Lost in translation

Peter Phillips

My interest in ridiculous sacred words began with a Victorian edition of Verdi’s ‘Requiem’, which I met at school. At the unbelievably splendid, and brassy, ‘Tuba mirum’ we were asked to sing the translation: ‘Hark! The trumpet sounds appalling’. I later discovered that there is a very enjoyable subculture of these things, mostly hidden away in our more traditional hymns.

Unlike the psalms, which in the King James translation have a linguistic robustness managing to avoid or transcend this kind of embarrassment, the hymns we sing have the most diverse backgrounds.

Shifts of meaning over time have been matched by changes in what is thought to be appropriate sentiment in religious worship. Publishers of hymn books for the modern market have to make some tricky decisions, as Kevin Mayhew, publisher of Hymns Old and New, made clear in a recent letter to the Church Times. Presumably Charles Wesley’s penchant for the word ‘bowels’ as an image for the mercy of Christ won’t do now; but what about ‘gay’?

Let me in season, Lord, be grave, In season gay; Let me be faithful to thy grace, Just for today

What would the bigoted luminaries of the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans (Foca) do about that?

In his resumé Mr Mayhew missed the questionable opening lines of the fourth verse of ‘Of the father’s love begotten’ which run:

O how blest that wondrous birthday, When the Maid the curse retrieved

so full of double meanings I can’t work them all out, but he did quote the suppressed last verse of the ‘National Anthem’:

Lord, grant that Marshal Wade May by thy mighty aid Victory bring.

May he sedition hush And like a torrent rush Rebellious Scots to crush: God save the Queen.

All this is in a quite different league from those extreme moments in the psalms when the whole endeavour equally teeters on the edge of absurdity, but never quite goes over it:

Moab is my washpot over Edom will I cast out my shoe

quaint, but it doesn’t make you squirm. Equally the punctuation of the psalms, so sui generis when it works, seems to matter little when it doesn’t. Hymns don’t escape so easily.

I discover from Mr Mayhew that ‘Hark! the herald-angels sing’ should be written just so, with a hyphen between ‘herald’ and ‘angels’, when in the New English Hymnal it is missing every time the words are given. This omission in turn has given rise to a common misreading: ‘Hark the herald, angels sing’, which confusingly also makes perfect sense. Conversely the punctuation in ‘God rest you merry, gentlemen’ is correct in the New EH, but this has not stopped many people from thinking the syntax must be ‘God rest you, merry gentlemen’, and quite reasonably been perfectly happy with the result.

Finally one acknowledges the tactful amendments of modern editors and smiles at the odd blue word. What stick in my throat as I try to sing them are those tiresome, uncorrectable solecisms, the misrhymes. To me they are like consecutive octaves in the music, only much more frequent. We are told that they are often caused by vowel shifts over time, but I don’t believe it. No vowel shift can justify ‘home’ rhyming with ‘come’ — when were these words ever pronounced ‘hum’ or ‘comb’? They are simply evidence of the substandard workmanship of so many of our hymns.

O for a closer walk with God, A calm and heavenly frame; A light to shine upon the road That leads me to the Lamb.

The lame? And what about the last verse of the same ‘Hark the Herald’, replete with dodgy imagery, where every rhyme is wrong:

Come, Desire of nations, come, Fix in us they humble home; Rise, the woman’s conquering Seed, Bruise in us the serpent’s head; Now display they saving power, Ruined nature now restore, Now in mystic union join Thine to ours, and ours to thine.

That last pair might just be vowel shift, though I don’t recommend anyone singing the resulting mummerset in public where I come from.

The majority of hymns, even among those contained in the New English Hymnal, are little more than purveyors of sentimental images, struggling to sound dignified and significant. The reason why these old hymns are still popular has little to do with the quality, or lack of it, in the forced rhymes and fluctuating punctuation of the poetry, but with the quality of the music, which was also written over several centuries while obeying much stricter rules of composition than the poetry. It is the music which gives traditional hymnody its edge over current evangelical styles, in which the music is standardly just as ghastly as the texts. Meanwhile the psalms don’t really need music at all, whether the translation be ancient or modern.