I have been recently engaged in a project for Liturgy Training Publications: recording all of the presidential chants as given for the new English translation [RM2011] of the third post-Vatican II edition of the Missale Romanum [hereafter MR2008]. I have derived great benefit from chanting these texts aloud, discovering where the solemn and simple tones seem to adorn the English texts naturally and where they offer some challenges. I have been especially surprised by some of the translations of the solemn blessings, a topic I don’t believe has been addressed by the readers of Pray Tell. I offer the following comments with genuine perplexity, hoping that other readers may be able to enlighten me about some of the choices that were made.
My examples appear in the solemn blessing for Advent celebrations. In MR2008 the first paragraph reads: “Omnipotens et misericors Deus, cuius Unigeniti adventum / et praeteritum creditis, et futurum exspectatis, / eiusdem adventus vos illustratione sanctificet / et sua benedictione locupletet.” My slavishly literal translation would read: “May the almighty and merciful God, the initial coming of whose Only-begotten you believe [in] and the future [coming] you await, sanctify you by the enlightenment of his coming and enrich you by his blessing.” The translation in RM2011 is: “May the almighty and merciful God, / by whose grace you have placed your faith / in the First Coming of his Only Begotten Son / and yearn for his coming again / sanctify you by the radiance of Christ’s Advent / and enrich you with his blessing.” I appreciate the use of the term “Advent” to connect this blessing with the season, although I hope the faithful realize that two different words are being used in the English translation to translate one in Latin. I can even understand why the translators might supply “Son” to the term “Only-begotten” and supply “Christ” when the Latin text has the possessive pronoun “his.” But I do not see any word or phrase that corresponds to “by whose grace” in the English translation. There should certainly be a comma after “yearn for his coming again.” The choice to capitalize “First Coming” and “Christ’s Advent,” even thought the underlying Latin keeps these phrases in lower case, might suggest that “coming again” might need special orthographic treatment. In other words, this paragraph as it stands does not seem to follow with precision the prescriptions of Liturgiam Authenticam.
The second paragraph reads: “In praesentis vitae stadio reddat vos in fide stabiles, / spe gaudentes, et in caritate efficaces.” In my opinion RM2011 translates this quite elegantly as: “As you run the race of this present life, / may he make you firm in faith, / joyful in hope and active in charity.” (I confess to taking delight in the alliteration of “run the race”, clichéd though it might be, and “firm in faith.”)
The translation of the third paragraph continues the pattern apparent in the translation of the first paragraph. In MR2008 it reads: “Ut, qui de adventu Redemptoris nostri / secundum carnem devota mente laetamini, / in secundo, cum in maiestate sua venerit, / praemiis aeternae vitae ditemini.” My slavishly literal translation would read: “So that, you who rejoice with devoted mind at the coming of our Redeemer according to the flesh, may be lavished with the rewards of eternal life in the second, when he comes in his majesty.” The translation in RM2011 is: “So that, rejoicing now with devotion / at the Redeemer’s coming in the flesh, / you may be endowed with the rich reward of eternal life / when he comes again in majesty.” I can appreciate the translators’ decisions to omit any reference to devotion of “mind” since “mens” can have such a wide range of meaning, but was somewhat surprised to see no mention that the Redeemer is “ours” (nostri). I can also appreciate the translators’ decision to render “praemiis” as the singular “reward” although it is plural in the Latin, as well as adding the adjective “rich” to reward, possibly to intensify the meaning of “ditemini.” I do think there is something lost when the Latin’s Second Coming (“in secundo”) is rendered simply as “comes again,” though “in majesty” identifies this coming as the Parousia.
But the real confusion for me is that paragraphs two and three form a single thought, yet are split into two presidential texts calling for congregational “Amens.” Paragraph three is an “ut-clause,” specifying the consequences of living “firm in faith, joyful in hope and active in charity” in paragraph two. However, this single thought has been interrupted by an “Amen” before the “ut clause” begins, leading to an apparently redundant “Amen” at the conclusion of paragraph three. Now I know that there are liturgical settings (e.g., the Mozarabic “Lord’s Prayer” with Amens inserted after each clause) where multiple Amens appear as congregational interventions during the course of a text, but this seems different. It seems especially awkward to have the congregation assent to a clause beginning “So that,…” as though it were a complete sentence in English. I look forward to my colleagues at Pray Tell both correcting my Latin translations and explaining what appears to be an odd placement of the congregational Amen.
Well I certainly hope your recordings encourage priests to chant these solemn blessings.
They certainly do not work well when spoken. Rare is the priest who modulates his voice in any manner to clue people as to when to say “Amen.” So often very few people respond, or do not respond in unison. I wonder if priests ever practice these or read them beforehand. One usually gets the impression that they are reading them for the first time.
Perhaps Bishops who really want to throw their weight around as Guardians of the Liturgy could mandate that priests use these prayers and chant them (only for the first year of course).
Let’s throw in the text of the 2008 draft for good measure.
1. The Season of Advent
May the almighty and merciful God,
whose Only-begotten Son’s first coming you welcome in faith
and future coming you await,
make you holy by the radiance of Christ’s Advent
and enrich you with his blessing.
R. Amen.
As you run the race of this present life,
may he make you firm in faith,
joyful in hope
and fruitful in charity.
R. Amen.
May you, who now rejoice with devotion
at our Redeemer’s coming in the flesh,
be enriched with the rewards of eternal life
when he comes again in his glory.
R. Amen.
And may the blessing of almighty God,
the Father, and the Son, + and the Holy Spirit,
descend upon you and remain for ever.
R. Amen.
“rejoice with devotion” “enriched with the rewards of eternal life” — this is the dreck the bishops passed?
“May the almighty and merciful God,
whose Only-begotten Son’s first coming you welcome in faith
and future coming you await,”
This is not English at all!
“whose mother’s first husband you know and second husband look forward to meeting”
“whose father’s ghost you saw and murder you avenged”
“whose teacher’s first lecture you remember and next lecture anticipate”
Gobbledygook!
The three paragraphs before the stereotyped Trinitarian blessing that comprise the solemn blessing for the Passion of the Lord (#5) appear to consist of a single thought. The second paragraph is an “ut clause” indicating the consequences of acting as the first paragraph directs; the third paragraph seems to be a “quatenus clause” functioning as an extension of the “ut clause” of the second paragraph:
RM2011: May God, the Father of mercies, / who has given you an example of love / in the Passion of his Only Begotten Son, / grant that, by serving God and your neighbor, / you may lay hold of the wondrous gift of his blessing.
R. Amen.
So that you may receive the reward of everlasting life from him, / through whose earthly Death / you believe that you escape eternal death.
R. Amen.
And by following the example of his self-abasement, / may you possess a share in his Resurrection.
R. Amen.
Once again the prescriptions of Liturgiam Authenticam seem arbitrarily applied. EITHER both the second AND the third paragraphs should begin with “so that”, “since” (“ut”, “quatenus”), OR both paragraphs should be recast into independent sentences to which the congregation would assent with “Amen.” I don’t understand why paragraph two would be translated “literally” but paragraph three recast. But again I am more than willing to have my understanding of the translation corrected by the other readers of Pray, Tell.
Yet another example of congregational “Amen”s interrupting what appears to be a single thought occurs in the solemn blessing for Ordinary Time IV (#12). Here paragraph two makes a statement and paragraph three consists of a “quatenus clause,” here translated “so that,” not “and,” as in the third paragraph of the solemn blessing for the Passion of the Lord (#5) treated above:
May he free you from every distress / and confirm your hearts in his love.
R. Amen.
So that on this life’s journey / you may be effective in good works, / rich in the gifts of hope, faith and charity, / and may come happily to eternal life.
R. Amen.
As it is presently formulated, I believe paragraph three would be heard by most English speakers not as an independent clause, but as the beginning of a conditional sentence: “So that…you may be effective…YOU SHOULD DO X AND Y.” I do not believe that it naturally evokes the assent of a congregational “Amen.” But again, I am willing to be corrected by my colleagues here at Pray, Tell.
In your first translation, if we ignore the opening “May,” which is a separated verb belonging to the independent clause, you have a five-word subject with 14 words of verbs + prepositional phrases to complete their meaning. Between the subject and verb of this clause, you have 16 words of dependent clause (35/36 words total). In English, lengthy dependent clauses between a main-clause subject and its verb(s) create an annoying delay in getting to the meaning. Also, the person addressed in this sentence seems to shift, from “almighty and merciful God” to “Only-begotten,” who is to “sanctify you . . . and enrich you. . . .” But perhaps it only appears to shift because “his” has an unclear reference. The RM2011 translation (and the 2008) has no confusion about the person addressed, but the reference of its final “his” is still unclear.
Placing the subordinate material up front in the sentence and guessing about pronoun reference,
May you who trust that God’s Only Begotten
came once for our sake and will gloriously return
find grace in this radiant Advent
and bounty in the blessing of almighty and merciful God.
(33 words, 15 between main-clause subject and its completed verb)
I’m too rusty in Latin to offer much help. The RM 2011 English translation troubles me enough to make me want to refurbish my Latin and rewrite the whole turgid translation if time allowed. I wish you the bounteous auxilior of those who are fluent in lingua Latina.
Oh, and Michael Joncas (6/15 9:08) is surely right: the “Amen” consents to a condition, a half-thought, a subordinate clause. And the clause lacks parallel structure . . .
. . . and parallel logic as far as I can tell. Which is closer to the Latin meaning?
“Thus [or so] on this life’s journey
may you be effective in good works,
rich in hope, faith, and charity,
and happy in the promise of eternal life.”
Or
“May you be effective in good works
and rich in hope, faith, and charity
in this life,
and may you come happily to eternal life
thereafter.
Ugh, more superstition. How about if we just scrap “magic blessings” completely instead of using these revolting translations in the first place?
But blessing is a basic human act, deeply enshrined in the Bible. It is a lovely way to express paternal affection.
How are blessings any more superstitious than, say, the Eucharist, or the Resurrection, or baptism, or ordination?
And Fr. Joe, that “paternal affection” is probably part of the problem.
It’s as well to remember the background of these texts. Composed north of the Alps, they lack the characteristic restraint of Roman prayers. Their use was (until 1970) restricted to bishops, and their elaborate style aims to impress. They are full of assonance, alliteration and other rhetorical devices: their sound is more important than their sense. So they are hard to translate since, when you have discovered their meaning, you haven’t discovered much. In this, they are like the Gloria in excelsis, another text originally used only at episcopal liturgies. The current version of the Gloria is much shorter than its original: the new version is longer, not because it has incorporated more semantic content, but because it has followed the rhetorical patterns of the Latin. The importation of the solemn blessings into the 1970 Missal, for use by priests as well as bishops, doesn’t seem to me to have been a good idea, and I have never found them very effective.
How ironic that the genuine faults that Fr Joncas cites result from the translators’ lack of faithfulness to the principles of Liturgiam Authenticam!
Medice, cura te ipsum!
Thanks to Msgr Bruce Harbert for his helpful clarifications about the difficulties in translating the solemn blessings since “their sound is more important than their sense.” (Of course I would never suggest that Msgr. Harbert here offers a principle distinguishing episcopal from presbyteral liturgies, with the former marked by “elaborate style that aims to impress,” whose rhetoric is more important than content :-)!) His insights do raise a profound questions about how (or whether) a translation should attempt to mirror this more orotund style in English. Would doing so “fix” the difficulties of having the congregation assent with “Amen”s to less-than-complete sentences?
It’s very amusing, to me at least, that the one paragraph Father Joncas considers to be “quite elegantly translated by 2011” isn’t translated by them at all. It’s the one section the Vox Clara hatchet-wielders left pretty much alone!
In other words, when 2008 stands as written, it is, in almost every instance, far superior to the emendations of the 7,000 experts, which, sadly, have received the confirmatio of the apparently otherwise preoccupied liturgy guardians of CDW.
2008 Solemn Blessing for Advent:
May the almighty and merciful God,
whose Only-Begotten Son’s first coming you welcome in faith
and future coming you await,
make you holy by the radiance of Christ’s Advent
and enrich you with his blessing.
Amen.
As you run the race of this present life,
may he make you firm in faith,
joyful in hope
and fruitful in charity.
R. Amen.
May you, who now rejoice with devotion
at our Redeemer’s coming in the flesh,
be enriched with the rewards of eternal life
when he comes again in his glory.
R. Amen.
And may the blessing of almighty God,
the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit,
descend upon you and remain for ever.
R. Amen.