BookEnds: Pinsky Breathes Life Into Israelite King

True “Simpsons” fans know exactly who Robert Pinsky is.

They remember when Lisa, posing as an undersized college student, sneaks out on a school night to one of Pinsky’s coffee house poetry readings, where chest-painted frat guys shout “Bashô!” and “Banana tree!” along with the poet’s work “Impossible to Tell.”

But Pinsky—who will be doing a similar reading this evening at the Harvard Hillel—also has a more academic following. Many critics consider the Boston University professor as important a modern American poet as William Carlos Williams, and in 1997, the Library of Congress selected Pinsky to be the nation’s ninth poet laureate. His translation of “The Inferno of Dante” also won awards from the L.A. Times and the Academy of American Poets.

With his latest work, “The Life of David,” Pinsky chronicles the entire life of the Old Testament’s David—the “Light of Israel” who bested Goliath, conquered his mentor Saul to become king, battled his son Absalom for power, and envisioned the city of Jerusalem. The author’s carefully-constructed prose takes the remoteness of the biblical tale and turns it into accessible drama; even when using prose, Pinsky operates with the grace of a poet.

Biographies based on religious scripture, no matter how eloquent, aren’t exactly beach reading, and “David” is no exception. Still, Pinsky adds enough modern-day points of reference to keep the story accessible. When David bargains with Saul about marrying the latter’s daughter, it’s “like something from the ‘Godfather’ movies or ‘The Sopranos.’” When one of David’s opponents finds a spear driven through his stomach, he’s “like a Kurosawa samurai.” When David wages war from Caanan’s outskirts, he’s “like a warlord, or a guerilla.”

These anachronisms do more than just entertain. Rather than portraying David as a monument to Jewish leadership—as Pinsky says Talmudic scholars who “need their king” do—the book shows him for what he was: a real person, with as many sides to his character as anyone living today.

If the book shows anything, then, it’s that David was no monochrome saint. In a matter of pages, David raids the townships of his own people, kills the inhabitants to avoid culpability, then writes a beautiful, passionate elegy to Saul’s family. Later, he impregnates a woman named Bathsheba, then tries to disown the child by calling the woman’s husband from the battlefield and getting the two to “lie together.” When the husband refuses, David sends him to the battlefront, “that he may be smitten, and die.”

Even David’s faith is bizarrely pragmatic. When another of his children falls ill, David refuses to eat and prays for a week straight, yet at news of the child’s death, David heads right inside for a meal. The king offers his puzzled servants the curt explanation, “I shall go to [my son], but he shall not return to me.” The more we see of Israel’s fabled king, the less of him we understand.

Like anyone throughout the ages, David has more than one side. Pinsky points out the singular importance of seeing his protagonist at every age, because “in his faults and attainments, his losses and victories, [he] embodies on a scale almost beyond imagining the action of living a life.” David and the scripture that he occupies are keys to modern religious life, yet each of them defies easy labels. Like faith itself, what you see in each of them—ideas of good and bad, of pious and heretic—is a matter of how you choose to look. Each reader, like a worshipper, can find his or her own message in the religious tale.

Even if the reader is only an 8-year-old cartoon.

Robert Pinsky will be discussing “The Life of David” at the Harvard Hillel at 52 Mount Auburn St., Cambridge tonight, Oct. 6, at 6:30 p.m.