Week 4 -- What Does That Mean Again?

Title: Missa Solemnis

Performers: Clergy and the Faithful celebrating/attending 1941 Easter High Mass at Our Lady of Sorrows, Chicago, IL, the Rt. Reverend Fulton Sheen, PA, narrator.

Origin: Rome, Catholic Church-Latin Rite

Instrumentation: Voice, organ, orchestra

One of my main reasons for my preference for the Contextualist Philosophy of World Music Education (still referencing Week 1's readings all the way out here in Week 4) is why things work they way they do in a particular culture.  One of my big interests when it comes to other languages and cultures is idioms.  Things do not often translate word-for-word or even meaning-for-meaning.  I studied Biblical Greek back when I was a budding seminarian in the ELCA (yes, that happened, but I only made it two years), and I was fascinated by the translation of John's Gospel.  In John's Gospel Jesus performs seven signs.  Or he does seven miracles  The English words signs and miracles are used rather interchangeably within translations and between translations.  Yet, the Greek is consistent: σημεῖον.  The standard translation of that word has two definitions, 1. Signs 2. Miracles.  The first definition goes deeper, talking about miracles that were signs of Jesus being the Christ.  I argued that this was an idiom that we were missing in the translation by being so haphazard about which word it is; it's actually both.  English does not have a word for "miracles that are signs," but Greek does, and it's the one that is used in John's Gospel.  The folks in the article that said, "Oh, just change the words.  That's what I do when I have a song from another culture that I want to use," are willfully causing their students to miss out.  

Now, I'm starting this discussion in the hopes that they're at least using translated English words, but if they think the native words are too hard to learn, might they also think that finding a translation is also too hard?  Might they just chuck the native text into Google Translate and hope for the best?  Do they look for some "Anglicized" text on the web?  Do these teachers have any idea what they're actually teaching their students when they do this?

I know from experience, both in trying to game the Greek translation game, and from my foiled attempts to read Zakhov Vs. 07 from the Russian translation that is floating about the web, that Google Translate does not get the job done.  There's just enough in common between Greek grammar and Russian for me to tell that I had no chance with comprehending the Gulyashki book pitting his Soviet Bloc answer to James Bond against 007 himself.  I'd have to go to Australia or New Zealand (I think) to track down a rare English copy of the tale.

Which brings me to the above video of the Catholic Mass in Latin.  One of the Catholic Church's supposed aims with the Latin was to have one language for the Church so that everyone would hear the same Mass said the same way throughout the world.  However, as not everyone learned Latin, this didn't work quite as planned.  With the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, the vernacular was permitted, but linguists, the Faithful, the Clergy, and Rome have continued to argue over accurate translations.  Pope Benedict XVI gave more broad permissions for the Mass prior to Vatican II to be celebrated, and a new English translation of the current Mass was approved, changing texts for Catholics throughout the United States.  Except that it didn't make things better because it was a more literal translation instead of a more idiomatic one.  Et cum spiritu tuo does not have an idiomatic translation in English.  Post Vatican II, it translated as "And also with you."  Now it is translated as "And with your spirit."  This makes less sense in English because we don't think idiomatically in that type of separation.

Other confusions came about.  The word "consubstantial" replaced "of one being" in the current translation of the Nicene Creed.  After the first time a church I worked at prayed the current version of the Creed, one of my choir members asked me what consubstantial meant.  I told him "of one being."  He rolled his eyes and asked why they changed it.

So this is just a basic demonstration of the issue of "just change the words."  Even if you change them to a translation, what is the accuracy of the translation?  What guarantees are there that it is translated correctly within the musical scope of the melody?  And if you're not going to change the words to a translation, you might as well not even bother.  I come down in the Authenticity as Continuum camp.