The Art of Translating, Christian-style

Yesterday being my birthday ... I am now in my eightieth year ... but for how long ... I did what all right-thinking people do: I got out and reread an academic paper by Christine Mohrmann. I have quite a lot of her things on my shelves as the result of benefactions from two kind friends. One batch came from the library of Fr J O'Connell.

As I read the following, I thought how relevant it is to the dispositions of Liturgiam authenticam. And then the penny dropped ... this is dead relevant also to the enthusiasm of PF, poor old gentleman, for rewriting the Oratio Dominica, the Pater noster.

"It is a general characteristic of all early Latin Bible translations that they follow the original text (i.e. the text the translator had in front of him) as closely as possible. Fully conscious of the fact that they were dealing with consecrated texts, where every word had its meaning (often difficult for the human intellect to fathom), where, as Jerome will subsequently point out, even the word order conceals some mystery, the Latin translators proceeded with extreme care. They deliberately abandon the system of free translation, advocated by Cicero among others, and proceed word for word, thus conserving as much as possible, the stylistic and linguistic peculiarities of the original text. For the Latins this means as faithful a reproduction as possible, in extremely untraditional Latin, of Greek texts which were already somewhat exotic. This respectful awe of the text, stops the translator from taking any risks, so that, even in cases where it does not appear strictly necessary, they directly transcribe the Greek word. This system of translation continues a tradition of the Jewish translators and it is not impossible that the earliest Latin bible-translators were subject to direct Jewish influence, by the way of Jewish Christians or otherwise."

She goes on to discern "rabbinic influence". 

Interesting, that Dom Gregory Dix also had a penchant for detecting Hebrew influences in the earliest Christian liturgical evidences. (It was perhaps one of the reasons why he had a fraught relationship with pro-Hitler members of the British Establishment, including top bishops, in the 1930s [cf the Wendy House anecdote].)