The woman now quotes something the young man says to her. We open quotation marks here and close them again after verse 15. As this is quoted speech, it may help to add a marginal note to identify the young man as the speaker. Note, however, that Good News Translation presents the material differently, indicating the man as the speaker. Styles of reporting speech vary greatly from one language to another. There are also different ways of indicating speakers in a print layout. The translator will have to decide on the method that is most suitable to report speech.

My beloved: see comments on 1.13.

Speaks and says is a good Hebrew idiom introducing quoted material. Especially in Africa, many languages have a similar idiom, with one phrase designating the action and another opening the quote: “he said; he says.” However, in languages where this is redundant, we can simply say “My lover said to me.”

Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away: this request from the young man is repeated in verse 13, forming an inclusio or bracket around this short speech. The opening imperative, Arise, is an interesting verb in Hebrew. It basically means to get up from a sitting or lying position, hence “stand up.” However, when used together with verbs of movement it usually means little more than beginning the action described in the main verb. In these cases it may not always be necessary to translate it literally. Here it corresponds to English “Come [away],” or possibly to the colloquial “Come on.” It is interesting that in many African languages the verb “arise” has a similar use, and if this is the case, this phrase can be translated literally. In many languages, however, to do so will result in an unnatural translation. Arise can be replaced by an equivalent expression. We can say “Come away…,” or with insistence, “Come, come away [with me].”

The two imperatives in this verse, arise and come, are followed by a curious expression “to [or, according to] you.” Grammarians see the Hebrew preposition l- as identifying the person addressed: “arise, namely you”; “come, you”; but generally it can be left untranslated. However, a word like “Please” can express the meaning behind this expression: “Please, come away [with me].”

My fair one is a noun derived from the adjective “beautiful” (see 1.15). In English fair can mean “light of skin color,” but here it means “beautiful.” Note that this form of address can appear at the beginning of the sentence, if that order is preferred in the translator’s language.

The adverb away in the phrase come away is supplied from the context. The young woman is inside the house; her lover calls her to go outside to join him, presumably in the fields where they can be alone. In many languages it will be necessary to make clear that the man wants her to come with him, so we will have to say “Come with me.”

Translation possibilities are:

• My beloved calls me and says, “Come, my love, my beautiful one.”

• My lover calls out, “Come with me, my love; come, my beautiful one.”

Good News Translation has kept the chiastic structure and is quite a good model:

• “Come then, my love.
My darling, come with me.”

Another possibility is to use a repetitive parallel structure:

• My lover calls:
“Come with me, my love,
Come, my beautiful one.”

Quoted with permission from Ogden, Graham S. and Zogbo, Lynell. A Handbook on the Book of Song of Songs. (UBS Helps for Translators). New York: UBS, 1998. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .