English translation of the Missal RAYMOND G. HELMICK
‘Opaque and clumsy’
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
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ext year, we are due to have a major change in the way that English-speaking Catholics expe- rience 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 per-
fect, 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 cen- tre on any further translations. All the same, I remain very conscious of a number of prin- ciples 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
FARM STREET, MAYFAIR JESUIT CHURCH
Sunday 7 November 2010 Mass Times: Vigil: Saturday 6pm
Sunday: 8am, 9.30am (Family Mass), 11am (sung Latin), Fauré, Duruflé, Vierne 12.30pm, 4.15pm, 6.15pm
www.farmstreet.org.uk 10 | THE TABLET | 6 November 2010
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 incom- prehensibility, 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 trans- lations. I’m glad to see us responding again “And with your spirit”. In the Gloria transla- tion, 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 com- munal 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 inade- quate 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 every- thing should be the most literal possible cognate of the Latin. Defences of the trans- lation 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 dis- tinctly 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 never- theless 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 fifth- century 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
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