New translation of Mass question

[odile53]

My parish hasn’t started catechesis of the New Missal yet. Will the New Missal have the three year cycle of readings, or revert to the one year cycle (like in the EF?)

 

[MarkThompson]

My parish hasn’t started catechesis of the New Missal yet. Will the New Missal have the three year cycle of readings, or revert to the one year cycle (like in the EF?)

The modern Lectionary will continue in use. The readings themselves, by the way, are not being retranslated.

 

[Joannm]

The modern Lectionary will continue in use. The readings themselves, by the way, are not being retranslated.

Well, not re-translated but with the approval of the revised Grail Psalter we will probably see the Lectionary revised to include that change. Also (and I have to check this), I think the last revision of the Lectionary only included the revised NT of the NAB, not the OT. The current Lectionary was supposed to be revisited after 5 years but it has been closer to 8 or 10 years now.

 

[puzzleannie]

My parish hasn’t started catechesis of the New Missal yet. Will the New Missal have the three year cycle of readings, or revert to the one year cycle (like in the EF?)

the lectionary does not change, there are only changes to the translation in some of the common prayers, including some of the responses and prayers of the people. Most of the changes are to the words the priest says, and the reason for the retranslation is to make the English conform more closely to the Latin original.

we will probably see some minor translation changes in the readings and psalms down the road as the revision of the NAB continues but that is not part of the program to be introduced in Advent 2011. The readings cycle will not change. Countries that use another scripture translation for liturgy won’t see any change.

 

[NewEnglandPriest]

My parish hasn’t started catechesis of the New Missal yet. Will the New Missal have the three year cycle of readings, or revert to the one year cycle (like in the EF?)

Most catechesis on the new translation will probably be in the fall. All that’s happening is that there’s a new translation of the Mass prayers and responses. There’s not that much that can be done ahead of time.

 

[Joannm]

Our parish has been catechizing on the revised texts in one way or another since Advent of 2009, when I began publishing articles in the bulletin about the Mass, and just mentioning where changes will occur. This month we have begun having meetings for our faculty and staff, liturgical ministers and this week we will meet with catechists. I am not planning on general meetings for parishioners until later this spring. By the fall all will have a general idea about the revisions and then we will get down to the nitty gritty starting the end of September.

 

[TheMc]

My parish hasn’t started catechesis of the New Missal yet. Will the New Missal have the three year cycle of readings, or revert to the one year cycle (like in the EF?)

In almost every case, everything will stay the same, except higher language will be used, but the content and the structure will remain largely the same.

Behind Door #1
God our Father,
help us to hear your Son.
Enlighten us with your word,
that we may find the way to your glory.

Behind Door #2
O God, who have commanded us
to listen to your beloved Son,
be pleased, we pray,
to nourish us inwardly by your word,
that, with spiritual sight made pure,
we may rejoice to behold your glory.

Try and guess which one is the new collect for the Second Sunday of Lent…

Btw, my parish hasn’t done a constant chatesis, but have mentioned it and had homilies on it several times since last year.

 

[odile53]

Ummm-my guess would be the second example! Nice! Some of the grammatical gaffes in the current translation remind me of reading English translations of owner’s manuals for foreign-made products. In other words, you can tell what they mean after you read it through a couple of times, but the grammar isn’t all that useful. No disrespect meant to the Church here, but one would think that with the number of scholars in the Vatican, they could have done a more polished job of it the first time around!

My reason for asking is, I was considering buying an English language daily missal. I recently attended the EF Mass a few times and decided to bite the bullet and get a Latin-English Missal. I suppose I’m a little spoiled now that I have a personal missal, but I think the Lord would approve of this indulgence.

I knew that EF has an annual reading cycle, and I knew that the NO Mass has a three-year reading cycle. If the Church was going to use the one year cycle, all I’d probably have to do would be to use the “English” side of the page in the Baronius missal.

Now I know–time to start saving my nickels and dimes!

 

[ProVobis]

I knew that EF has an annual reading cycle, and I knew that the NO Mass has a three-year reading cycle. If the Church was going to use the one year cycle, all I’d probably have to do would be to use the “English” side of the page in the Baronius missal.

Those “English” sides of our 1962 Latin-English missals probably could use some revisiting as to their translations as well. There’s no way today’s Latin students would translate them the same way. For instance they wouldn’t translate “Dominus Vobiscum” as “The Lord BE with you” any more than they would translate “Gloria in excelsis Deo” as “Glory BE to God in the highest” Seems benign but there’s a difference in theology. Fortunately the 1962 Missal can only be said in Latin. That way everyone (English-speaking and non-English speaking) gets the same theology, despite the limitations of the vernacular.

 

[TheMc]

Ummm-my guess would be the second example! Nice! Some of the grammatical gaffes in the current translation remind me of reading English translations of owner’s manuals for foreign-made products. In other words, you can tell what they mean after you read it through a couple of times, but the grammar isn’t all that useful. No disrespect meant to the Church here, but one would think that with the number of scholars in the Vatican, they could have done a more polished job of it the first time around!

I heartilly agree. Sometimes, it feels like a prayer is saying something like this:

Lord,
You are good. Help us to be good like you.
Amen.

The language we use in worship should be higher, not common, every-day talk.

If you thought that was stark, watch this.

ASH WEDNESDAY: BLESSING AND DISTRIBUTION OF ASHES
Door Number 1
Dear friends in Christ,
let us ask our Father
to bless these ashes
which we will use
as the mark of our repentance.

Door Number 2
Dear brethren brothers and sisters], let us humbly ask God our Father
that he be pleased to bless with the abundance of his grace
these ashes, which we will put on our heads in penitence.
O God, who are moved by acts of humility
and respond with forgiveness to works of penance,
lend your merciful ear to our prayers
and in your kindness pour out the grace of your blessing
on your servants who are marked with these ashes,
that, as they follow the Lenten observances,
they may be worthy to come with minds made pure
to celebrant the Paschal Mystery of your Son.​

HT Chant Cafe​

Boy, did the ICEL mess up this one!!! How can you call that a translation? If my latin teacher were catholic, I’d be making “At least it’s better than the ICEL” jokes all the time!

 

[ProVobis]

If you thought that was stark, watch this.

ASH WEDNESDAY: BLESSING AND DISTRIBUTION OF ASHES
Door Number 1
Dear friends in Christ,
let us ask our Father
to bless these ashes
which we will use
as the mark of our repentance.

Door Number 2
Dear brethren brothers and sisters], let us humbly ask God our Father
that he be pleased to bless with the abundance of his grace
these ashes, which we will put on our heads in penitence.
O God, who are moved by acts of humility
and respond with forgiveness to works of penance,
lend your merciful ear to our prayers
and in your kindness pour out the grace of your blessing
on your servants who are marked with these ashes,
that, as they follow the Lenten observances,
they may be worthy to come with minds made pure
to celebrant the Paschal Mystery of your Son.​

HT Chant Cafe​

Boy, did the ICEL mess up this one!!! How can you call that a translation? If my latin teacher were catholic, I’d be making “At least it’s better than the ICEL” jokes all the time!

Now let’s be fair. ICEL weren’t the first ones to mess up translations. Why do you think we have so many English Bibles? Take ten translators and you’ll come up with ten different translations. And then the language changes. Can’t win.

 

[TheMc]

Now let’s be fair. ICEL weren’t the first ones to mess up translations. Why do you think we have so many English Bibles? Take ten translators and you’ll come up with ten different translations. And then the language changes. Can’t win.

The way I see it, biblical translations and litirgical translations, while they are related, are almost completely two different animals.

In liturgical translations, they are first and foremost translations of the latin, not adaptations. This principle was clearly neglected in the 70s on “the first time around”.

Anyone who has taken a year of latin (and many people who haven’t) can easily see that:

Laudámus te,
benedícimus te,
adorámus te,
glorificámus te,

does not translate as

Lord God, heavenly King,
Almighty God and Father,
we worship you, we give you thanks,
we praise you for your glory.

but rather, something like

We praise you,
we bless you,
we adore you,
we glorify you,

And that if you have “qui tollis peccáta mundi” twice in the latin, you should have something like “you take away the sins of the world” twice in the english.
My point is made even clearer in my text above about the Ash Wednesday prayer.

There is no excuse for this, particularly in the ordinary of the Mass. I’m not even going to go into the whole issue about “Christ has Died”. It simply wasn’t there in the latin edition.

Frankly, they did a terrible job. The average high school student who has studied latin for a year or two could do a better job on the Gloria then this team of “scholars” did.

(Non liturgical) biblical translation, on the other hand, is mainly for private devotional reading. For private reading, it makes sense to have different translations.

The other clear difference is that anyone can go out and translate the bible on their, but the church was the one who approved the translations of the Mass in the first place. They have the final say.

To answer your question in a quicker fashion: I’m not saying every biblical translation is great, but they also aren’t all specifically approved by the church either, as the sacramentary was.

 

[MarkThompson]

There is no excuse for this, particularly in the ordinary of the Mass. I’m not even going to go into the whole issue about “Christ has Died”. It simply wasn’t there in the latin edition.

Frankly, they did a terrible job. The average high school student who has studied latin for a year or two could do a better job on the Gloria then this team of “scholars” did.

One must be fair, though. It’s not as though out of all of ICEL there was no one who realized that “adoramus te” means “we adore you,” like if you went and pointed it out they would all smack their foreheads and confess your Latin supremacy. Their goal was clearly to produce a markedly simplified, plain-language version of the Mass, hewing by and large to the Latin text but with substantial latitude for poetic license and more-than-occasional flights of preference, rewriting, and invention. Whether they did a “terrible job” has to be evaluated on those terms, and then the terms themselves have to be evaluated. Apparently all the bishops around in 1970 who had voted for Sacrosanctum Concilium like the 1970 translation just fine, so I’m not sure we can now object to it solely on the theory that those kinds of changes and experimentation were not what the Council wanted, but evaluating and adjudging theories of translation on objective terms was what Liturgiam Authenticam was about.

So although it is fun to hypothesize that “no first-year Latin student would ever have done such-and-such,” we have to keep in mind that maybe they would have if the assignment said “Take this text as an inspiration and really make it your own.” Besides which, first-year students are hardly the paradigm of prowess. If a first-year student checked his dictionary and grammar and rendered “Mihi nomen est Marcus” as “To me, the name is Mark,” he’d deserve a gentleman’s C at the very best. Whether “Dominus vobiscum” is properly rendered as “The Lord be with you” or “Lord with you” is properly a question for people who are good (better than me) at Latin, not people who struggle to pick their way through the vocab and cases, with little hope of really comprehending idioms or the way a phrase might be used and understood by proficient speakers.

 

[RobbyS]

One must be fair, though. It’s not as though out of all of ICEL there was no one who realized that “adoramus te” means “we adore you,” like if you went and pointed it out they would all smack their foreheads and confess your Latin supremacy. Their goal was clearly to produce a markedly simplified, plain-language version of the Mass, hewing by and large to the Latin text but with substantial latitude for poetic license and more-than-occasional flights of preference, rewriting, and invention. Whether they did a “terrible job” has to be evaluated on those terms, and then the terms themselves have to be evaluated. Apparently all the bishops around in 1970 who had voted for Sacrosanctum Concilium like the 1970 translation just fine, so I’m not sure we can now object to it solely on the theory that those kinds of changes and experimentation were not what the Council wanted, but evaluating and adjudging theories of translation on objective terms was what Liturgiam Authenticam was about.

So although it is fun to hypothesize that “no first-year Latin student would ever have done such-and-such,” we have to keep in mind that maybe they would have if the assignment said “Take this text as an inspiration and really make it your own.” Besides which, first-year students are hardly the paradigm of prowess. If a first-year student checked his dictionary and grammar and rendered “Mihi nomen est Marcus” as “To me, the name is Mark,” he’d deserve a gentleman’s C at the very best. Whether “Dominus vobiscum” is properly rendered as “The Lord be with you” or “Lord with you” is properly a question for people who are good (better than me) at Latin, not people who struggle to pick their way through the vocab and cases, with little hope of really comprehending idioms or the way a phrase might be used and understood by proficient speakers.

Something else that should be taken into account: a mastery of one’s own language. Luther’s genius was not as a translator but as a master of the German language. Cramer’s Book of Common Prayer owed so much to his ability to write out standing English. The Church lost so much, I think, for refusing to let Newman translate the Vulgate . William F. Buckley’s dislike of the NAB is well-known.He knew inferior language when he saw it.

 

[MarkThompson]

Something else that should be taken into account: a mastery of one’s own language. Luther’s genius was not as a translator but as a master of the German language. Cramer’s Book of Common Prayer owed so much to his ability to write out standing English. The Church lost so much, I think, for refusing to let Newman translate the Vulgate . William F. Buckley’s dislike of the NAB is well-known.He knew inferior language when he saw it.

Excellent point. As much as I’m looking forward to the new translation, I suspect we would have been much better off to have it translated by one genius rather than three committees of smart people.

 

[RobbyS]

Excellent point. As much as I’m looking forward to the new translation, I suspect we would have been much better off to have it translated by one genius rather than three committees of smart people.

Which is why Knox’s version is so much better, even though he follows, more or less the same principles of translation as the committees that produced the NAB. Academic writing tends to be pretty bad.

 

[ProVobis]

Something else that should be taken into account: a mastery of one’s own language. Luther’s genius was not as a translator but as a master of the German language. Cramer’s Book of Common Prayer owed so much to his ability to write out standing English.

IMO today’s Latin students with just two years of Latin could have done much better than Luther and Cranmer.

Certainly these young kids could.

And you’re right in that the most iconoclastic (Cardinal Arinze’s word) translations were amongst the Germanic languages, of which English is one. I can’t believe someone simply said “Dominus vobiscum” means “The Lord BE with you” or “Sursum corda” means “LIFT up your hearts” and people bought that for well over 400 years and still are. You won’t find such introductions of the subjunctive or lifting in Polish, for example. It’s different theology.

Although not perfect as the English language changes all the time, I find it’s best to go with interlinear translations for maximum understanding and authenticity. For example:

rickmk.com/Mass/masstext.html

 

[FAB]

Ummm-my guess would be the second example! Nice! Some of the grammatical gaffes in the current translation remind me of reading English translations of owner’s manuals for foreign-made products. In other words, you can tell what they mean after you read it through a couple of times, but the grammar isn’t all that useful. No disrespect meant to the Church here, but one would think that with the number of scholars in the Vatican, they could have done a more polished job of it the first time around!

QUOTE]

The process of the translation was nothing like a translation of an car’s owner manuel. What you might see as an English gramatical error, relates to the phrasing of the orignal Latin.
The process also had to satify the English language in all English speaking countries around the world. This was not the work of a few scholars, but a massive undertaking on many commisions and committees including the bishops of all English language Bishop’s councils.
This missal is not only polished, it has been rubbed to a fine shine.

 

[japhy]

This missal is not only polished, it has been rubbed to a fine shine.

I think that’s a bit of hyperbole about the new translation of the Roman Missal. There are some awkward sections.

 

[TheMc]

I think that’s a bit of hyperbole about the new translation of the Roman Missal. There are some awkward sections.

Hey, you can always just use the latin!