🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1993Jan12.082842.4979@memstvx1.memst.edu>, connolly@memstvx1.memst.edu writes:

[...]

> 	   O'Neill
> 	   (did I get that right?) noted that the Vulgate is much easier
> 	   to read than Cicero.  True, except for the Psalms, which are
> 	   so scrambled as to be quite unintelligible in spots.  (If
> 	   memory serves, the reason is that St. Jerome never touched
> 	   them, retaining the older translations that Christians were
> 	   used to, whether they understood them or not.)  The Psalms are
> 	   so bad that the Vatican actually released a new Latin transla-
> 	   tion of them about 1950, which was intelligible but didn't
> 	   flow.

Pius XII, 24 March 1945 to be exact.  Your statement that the new
translation doesn't flow bugs me, but I can't offer any objective
criteria for flowingness, at least not today <:->

However let me seize this opening for a question I've long pondered.
If you look at Jerome's Psalms, it's the tenses that are screwed up.
Compare the first few lines of Psalm 22 (23), first Jerome's, then the
1945 translation:

Jerome:

	Dominus regit me, et nihil mihi deerit:
	In loco pascuae ibi me collocavit.
	Super acquam reflectionis educavit me,
	Animam meam convertit.

1945:

	Dominus pascit me: nihil mihi deest;
	In pascuis virentibus cubare me facit.
	Ad acquas, ubi quiescam, conducit me;
	Reficit animam meam.

My notion--completely off the top of my head--is that somebody didn't
understand waw consecutive, which (to put it naively) in Hebrew gives
the grammatical imperfect the meaning of the perfect and vice versa,
and just translated the aspect literally verb by verb.  This of course
makes utter gibberish out of the Psalms much of the time.  Since
Jerome wouldn't have done this himself (else it would be in evidence other
than in the Psalms), maybe the folk were using earlier translations
for liturgical purposes, and Jerome didn't want to change, as you
suggest, what they were used to.

Incidentally, recent editions of the Vulgate give both translations of
the Psalms in parallel columns, which enables one to compare them,
check for flowingness, etc. :)

[...]

> -Leo Connolly

-Ken
-- 
miner@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu | Graecis ac barbaris, sapientibus et
opinions are my own      | insipientibus debitor sum