Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 19 August 2006

There will be no deigning, I’m glad to discover, in the new translation of the Mass into English

issue 19 August 2006

There will be no deigning, I’m glad to discover, in the new translation of the Mass into English. A contrary rumour was, I think, put about by enemies of the conservative approach taken, after Vatican intervention, by the International Committee on English in the Liturgy. Its chairman is an Englishman, the Bishop of Leeds, Arthur Roche. My husband tells me he is not a baddy but wears a white hat.

The text of the Latin Mass is one long crux for translators. The temptation to use deign comes in the Canon: ‘Nobis quoque peccatoribus famulis tuis … partem aliquam et societatem donare digneris cum tuis sanctis Apostolis et Martyribus.’ How to render digneris?

Bishop Roche writes, in the Catholic weekly, the Tablet, that ‘“Deign” was greeted with howls of derision from all sides: it was thought to belong to too formal a register.’

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