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 epis- tolary “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 adjec- tives. 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 con- versation among their peer group with all the four-letter words. And with that we have exhausted the con- temporary 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 mean- ing 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 beau-


tiful 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 uncared- for 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 respon- sibly 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.


6 November 2010 | THE TABLET | 11


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