to my world. It's speaking to First Nations peoples of Turtle Island, many of whom have had their languages suppressed or killed by colonisers. I read the Scriptures afresh through their eyes, and it brings a new taste of life to me.

In the other direction the Bible is very foreign. We are entering the language and thought and culture of ancient Israelites, of first century Jews, of Greek-speaking subjects of the Roman empire, etc., and their world and their ways are very, very different to ours. One of the dangers, then, of Bible translation(s) is that we lose that foreignness, and we assimilate the texts too much to our own culture and ways of thinking and being, so that we lose the 'taste' of foreignness that these texts should carry with us.

It's harder to do this in an (english) translation, to be honest. Simply reading the NASB and being subject to a translation so hyper-concerned with syntactical fidelity is alienating, but not because it gets you any close to the foreign world we are speaking of! Personally, this bridge is crossed mostly by reading in Greek. When I open the scriptures in Greek, I find myself swimming in a different thought-world. This is even more so when I open up the Septuagint, which is both so familiar and so strange.

I only came upon the FNV by accident, I was searching for other things. Aware that it is also fitting for me to try to hear Scripture with more Australian influences, I have been reading the Plain English Version and listening to the Kriol version, via the Australian Bibles app. I don't speak Kriol, but listening to it gives me a decent chance at understanding.

What's the point of all this? I think there's a danger that we become stale in reading and hearing the Scriptures. That the text becomes so personally domesticated to us, we don't feel its force, we lose its nuance, we miss how simultaneously close to us and far from us it is.

It also infiltrates my thoughts and prayers. My vocabulary for crying out to God is enriched when I call upon him as my βοηθός, καταφυγή, and ἀντιλήμπτωρ. My evening prayers take a different tone when I ask Creator-Sets-Free to fix my bad heart and set right my wrong ways. The world, both out there but also the interior life of my soul, is enriched by reading with different eyes, seeing things I never would by myself, and this flows forth when I pray in other tongues.