In fact, I’ve recently picked up all three copies of Kenneth Barker’s trilogy on the NIV published in the nineties: The Making of the NIV, The Accuracy of the NIV, and The Balance of the NIV. I don’t know if you have these volumes but having just really discovered them, they are a goldmine of insight into translation in general as well as the historical place of the NIV (a translation I always neglected, but appreciate a bit more now). They’re all out of print but can be picked up cheaply used through Amazon.

Maybe what is framed here as “LE” really does get back to the conceptual roots of DE, but if so, has there ever been a true DE translation?

I’d argue that the notion of DE as “dumbed down”, is not what Nida had in mind at all. Granted they simplified the language of the TEV/GNB which was (is?) touted as a DE translation, but that was to make it accessible to non-native speakers, something not possible at all with a FE translation. In my mind the association of DE with simplification is a mistake.

I’ve always understood that a proper application of DE is not only to be referentially accurate but also to match the “effect” of the passage on the target language speakers to that which the original had on the speakers of the source language. (Sorry about quoting effect, but I don’t want to go through a full discussion of speech act theory to get to talk about illocutionary and perlocutionary force. If you know what all that means, that’s what I intend by “effect”.)

So, yes, Mark should be translated with simple and straightforward language. The letter to Philemon should sound like a personal letter. By having this diversity of literary styles in one translation, we can perhaps come a little closer to understanding the rich range of authorship of the Bible - not just a broad flattening into eighth-grade English.

A literary translation will not be literary in ways that the original is not.

That implies that if the original is not literary at all, a literary translation should not be literary. So I think we have an oxymoron here!

Well, some might argue that the point is moot because the original Bible text is literary. I would deny that of much of the Bible, in any meaningful sense of the word “literary”. The Gospel of Mark, for example, is not literary in style, nor in intent; the only meaningful sense in which it is literary is that it has been considered so by some literary critics, judged as if it were literary and found wanting. Similarly, Paul’s letter to Philemon is not “literary” but a personal letter. So, to use the term “literary translation” for Bible translation seems to imply either the false assumption that the original is literary or, in violation of Lingamish’s principle which I quoted above, an attempt to distort a text which was not originally literary into a translation which is.

In the New Testatment too, and especially in the Epistles, NRSV is apt to translate verse by verse where REB tries harder to render the entire sequence of thought in a passage. 2 Cor. 3 is a particularly fine example. REB is especially notable for its independence of mind in using all available tenses and aspects of the English verb to render Greek and Hebrew, thus producing a far more nuanced translation than NRSV in many places [...] The NRSV, on the other hand, is generally more successful in passages requiring a degree of solemnity, because it can draw on the traditions of the AV. (Barton, p.547)

Also, part of Barton’s conclusion:

[The REB] is a genuinely new version, at its best in rendering argument (the prophets, St Paul) and aphorisms (Proverbs, parts of the synoptics), and weakest where its deliberately modern style is too flat-footed to catch the genius of the original (Psalms, Revelation). (Barton, p.550)

I’ve written before that the REB’s translation of Paul was the first version I’ve read where many of the threads of logic made sense or were at least understandable. The willingness to translate multiple verses into a single unit bears much fruit.

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Indeed it may be that the attempt to translate the whole Bible into a uniformly modern English is doomed to failure from the start, for modern English simply lacks some registers which this enterprise requires. The hardest passages of all to render into ‘modern’ English are those which are consciously archaizing in the original. Thus I cannot believe that the twenty-four elders in Rev. 11: 17 said: ‘O Lord God, sovereign over all, you are and you were; we give you thanks because you have assumed full power and entered upon your reign.’ Such passages require a translation that recalls the Psalms; but of course the Psalms have been accorded the same flattening-out treatment.
One answer would be to employ different registers for different books. No modern translation known to me has ever attempted this, but the convergence of traditional and self-consciously modern versions ought to make it possible. One might get the right impression if one read the NRSV or even the RSV for Psalms and Revelation, and for passages such as Luke 1—2, and the REB for the Pauline epistles. There is little evidence that translation panels pay much attention to questions of register, partly no doubt because their brief is to write in ‘modern’ English and avoid obscurity. The NRSV comes somewhere near it with its note (p. xv) comparing

the more stately English rendering of the Old Testament with the less formal rendering adopted for the New Testament. For example, the traditional distinction between shall and will in English has been retained in the Old Testament as appropriate in rendering a document that embodies what may be termed the classic form of Hebrew, while in the New Testament the abandonment of such distinctions in the usage of the future tense in English reflects the more colloquial nature of the koine Greek used by most New Testament authors except when they are quoting the Old Testament.

This particular distinction is unfortunately now unfamiliar to many English speakers – already in 1901 the Fowlers wrote: ‘It is unfortunate that the idiomatic use, while it comes by nature to southern Englishmen … is so complicated that those who are not to the manner born can hardly acquire it’. But it is a strength of the NRSV that it is aware of such things, and a pity it did not take the matter further. (Barton 548)

ElShaddai