At the risk of totally embarrassing myself in public (if a hardly read website such as this can be considered "public"), I have to admit that from the very beginning I may have been barking up the wrong tree. Although I wrote that I'd found parts of the book on Google Book Search, I'm not completely sure that I was searching for the right book. Why, after all, did I write that "the psalms themselves" weren't available, if what I was looking for was the "Song of Songs"? As I later wrote in my report of my search:
But being up late also caused me to make a few mistakes. Though I at first got to a version of Song of Songs, as I kept looking I hardly noticed that I was reading reviews of Alter's translation of Psalms. The reviews were fascinating, and only after I'd found some snippets of quotes in various reviews and comparisons did I realize that I was looking for Psalm #2, and not Song of Songs #2. (I had to do some translating between Hebrew and English and then said to myself - wait a second, I've got this wrong.)So although I was enjoying learning about Robert Alter's translation of Psalms, I certainly wasn't getting closer to what I was actually looking for. But trying to reconstruct my steps now has still left me a bit confused. Was the reason I didn't find the verses I was looking for because I was looking into the Alter translation of Psalms, and not the Bloch translation of Song of Songs? Perhaps, but I'm not really sure. No preview of the Alter translation of Psalms is presently available on Google Book Search, and probably wasn't a year ago either. So if I'd actually found parts of the book on Google Book Search, "the book" would have been the Bloch translation of Song of Songs. Were the verses I was looking for actually there a year ago as they were when I looked for them now? Probably not, though I don't know why that might have been.