On the ‘Latinitas’ of the Roman Missal

Michele Somerville has some commentary on the translation of the Latin in the new Roman Missal, inter alia:

[…]
It was interesting to watch, at the Saturday night vigil, my exemplary priest muddle through these changes with his usual open heart, and it was interesting to see the highly sophisticated reader, homilist and teacher struggle through the stiff and unwieldy and language of “corrected” sections of the mass.

When I first started to study Latin in college, I began to try to translate the lyric poems of Catullus. Catullus was a contemporary of Caesar Augustine, so the Latin vernacular in which he wrote would have been about the same as that used by Romans during the time Jesus lived on earth. The grammar and Latin in many of Catullus’s poems are straightforward, and often the verse is bawdy, so young poets who can manage a little Latin are often drawn to translating it. It was through translating Catullus that I learned the little Latin I know, and through reading bad translations of Catullus that I first began to observe that a good translation of any text finesses a compromise between sense and literal meaning. In the case of a poem, some measure of “melopoeia” (Ezra Pound’s word for the melodious aspect of verse) must enter in and infuse the text in question.

The Eucharistic Prayer may not be a poem in a technical sense, but it functions as one. Besides its obvious purpose — to catalyze the consecration — its rhythms reach into the heart like a song with its “word made flesh” message pertaining to hope.

Those who don’t care about poems probably think it does not matter that the Eucharistic Prayer, as of last night, is no longer a poem (in English), but poetry is powerful and one of its strengths is its ability to sneak up and evoke strong response from the unsuspecting. The pope didn’t do himself any favors when he had the scholars siphon the poetry out of the English Eucharistic prayer, and the translation team’s failure to achieve a compromise between certain of the larger truths of our faith and the literal meaning of the words reflects the Vatican’s readiness (nothing new) to sacrifice the glory for the power. People will feel the power of the lost poem through its absence.

I came away from mass last night feeling that these new changes are designed to stick it to priests at the parish level. The implementation of the new procedures makes marionettes of priests. It has every Catholic in the U.S. dutifully holding “pew cards” (in my parish they took the form of laminated “cheat sheets”) so that all could follow the new, old, unwieldy script. It has congregations doing an obedience dance.

I attended a meeting about a year ago in which these changes in the liturgy were introduced. At one point in the discussion, a friend seated behind me tapped my shoulder. “Psst,” he said, pointing to the new translation of the Nicene Creed, “looks like they missed something.” He pointed to this:

 “For us men / and our salvation…”

As Vatican scholars in search of a more faithful translation of this prayer labored over every syllable seeking to bring each into line with the original Latin and the true message of the mass, they failed to make some significant corrections.

Maybe the boys in lace and their scholars were absent the day the Latin class learned that “homines” is a form of the noun “homo, hominis,” which means “man” as in “human being” or “person.” (There’s an alternative word for “man” that would have been used to refer to those with Y chromosomes.)

Or maybe the boys in lace just forgot that women are included in the salvation.

The Vatican’s choice to revisit the text of the Nicene Creed with the aim of perfecting the English translation from Latin is understandable. When it comes to translating our unified profession of faith (which, in going from “we believe” back to “I believe,” would seem to make the prayer less unified.) precision should matter. What is less easy to understand is why the painstaking revision did not include a second look at “for us men / and our salvation.” Every Magisterium-sanctioned text we have tells us that women are included in salvation, yet the translators of the “New” (old) Missal thought it unnecessary to pause, in the course their painstaking parsing, to notice what is essentially erroneous about “for us men and our salvation.”

This non-oversight says all one needs to know about the spirit of this translation. One should expect nothing better from this pontificate. Why did they not correct this inaccurate language when the Vatican experts were in there fixing everything else? Why does the Credo retain this inaccurate and misogynist language?

You know why. The He-man Woman Haters are sending a message. Swinging their censers. This show of power is Ratzinger’s billet doux to lockstep Catholics. He’s tossing the sheep a bone. Even the smallest evidence of devolution thrills them. So, why did they boys in lace change the words to the mass?

Because they can.

But do we have to say those words? No. One doesn’t get kicked out of mass for not saying the words right. Not yet, at least. I have always love the words of the mass, but I’ve been tweaking my whole life, correcting sexist language in my own prayers at will.

I’ll say some of those new old words when they make sense and decline to say others. Catholics don’t need no stinking “pew card.” Roman Catholics don’t an imprimatur to pray. […]

• via: The Truth Behind the Godawful New (Old) Roman Catholic Missal (Huffington Post)

… not sure why, but that last quoted sentence sounds best if given a ‘honey badger don’t care’ inflection …