“How lonely lies the city”
How lonely lies the city, once so full of people! She who was great among the nations has become a widow. The princess of the provinces has become a slave. (Lamentations 1:1 BSB)
What it sounds like today
A sad but ordinary opening line about an emptied city.
The cultural key
Two features vanish in English. First, the opening word, 'How' (Ekah), is not a casual exclamation but the formal cry that begins a Hebrew funeral lament, the sound a mourner made over the dead; the book is actually named Ekah, 'How!', in Hebrew, announcing itself as a dirge from its first syllable. Second, the poem is a strict alphabetic acrostic: each of the twenty-two verses of chapter 1 begins with a successive letter of the Hebrew alphabet (chapter 3 does it three times over). That form is doing what the translation cannot show: it voices grief 'from aleph to tav,' from A to Z, complete and exhaustive, while its tight, ordered structure holds unbearable sorrow within disciplined banks so it does not dissolve into chaos. And the city is personified as a woman fallen from princess to widow to slave. The English reader hears a sad line; the Hebrew reader heard a controlled, total, alphabetized wail.
Recovered meaning
The book opens with Ekah, 'How!', the ritual cry of a funeral dirge and the book's Hebrew title, and each chapter is an alphabetic acrostic voicing grief from A to Z. The form itself, ordered and complete, carries a sorrow the plain English cannot convey.