Southern Comfort wrote:It has already been stated many times that perhaps this is the underlying Roman agenda - to put people in a situation where returning to Latin if the English is unusable is seen as a better option. Hmmm.
SC, please understand that if I suggest you beware paranoia I'm not flaming you, merely offering useful advice.
It would be far better to address the points I made in direct response to your comments on the new translation.
I'm not overly concerned about the translations of the Mass Ordinary but it's a different thing entirely when it comes to the Proper of the Mass. Much of what we currently call a translation is just a paraphrase. I suspect that there are some who dislike the new translations of the Collect for example because they return the English speaking Church to a relationship with God that they have never known (I'm thinking of the deference, the kinds of thing that Cranmer would render as ...for we can do no good thing without thee...etc) and yet which have remained unchanged in the Latin prayers of the Church and certainly were not expunged at V II. Our perception of the post-Vat II Chirch has been largely coloured by these paraphrases. If you have access to the Latin look at the prayers for the Blessing of the Ashes on Ash Wednesday - I find it hard to believe that there was no subtext to the ideas that were left out of our translations.
Does the liturgy of the Church need to be instantly accessable? There were plenty of things that Jesus could have diluted had he so wished. Instead he risked offence by talking of people eating his flesh and was even prepared to see the rich young man walk away. Our encounter with God in the Mass needs to have the qualities of a marriage, not a one-night stand.
Reginald wrote:I suspect that there are some who dislike the new translations of the Collect for example because they return the English speaking Church to a relationship with God that they have never known (I'm thinking of the deference ... Does the liturgy of the Church need to be instantly accessable? ... Our encounter with God in the Mass needs to have the qualities of a marriage, not a one-night stand.
How would this feel as a rough translation of the Lord's Prayer: Graciously deign, O benign and paternal ruler of the heavenly kingdom, to grant unto us that bread by which through your munificence we are fed diurnally? Interesting, isn't it, that the language in which our Lord taught us to pray is so different from the courtly language of emperor-worship in which lots of the prayers of the Roman liturgy are framed. The plain speaking of the existing ICEL translations has the merit, to my mind, of cutting through all that courtly deference, and simply speaking to God, in the same spirit as our Lord's example. For sure, the translations we have now are sometimes ungainly, and more than sometimes a little blasé about paraphrase, but that doesn't change the overall appeal of their directness. Does the Lord's prayer really convey the linguistic register of a casual relationship?
johnquinn39 wrote:Does ineffable mean that you are not allowed to use unacceptable language?
Well yes it does. One of the shades of meaning of ineffable is indeed that which must not be spoken - hence Rome's fairly recent instruction on prohibiting the use of that which must not be spoken in the texts of hymns.
mcb wrote:How would this feel as a rough translation of the Lord's Prayer: Graciously deign, O benign and paternal ruler of the heavenly kingdom, to grant unto us that bread by which through your munificence we are fed diurnally? Interesting, isn't it, that the language in which our Lord taught us to pray is so different from the courtly language of emperor-worship in which lots of the prayers of the Roman liturgy are framed. The plain speaking of the existing ICEL translations has the merit, to my mind, of cutting through all that courtly deference, and simply speaking to God, in the same spirit as our Lord's example. For sure, the translations we have now are sometimes ungainly, and more than sometimes a little blasé about paraphrase, but that doesn't change the overall appeal of their directness. Does the Lord's prayer really convey the linguistic register of a casual relationship?
The translation of the Lord's prayer that we use is an interesting example for this discussion. It isn't an ICEL translation. It 's a traditional one, essentially the same as that found in the Book of Common Prayer. It is nothing like mcb's faux-traditional translation. It is, however, defferential in tone and it employs hieratic language, including archaisms such as "art", "hallowed", "thy" and "trespasses". It is a greatly loved public and private prayer, both within the Church and without, and incidentally - pace Alan29 - it works very well with plainsong.
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name; thy kingdom come; thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread; and forgive us our trespasses; as we forgive those who trespass against us; and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
A trifle disingenuous? Give us this day our daily bread is as plain and direct as any prayer could be. There's a difference between archaic and hieratic. By the standards of typical prayers of the Roman Rite, da nobis hodie is shockingly candid.
mcb wrote:A trifle disingenuous? Give us this day our daily bread is as plain and direct as any prayer could be. There's a difference between archaic and hieratic. By the standards of typical prayers of the Roman Rite, da nobis hodie is shockingly candid.
My comments were not even a trifle lacking in candour, mcb. I candidly observed that "art", "hallowed", "thy" and "trespasses" are hardly the stuff of contemporary Engflish. Candidly, we can observe the same of the translation's archaic word order (e.g. "hallowed be thy name"). And while it's true that archaic isn't identical with hieratic, hieratc English, as with many other Languages, employs archaisms of this kind. ICEL's decision to leave the traditional translation of the Pater Noster in place bears witness to the effectiveness of such language, as does the popularity of traditional translations of other religious texts, such as Marian prayers.
The point I was trying to make - unsuccessfully - is that the originals upon which our translations are based are not true to the deferential character that persists in the Latin originals...therefore the Church universal still believes that that is the nature of our relationship with the creator. The fact that the translations may be truer to the style of Christ's own prayer is surely neither here nor there. Your pastiche of the archaised Our Father simply does the reverse of the ICEl translations - at least one of which renders "Almighty and ever-living God" as "Father"
The Gregorian Missal, with the Latin and current ICEL translations is available for download here: http://www.musicasacra.com/communio/ (right hand column, arranged alphabetically). Choose a page and compare. My Latin's only GCSE level so I couldn't do a really good translation but I can see when someone's taken the salad out of my ham sandwich!
I can live without the archaisms, but the dishonesty of the ICEL translations concerns me greatly. I've a copy of the Goodliffe Neale Missal, it seems a shame that it was not more widely used.
It may not be totally irrelevant to point out that the traditional wording of the Lord's Prayer is now only used in the Catholic Church and the higher reaches of the Anglican and Episcopal communion (and some of those use an even more archaic form of words - "which art in heaven", etc). Virtually all other Christian Churches around the world now use a modern-language form of this prayer. (Let's not get into a discussion of the fact that this includes Churches which are growing at a rather faster rate than the Catholic Church...)
Back in the early 1970s it seemed that Catholics, too, might move in this direction, and modern-language sung Our Father texts were even used sporadically at SSG Summer Schools from then on until at least the mid-1980s. The ICEL revised translation of the Missale Romanum which was sent to Rome in 1997 by all the English-speaking Bishops' Conferences of the world included the modern-language version as a legitimate optional alternative to the traditional wording.
However, I think this focus on the Our Father and the texts of the Ordinary of the Mass, as reginald says, is not the main point at issue. The collects, prayers over the gifts, postcommunion prayers, and the Eucharistic Prayers for that matter, are a different case. The ICEL translation of the euchological texts may certainly have been something of a paraphrase, but that's no excuse for reverting to something which has already been described as "robot-speak". It's perfectly possible to have good, decent, non-flowery English along with accuracy of content (but not "transliteration" rather than translation), and once again, that's precisely what the 1997 revision provided.
Reginald wrote:I can live without the archaisms, but the dishonesty of the ICEL translations concerns me greatly. I've a copy of the Goodliffe Neale Missal, it seems a shame that it was not more widely used.
Yes, but that's not the point. Nobody is, or ever was, proposing to retain the current ICEL texts, which were done in a great hurry in the early 1970s. The question is whether the revised version should be in current, if formal, English idiom, or whether it should be festooned with archaic and obsolete words and verb forms for no better reason than that some people seem to think it sounds more 'churchy' that way: an argument which evidently did not appeal to Cramner (perhaps he just couldn't face writing in Chauncerian idiom?)
Yes, but that's not the point. Nobody is, or ever was, proposing to retain the current ICEL texts, which were done in a great hurry in the early 1970s. The question is whether the revised version should be in current, if formal, English idiom, or whether it should be festooned with archaic and obsolete words and verb forms for no better reason than that some people seem to think it sounds more 'churchy' that way: an argument which evidently did not appeal to Cramner (perhaps he just couldn't face writing in Chauncerian idiom?)
