TRADUTTORE TRADITORE

Every translator is a traitor. And yet one tries. Confronted with Hermann von Reichenau's medieval hymn "Salve Regina" I was pained by the languorous rosewater sentimentality of the translations I found. So what do you do? You stick your neck out. Here, for what it's worth, is my small effort. 

Salve, Regina, mater misericordiae:
Vita, dulcedo, et spes nostra, salve.
Ad te clamamus, exsules, filii Hevae.
Ad te suspiramus, gementes et flentes
in hac lacrimarum valle.
Eia ergo, Advocata nostra,
illos tuos misericordes oculos
ad nos converte.
Et Iesum, benedictum fructum ventris tui,
nobis, post hoc exsilium ostende.
O clemens: O pia: 

O dulcis Virgo Maria.

Hail, Majesty, mother of mercy, hail,

Our life, our sweetness, and our hope.

Eve’s children, exiles, here we call to thee,

Lamenting, weeping, here we sigh to thee,

here in this vale of tears.

Turn, then, thou who plead’st for us,

to us thine eyes of mercy.

And after this our exile show us

Jesus, thy womb’s blest fruit.

Thou merciful, thou gravely reverent,

exquisite Virgin Mary.

Note: 'and after this our exile' is of course the last line of section IV inT.S. Eliot's "Ash Wednesday".

MON DIEU, JE VOUS L'OFFRE

  

Travelling (I’m in Chicago for a conference where my edition of Sidney’s Correspondence is having a prize presented to it) is conducive to thought but mainly in bits, choppily, and perhaps more suited to Twitter than to a pensive blog.  On the other hand, its vicissitudes include, at my age, aches and pains and contrarieties, and those lead me to consider the old French expression of resignation Mon Dieu, je vous l’offre. It is repeated, mutteringly or with a shrug, even now by those who may years ago had a Catholic education but who have since confined their churchgoing to Christmas and Easter.

However, early one morning I thought of it again and wondered what it really meant, or could be brought to mean. The idea was, or so the young were told, that when something unpleasant happened to you you offered it up to God. Why, I wondered. If I miss an aeroplane connection, or if I am experiencing a nasty arthritic cramp, what would God want with that? And yet even my beloved Carthusians mention such offering in their writings, and they are so far advanced in spirituality that I can barely see their dust. So I kept pondering.

In the first place, I began to see, it may clean the wound, so to speak. If I miss that plane or have that cramp, I am filled with negative vibrations – rage, anguish, pain – that take up all the space in my mental house and make it a damned unpleasant place to be. If I off-load all those vibrations on to Someone else, I shall be rid of them. Oh, goody.

Yet there remains the problem: why would I saddle God (Who, one hopes, has better things to do) with all that grudge and grunge? Here, Lord, You take it, I don’t want it. An unattractive attitude, surely?

Well, in the course of some stubborn pondering, three answers either suggested themselves or, I prefer to think, were suggested to me. The first one has to with that chap Yeshua. I (thank God) so far have mainly aches, pains and contrarieties; He went all the way. If He could offer all that horror up to His Father, then – whether I understand it or not – it has to make sense. What’s more, He did it for me, which is a sobering thought.

Secondly, it leads one to think about what “offering” means. And the more you think about it, the more you realise it’s not just  dumping or unloading. It’s giving. Now that still seems odd; but if you give what is attacking you to God, it does two things to your spirit. It reaffirms your status as a child of God: when a kid meets a problem too big for its understanding, it presents it to its father who, being an adult, can and should handle it. Pain, suffering of all kinds, passes our understanding. C.S. Lewis once said that for a modern Westerner the only rational choices are Stoicism or Christianity (or perhaps Judaism if you are born into it). So if you give your suffering to God, you are recognising Him as your Father and behaving as you should. Also, the giving is an offering: you give to God something that either is precious to you or at least takes up a large space in your life. And you give it as an act of thanks, as an expression of belonging, or as an act of beseeching: here it is clearly the latter.

Thirdly, if what you want in life is to be filled with the Spirit of God, the Spirit that is God, think of those moments of giving, of offering – even the small ones – as creating, and opening, a small window in the wall of your spiritual house: a window that lets in a little more of the Spirit Who is always waiting, loving and surprisingly patient, outside until you are ready to open up. A large suffering, offered, opens a large window: my father, spending every day and night for several years looking after my mother who had Alzheimer’s, I suspect opened a huge window. But even a small suffering – an ache, a pain, a contrariety – can open a small but important little shutter and let in another bit of that huge and wonderful Spirit Who is very much a Person also, one-third of the Triune God.

And – as a friend who posted Philippians 4:4-7 on Facebook reminded me – if you do manage to do this, the ache will frequently go away, and at least a little piece of the Great Peace of God, which passeth all understanding, will take root and grow in your heart.

This is a really small and clumsy beginning of coming at, and getting a glimmering of, what seems like a huge truth. Stay tuned, and we can explore it some more. For those interested: I’m reading Lewis’ The Great Divorce and finding it moving and perceptive – perhaps it has something to do with these scattered intuitions.

The painting above is Holman Hunt's "The Light of the World". 

A TIME OF GIFTS

     I have long liked to think of Epiphany as the feast of faith for scholars. We have no idea who the three chaps from the East were, or even where they came from. They are variously known as “wise men”, “three kings”, and in the French version “mages” or “les rois mages”. Some people have thought of them as coming from Persia. In the 7^th century they were given names: Balthazar, Melchior, and Caspar. In the 16^th century they were given ethnic origins: Balthazar was European, Melchior was African, and Caspar was from the Far East. Their gifts betoken grandeur and sanctity: myrrh, I had read, prefigured Jesus’ death and entombment, but it was also an ingredient in the chrism of sanctity. And myrrh, apparently, grows naturally in Yemen.

     Two things are certain: they were not Jewish – they were Gentiles – and they appear to have been scholars, royal or no, magi or no. The Church has decided that Epiphany shall be the feast of the Gentiles, and quite rightly reads Paul on the subject. But I like to think of it as the feast of scholars. There have been times and places when to be a scholar seemed a natural opposite of having faith in God. Ditchkins notwithstanding, this is less true now. (For those not in the know: “Ditchkins” is a portmanteau name for the late Christopher Hitchens and the all-too-current Richard Dawkins, and all who sail in them.)

     It is currently fashionable to adore Pope Francis (I concur, on the whole) and retroactively to deplore Pope Benedict XVI. But scholars, of all people, should not fall into that trap, whether we are Roman Catholic or not. Benedict was one of the supreme scholars of our time on the topic of faith’s relation to reason, which is the topic of topics for scholars and their relation to God.

     Meanwhile, let us bring our own presents to the Child – not, probably, as grand as gold, incense and myrrh, but the fruits also of a journey across a desert.

LEARNED, PASSIONATE, POETICAL

Today is the Feast of St Basil the Great, one of the awesome 4th-century Doctors of the Church. Monks love him for his contributions to the monastic life: St Benedict stood in awe of him. He was a powerful and influential bishop of Caesarea in Pontus: when the emperor sent his prefect Modestus to chastise him, he reduced Modestus to stammering vagueness, and when the prefect complained of being spoken to like that, Basil said crisply, "You seem never to have met a bishop." He was a giant of theology, who wrote a classic work on the Holy Spirit ; and he was a passionate, poetical character who wrote the following in praise of psalms:

"A psalm implies serenity of soul; it is the author of peace, which calms bewildering and seething thoughts. For, it softens the wrath of the soul, and what is unbridled it chastens. A psalm forms friendships, unites those separated, conciliates those at enmity. Who, indeed, can still consider as an enemy him with whom he has uttered the same prayer to God?

So that psalmody, bringing about choral singing, a bond, as it were, toward unity, and joining the people into a harmonious union of one choir, produces also the greatest of blessings, charity. A psalm is a city of refuge from the demons, a means of inducing help from the angels, a weapon in fears by night, a rest from toils by day, a safeguard for infants, an adornment for those at the height of their vigor, a consolation for the elders, a most fitting ornament for women.

It peoples the solitudes; it rids the market place of excesses; it is the elementary exposition of beginners, the improvement of those advancing, the solid support of the perfect, the voice of the Church. It brightens the feast days; it creates a sorrow which is in accordance with God.

For a psalm is the work of angels, a heavenly institution, the spiritual incense."

The illustration is an icon from the Cathedral of St Sophia in Kiev, Ukraine

PER UN'ANNO NUOVO

For the new year (felix faustumque sit omnibus!) I thought I would put up a prayer traditionally said to be by St Francis, though scholars now doubt this. It is certainly in his spirit, and the current most famous Francis would doubtless approve it too. The version above I wrote out for my parents many, many years ago, in the original Italian, which is still the most melodious language I know. I give it here in both tongues:

O Signore, fa' di me un istrumento della tua pace:

Dove è odio, fa' ch'io porti l'amore,

Dove è offesa, fa' ch'io porti lo perdono,

Dove è dubbio, fa' ch'io porti la fede,

Dove è disperazione, fa' ch'io porti la speranza,

Dove è tristezza, fa' ch'io porti la Gioia,

Dove sono le tenebre, fa' ch'io porti la Luce.

O Maestro, fa' ch'io non cerchi tanto

Ad esser consolato, quanto a consolare,

Ad esser compreso, quanto a comprendere,

Ad esser amato, quanto ad amare;

Poiche  si è dando che si riceve,

Perdonando che si è perdonato,

Morendo che si risuscita a vita eterna. 

O Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace:

Where there is hatred, let me bring love,

Where there is offence, let me bring forgiveness,

Where there is doubt, let me bring faith,

Where there is despair, let me bring hope,

Where there is sadness, let me bring Joy,

Where the shadows are, let me bring Light. 

O Master, let me not seek so much

To be consoled, as to console,

To be understood, as to understand,

To be loved, as to love;

For it is in giving that we receive,
In forgiving that we are forgiven,
In dying that we are reborn to life eternal.

May we all remember this, and have it granted!