Sometime next year, English-speaking Catholics at celebrations of the ordinary form of the Mass in the Roman rite will stop professing a belief that God created everything "seen and unseen" and start professing instead their belief that God created everything "visible and invisible." They will no longer proclaim that Jesus was "born of the Virgin Mary and became man" but rather that he was "incarnate of the Virgin Mary and became man." When the priest, in the Consecration, narrates the institution of the Eucharist, he will no longer say that Jesus took "the cup" but rather that he took "this precious chalice into his holy and venerable hands." Most controversially, perhaps, the priest will no longer say that Christ's blood will be "shed for you and for all" but that it will be "poured out for you and for many."
Does any of this make any difference?
In the way that counts most, the answer (I believe) must be no. The Mass is the Mass -- ordinary form or extraordinary, Latin or vernacular, well translated or ill. The Mass is what the Church says it is. If you disagree with that, then you understand neither the Church nor the Mass.
In another way, the answer must be yes -- it does make a difference. There are good translations of Latin texts and bad translations. On purely linguistic grounds, the English translation of the Roman Missal that has been in use for almost 40 years is a pretty bad one. It is denotatively inaccurate (prompting each of the changes cited in my first paragraph). It is clunky and tin-eared in innumerable places. For instance, I can never hear the Prayer after Communion for the 30th Sunday in Ordinary Time...
Lord, bring to perfection within us the communion we share in this sacrament. May our celebration have an effect in our lives.
...without feeling sorry for the priest who has to pray it. "May our celebration have an effect in our lives"?? That's really laying siege to heaven, isn't it? (Needless to say, the original Latin of that prayer bears no discernible resemblance to the absurd English rendering -- so I guess that particular translation belongs in both the "clunky" and "inaccurate" categories.)
And occasionally, the current English translation -- beyond being inexact and graceless -- even descends into outright ungrammaticality. I can't be the only former English teacher who cringes at "all glory and honor is yours."
For years, liberal and conservative liturgists argued not so much about the quality of the English Mass translation (nobody claims it's a masterpiece), but about the alleged motives of the translators. Was the International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL), which produced the current translation, devoted simply to a particular philosophy of translation (simplified vocabulary and sentence structure, avoidance of rhetorical decoration, paraphrase when necessary to achieve wide intelligibility), or was it committed to something more ambitious -- putting its own stamp on the Mass, emphasizing inordinately a communal, lay-centered, "spirit-of-Vatican-II" understanding of the Sacrament?
At one time I had a firmly held opinion on that question, but with the new translation on its way I find, blessedly, that I don't have to have an opinion any more. The old ICEL "dynamic equivalence" philosophy of translation is gone, relegated to a footnote in liturgical history by the Vatican's directive Liturgiam Authenticam and the subsequent ratio translationis for English-language translations, in which the Vatican undertook to give English-language translators of liturgical texts fairly explicit instructions on how to do their job. So the new translation that is nearing final approval reflects translating principles like these:
- The translator should strive to maintain the denotation, or primary sense of the words and expressions found in the original text, as well as their connotation, that is, the finer shades of meaning or emotion evoked by them, and thus to ensure that the text be open to other orders of meaning that may have been intended in the original text.
- To be avoided in translations is any psychologizing tendency, especially a tendency to replace words treating of the theological virtues by others expressing merely human emotions.
- Certain expressions that belong to the heritage of the whole or of a great part of the ancient Church, as well as others that have become part of the general human patrimony, are to be respected by a translation that is as literal as possible, as for example the words of the people’s response Et cum spiritu tuo, or the expression mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa in the Act of Penance of the Order of Mass.
- That notable feature of the Roman Rite, namely its straightforward, concise and compact manner of expression, is to be maintained insofar as possible in the translation. Furthermore, the same manner of rendering a given expression is to be maintained throughout the translation, insofar as feasible.
- In the translation of terms contained in the original text, the same person, number, and gender is to be maintained insofar as possible.
- The literary and rhetorical genres of the various texts of the Roman Liturgy are to be maintained.
Not surprisingly, a translation of the Mass that is as close as possible to the original Latin text will also be as close as possible to the actual faith of the Church. There are things in this world that are not merely unseen but invisible. Jesus did not "become man" when he was born but when he was incarnate, conceived in his mother's womb (a particularly important truth for us to be reminding the world of nowadays).
The Mass is the Mass, despite whatever little distractions may come by way of inept translation. But it will be nice when those little distractions are gone. I'm really looking forward to the 30th Sunday in Ordinary Time 2010.
[NOTE: For a handy overview of the changes made in the new English translation of the Mass, go here.]
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