Liturgical Language and Translation: The issues
arising from the revised English translation of the Roman Missal:
Joint Liturgical Studies 77
Thomas O'Loughlin, editor
Hymns Ancient & Modern for Alcuin Club/GROW
£7.95
(978-1-84825-625-5)
Church Times Bookshop £7.15 (Use code
CT823 )
ADVENT 2011 brought the introduction in the English-speaking
world of a new translation of the Roman Missal, after Vatican
guidelines were issued in 2001 which demanded a much more literal
version rather than one adapted to the nuances of the English
language.
One example of the kind of change involved comes in the third
Eucharistic Prayer. Where formerly the celebrant said: "Welcome
into your kingdom our departed brothers and sisters, and all who
have left this world in your friendship," he is now required to
say: "To our departed brothers and sisters and to all who were
pleasing to you at their passing from this life, give kind
admittance to your kingdom" - which implies a rather grudging
interpretation of God's mercy, and which, to my mind, if offered in
an exam, would score no higher than gamma-double-minus-query-minus
(admittedly somewhat better than the epsilon that I once got for a
Greek prose at school).
With remarkably restrained scholarly politeness, the
contributors to this small but valuable symposium dissect the many
shortcomings of what has been imposed on English-speaking Roman
Catholics. The motives behind the shift in policy are succinctly
analysed in the introduction, and successive contributors lay bare
the defects of the kind of translation demanded by Rome.
In essence, what is officially required is a form of English
which reproduces as closely as possible the rather different syntax
of the Latin, a language that delights in subordinate clauses
rather than the much briefer sentences we are used to in English
(and which makes liberal use of conjunctions like "for" which we
find redundant). The result is neither good liturgy nor good
English, and in some cases theologically questionable: Janet E.
Rutherford provides a lucid explanation why, in the consecration of
the wine, the replacement of "for all" by "for many" is
mistaken.
What this slim volume does not examine is why the bishops of the
English-speaking world meekly accepted what was foisted on them by
Rome. When the First Vatican Council defined papal infallibility,
Bismarck mistakenly thought that this meant reducing bishops to
mere lackeys of the papacy. I hope that, nearly a century and a
half later, he is not being proved right.