English translation of the Missal
It is 10 years since Pope John Paul II called for a revised English translation of the Roman Missal. But as anglophone Catholics prepare for its introduction there is grave disquiet about its rendering of a usable and sacred vernacular, as one of those involved in the 1960s translation explains
Next year, we are due to have a
major change in the way that
English-speaking Catholics experience
the Liturgy of the Mass.
New translations of the ordinary parts and
the Eucharistic Prayers have been prepared,
largely at the instigation of the Holy See and
its Congregation for Divine Worship and the
Discipline of the Sacraments.
Both the English versions of the 1960s and
these new ones have come in for criticism. I
happen to approach the change as one of the
group who prepared the translations we have
used these last 40 years and more, and must
say first that it has been a joy for me to hear
these prayers in the words that I had so much
to do with. I read these new translations with
a great deal of reservation, which I will try to
explain in this article.
What we did back in the 1960s was not perfect,
of course. After it had gone through
several revisions, I wrote to the rest of the
group about the First Eucharistic Prayer (it
was the only one then, hence “The Roman
Canon”), which I felt was rather like the camel
– the horse designed by a committee– and
that we needed to have more unity at the centre
on any further translations. All the same,
I remain very conscious of a number of principles
we followed that I think were important,
and that have been quite deliberately dis -
regarded now.
Among the 10 of us who did that translation,
I was particularly insistent that the English
should be the English we actually speak. In
that, I was supporting the principal translator,
Edward Harold, a most extraordinary critical
linguist who did the heaviest lifting on the
project. Fr Fred McManus had invited me to
take part, because of the work I was doing
then on liturgical chant, which involved a lot
of sensitivity to the language. My contention
was that to address God in language that was
either archaic or artificial was to assert that
the one addressed was not real.
That is my basic concern. I fear that this new
translation, often clumsy to the point of incomprehensibility,
is going to alienate our Catholic
people still more than the current turmoil has
already done, discouraging Mass participation
by making the language opaque. Even now,
despite this latest translation having been given
official approval, or recognitio, it appears that
there have since been yet more changes, with,
as Alan Griffiths warned in his letter in last
week’s Tablet, incorrect English and a lack of
understanding of English grammar.
There are things that I like in the new translations.
I’m glad to see us responding again
“And with your spirit”. In the Gloria translation,
I was happy to see that the triple formula,
qui tollis … , qui tollis … , qui sedes … , was
restored, as it was a bad idea to condense it
in the first place. I thought the changes in the
new Creed translation rather unhelpful – “I”
form rather than “We” form for what is a communal
profession of faith, the loss of the
articulation offered by the repeat “We/I
believe” before Son, Holy Spirit and the articles
at the end of the formula. But I thought the
substitution of “consubstantial” for “one in
Being” truly egregious. We are translating
Greek and not Latin in the Creed, and the
Latin consubstantialem is already an inadequate
translation of homoousios, whereas
“One in Being” translates it better than any
Latin term. “Consubstantial”, in English, is
without any meaning that can be deciphered
without elaborate exegesis.
And there, exactly, is the central problem:
the edict laid down by the Romans that everything
should be the most literal possible
cognate of the Latin. Defences of the translation
that I have read try to make it a virtue
that the language is not the English we speak,
but somehow “elevated”. I think the translators
have run right into the critical problem we
were all so aware of in the 1960s – that artificial
language says “God is not real”.
I was in sympathy then with people in the
Anglican tradition who had been using the
centuries-old language of the Book of
Common Prayer, because they had grown up
with that language as their way of prayer. It
was therefore right for them, but the archaic
language, based on it, that we Catholics used
to have in the parallel-text missals was distinctly
not for us.
At one stage, we were given the proposition
that we should do a fresh translation of the
Lord’s Prayer, and I refused personally to have
anything to do with it because we already
know the “Our Father” and have used it all
our lives. When that translation was nevertheless
produced, our Catholic bishops in the
United States had the good sense to reject it.
Anglicans and some of the other Churches,
following our work closely, did adopt it, and
hated it so much that they quickly got rid of
it. But the Anglican and Episcopal Churches
liked our translations so well that they soon
initiated alternative formulas closely parallel
to ours.
The problem is most acute in the Roman
Canon – First Eucharistic Prayer – where the
Latin is of a very early century and contains
many conventional usages, fine in their own
historical context, that do not concur with
anything in contemporary English. One such
glaring usage is the constant employment of
non-limiting adjectives in this fourth- or fifthcentury
Latin, which the new translation tries
to duplicate slavishly, often with ridiculous
effect, but there are many other instances as
well. The other Eucharist Prayers are Latin
compositions of a more contemporary period
and therefore more cognate to our modern
languages.
Much as I was disinclined in the 1960s to
change things that had acquired traditional
meaning in people’s actual life of prayer, such
as the Book of Common Prayer to its own
users, or the “Our Father”, I don’t like to see
simple tinkering with what have become
familiar formulas. That happens, to my mind,
in the very trivial changes made to the prayers
around the Preparation of the Gifts. These
are needless, and only things for tongues to
trip on. I do realise that, beyond inadequacies
in our earlier translation, our language has
changed in the last 40 years. We have become
sensitive, for one thing, to inclusive language
(something the Romans never want to hear
of), which was not an issue then, and there
are more subtle differences.
I don’t want to be obstructive and argue
against making reasonable changes. But once
into the Eucharistic Prayers, the translation
we are offered goes off the tracks into gibberish
right from the start, with “To you, therefore
… ” for Te igitur … . Syntactically, this is not
English, but Latin using English words.
Immediately following this, we come to a first
crop of non-limiting adjectives. Mention of
these may be unfamiliar simply for the reason
that we very seldom use them in English and
may not recognise them as such when we do.
An adjective modifies its noun: it gives more
information about the referent, the thing
named. A chair may be a wooden chair, an
upholstered chair. The adjective thus limits
the meaning of the noun. Non-wooden chairs,
or non-upholstered chairs are excluded. But
we can use adjectives in a way that makes no
such modification, but simply decorates the
noun. A common instance would be the epistolary
“dear.” We open a letter with “Dear Mr
X”. This makes no assertion that we like Mr
X or that he is truly dear to us. It is simply a
conventional phrase. It says nothing more
than that “This is a letter”.
Other non-limiting adjectives are rare in
English. One is to reduce the subject to the
mythical or the fairy tale: “Brave Tarzan”;
“faithful Cheeta”. Or if used of an historical
person, it gives an aura of the unreal, the
unbelievable, the legendary: “Ivan the
Terrible”; “Peter the Great”; “Good Pope John”.
This usage is purely conventional, having no
more meaning than the epistolary “Dear …”.
There is only one other usage in the English
we actually speak. That is to identify the user’s
peer-group identity. Adolescent girls, in the
1960s, sprinkled their conversation with
“dear”, “sweet”, “adorable” and other like adjectives.
A boy could be “adorable”. So could a
motor accident. The adjective did not mean
anything to do with adoration, sweetness or
affection. It merely identified the peer group:
we are girls talking to one another. Perhaps
in our own time, girls are more likely to imitate
the boys of the same age who ornament conversation
among their peer group with all the
four-letter words.
And with that we have exhausted the contemporary
English usage of non-limiting
adjectives. So how are we to deal with the
constant flow of sancta, venerabilis, gloriosa,
benedicta, praeclara adjectives hung on the
nouns of this fourth-century Latin, often in
pairs: sanctas ac venerabiles manus suas?
Our conclusion in the 1960s was that they
could not stand in an English translation of
these prayers without essentially distorting
the meaning. Faithful translation of the meaning
of the prayers must mean eliminating
them as a distorting foreign and archaic usage.
Far from “elevating” the language, slavish
inclusion of them in our own language
deprives it of reverence.
Another pervasive usage in the quite beautiful
Latin of this early epoch is the reference
to servants. Nos servi tui. The reference is
quite biblical, as so many of the New
Testament parables speak of the servi, douloi
in the Greek original, and their relation to
their master. We need to understand that the
term does not mean “servant” in any sense
we would use, but always “slave”. Modern
translations of the Gospels normally recognise
this. The master sends his slaves out to invite
the guests to his supper, and that is quite
appropriate for the time and place.
The social situation it supposes is that of
the latifundium, the large landed estate with
its house slaves and its field slaves. All of these
made up the family of the master. All his slaves
were valuable property. He might be angry
with them, or punish them, but he always
cared for them. They would not be cast off or
be unforgiven. The relation was essentially
personal, not at all like the cold and uncaredfor
status of the denizens of the Soviet
collective farm. The slave could rely on his or
her master.
This is a situation of the past (including
the New Testament past), one that, if it exists
anywhere today, is only in remote parts of
Pakistan. “The servant”, in our time, a less
and less frequent figure in our experience, is
the maid who comes in once or twice a week
to clean the house, in no way an intuitive
modelling of our relation to God. Prayer of
the fourth century, like that of New Testament
times, could understand our position before
God in those terms. In our time it cannot.
I give only these few illustrations of guiding
principles that have to be recognised if we are
to have a faithful translation of our most
important prayers. None of this has been done
in the preparation of these new translations
of the ordinary parts and Eucharistic Prayers
of the Mass. The situation is not so drastic
with the newly written Eucharistic Prayers
II, III and IV, as they are composed in a Latin
more compatible with our modern linguistic
sensibilities.
We have been presented with a drastically
botched job, botched basically because the
Romans, people of goodwill whose language
is not English, insistent on literal cognates of
the Latin forms, have imposed an ill-chosen
criterion. I wish this could be said more
politely. I don’t feel, as one who seriously
thought through these matters of liturgical
language in crafting, all those years ago, the
versions we have been using, that I can responsibly
let that pass unchallenged.
Our Catholic people have been presented,
in recent years, with a series of shocks that
have profoundly disorientated, disillusioned
and disappointed them about our Church.
Making the language of liturgy opaque will
be one more reason for them to stay away.
■Raymond G. Helmick SJ is based in the
Department of Theology, Boston College,
Massachusetts, USA.