Thursday, August 07, 2008

Have you read the new liturgy translation?

You can find it here. There are more changes that we've been led to believe. The good news is that we have until 2010 until the changes take effect. We may be able to use the next two years to help our people get used to them slowly.

The Lord be with you
And with your spirit

and

Behold the Lamb of God,
behold him who takes away the sins of the world.
Blessed are those called to the supper of the Lamb.

Lord, I am not worthy
that you should enter under my roof,
but only say the word
and my soul shall be healed.

I have a feeling, however, that we won't do anything until we are forced to do something.

1 comment:

nabimba said...

Ahhh!!!! Such nonsense that doesn't work in translation! Why? Why?!!

Well, I'm glad that as one of the assembly, I still get the Lord to be with me (and all of me!) It would be terrible to be the presider and only hear "and with your spirit" (and thus no longer with my body, my intellect, etc.)

In fairness, perhaps this was a colloquialism of old Greek or Latin, some common manner of greeting. Or maybe adding "spirit" made it a more emphatic form of response, also noted with the distinction of singular and plural forms of "you" (The Lord be with y'all. - And with yourself.) In Hiberno-English, for example, one might hear someone refer to another as "himself" or "herself" rather than just him/her. Also, in conversational Irish, after being asked "How are you?" you might turn it around and ask "Agus thúsa?" or "Agus thù fein?"; "And *you*?" or "And yourself?"

If there is truth in this hypothesis, then it's fair to make a translation with the same sense as the original (something like "And with yourself"). But the problem in a word-for-word translation (And with your spirit) is that we don't speak colloquial Latin! It makes no native sense to us! That makes it a poor translation - it is translated in word but not in *spirit* :)

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