I'm not a great fan of trad-language Anglicanism, though I didn't go as far as someone at a church I used to attend who would alter the 'thees' and 'thous' in traditional hymns to 'you' regardless of what it did to the rhyme or rhythm. But I don't see much sense in continuing to address God in a manner which hasn't made social sense since about 1670.
Last week I went to the cathedral to make my confession for Advent. My penance was to say Psalm 8, and only the Book of Common Prayer is available in the cathedral pews. Here's part of the psalm in the Common Worship translation:
O Lord our governor,
how glorious is your name in all the world!
Your majesty above the heavens is praised
out of the mouths of babes at the breast.
You have founded a stronghold against your foes
that you might still the enemy and the avenger.
When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars that you have ordained,
what is man, that you should be mindful of him;
the son of man, that you should seek him out?
You have made them little lower than the angels,
and crown them with glory and honour.
And this is the same text from Miles Coverdale's 16th-century rendering:
O Lord our governor,
how excellent is thy name in all the world:
thou that hast set thy glory above the heavens!
Out of the mouth of very babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength, because of thine enemies:
that thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger.
For I will consider thy heavens, even the works of thy fingers:
the moon and the stars which thou hast ordained.
What is man, that thou art mindful of him:
and the son of man, that thou visitest him?
Thou madest him lower than the angels:
to crown him with glory and worship.
I sat and prayed very slowly through this antique text which, because it occurs quite often in the modern Office, I know almost by heart. And the subtleties of Coverdale's language threw into relief a whole set of different themes which I hadn't seen were there. For instance, God makes babes and sucklings speak for him precisely in order to still the powerful and vengeful, as though they can only be defeated by him deliberately using the weak and lowly things of the earth, a sense which is completely lost in the changes in sentence-order in the modern version. Again, in the modern translation human beings are simply made lower than the angels, and then crowned with glory; in the old one, the glorification of man is a consequence of his lowliness, and his humbleness a necessary condition of his glory. The modern text seems to have one meaning; it speaks with a single voice. The Tudor one is multivocal, full of ambiguities, partly because of its very obscurity. It's ambiguity that gives poetry its power; suddenly, I can see why the poetic-minded tend to prefer the subtle strangeness of Coverdale, Cranmer and the King James Version to the clarity and accuracy of latter-day scholars.
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The old versions translated the text; by following the literal Greek or Hebrew, they perforce gave the English language rich new expressions that hadn't existed before, and which we now tend to think of as evidence of Cranmer's or Tyndale's genius. Some of the newer translations tell you what to think; they collapse ambiguity, presumably in the belief that there has to be "a" meaning. I was reading AN Wilson's book about Paul the other day: he points out that the New English Bible used the word "Christian" repeatedly in the Epistles, despite the fact that Paul never used it an the concept scarcely existed in his day.
ReplyDeleteIt depends what you mean by translation. All translation has an element of paraphrase, and even if you aim at literality what appears intriguingly ambiguous in one language may not have anything like the same effect in the original. But the modern translations seem to err too much in the direction of paraphrase; I wonder whether this apparent respect for 'the meaning' of the text works at the expense of allowing it (and, in Christian terms, the Holy Spirit) to have its own meaning or meanings.
ReplyDeleteGood to see the Heresiarch here, by the way.
The extreme case is the Message, but sometimes things can strike you afresh reading that version as well.
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