In Chad, around 2004, a room of Bible translators was told what was coming next. They had worked through narrative books, the straightforward prose. Now they were going to translate the Psalms — and the Proverbs after that. They had brought in a professor who knew the poetic books well for a three-week workshop on the Psalms alone.

Several of the translators had an objection ready, and it was blunt: we don’t have poetry. Not that it would be hard to translate. That it didn’t exist — that their own languages had no such thing.

The professor didn’t argue the point. He set them an exercise instead. Go and record the traditional songs. The songs people already sang — at funerals, in the fields, at celebrations — and then take them apart. Lay out the whole structure. Name every component.

So they did. And what came back undid the objection completely. The paired lines, the repetitions, the patterns of sound and sense: every characteristic they were about to study in the Hebrew psalms was already sitting inside the songs they had grown up hearing. As Tchande Awakde, now a translation consultant, remembers it: “We realized that our songs in Africa were not far from the psalms. We found all the characteristics of the psalms in our songs.”

Only then did they begin — translating not as flattened prose, the way poetry dies in translation, but as poetry answering to poetry.

Tchande tells this story now as a translation consultant himself, reflecting on the workshops Scriptura runs today. Twenty years on, the discovery he describes is the one those workshops are built to reach: before a psalm can be carried into a language, the translators have to find the poetry already living there.