Languages trail immense, individual histories behind them, and no two languages, with all their accretions of tradition and culture, ever dovetail perfectly…. Words or syntax…are peculiar to specific languages and are not transferable.
We should be grateful, then, for anything that sheds light on the ecosystem of liturgical Latin, for that ecosystem is part of the treasury of the traditional Roman Rite. If, for example, the 1962 Roman Missal were to be translated, accurately and eloquently, into English, and if it were then to be celebrated exclusively in translation, something would still be lost.
Two books, one recent and one not, help us fathom the potential loss. The Roman Canon: An Interlinear Translation was written by Craig Toth and edited by Romanitas Press founder Louis Tofari. Toth has had a lifelong specialist’s interest in Hebrew, New-Testament Greek, and ecclesiastical Latin, and he has translated the Latin writings of St. Laurence of Brindisi and Cornelius à Lapide.
As the subtitle suggests, the heart of the book is an interlinear translation of the Roman Canon, where an English translation appears directly below the Latin word that it is translating. This arrangement is particularly useful for non-Latin speakers, enabling them to follow the flow of the original. And once acquainted with this flow, they are better able to follow the Canon during Mass, whether or not they bring their copy of The Roman Canon with them. Toth also provides interlinear translations for all of the Prefaces and Sequences in the traditional Missal, as well as an analysis of the Collect. Copious footnotes accompany these sections for further illumination.
It was the other part of the book, however, that I found the more interesting: essays on the history, style, and character of Christian Latin as well as essays on the Roman Canon such as a “Note on the Orality behind the Canon” and “The Influence of Architectural Acoustics and the Composition of the Eucharistic Liturgy.”
The Roman Canon also contains a helpful glossary of terms and two intriguing appendices. The first, “Toto orbe terrarum: Is orbe actually referring to a sphere?,” provides extensive evidence that the medieval Church believed in the sphericity of the earth. I only wish that Toth had explained why this clarification matters, namely, that it refutes the American, nineteenth-century, anti-Catholic propaganda about everyone believing in a flat earth until the scientifically progressive Christopher Columbus proved them wrong. Second, “The Lexigraphical significance of Amen” explores the nuances of the Hebrew original and why the Church Fathers deemed it wise to leave certain loanwords like it untranslated. It would be interesting to know Toth’s opinion about the French exception to this rule, the only language that I know of that uses a translated version (Ainsi-soit-il) of “Amen.”
Almost a century before The Roman Canon, Cyril Charlie Martindale, SJ published The Words of the Missal, available once again thanks to an excellent 2023 reprint by Os Justi Press. Fr. Martindale was among the most famous Catholics in England in the first half of the twentieth century, and his list of friends reads like a Who’s Who of other famous English Catholics, names such as Fr. Martin D’Arcy, Msgr. Ronald Know, Graham Greene, and Evelyn Waugh. Waugh was a student at Oxford when he first met Martindale, who was teaching there. “He dazzled and stimulated the most various undergraduates by his restless zeal, incisive diction, and by his modernity,” Waugh wrote. “He was loaded with academic distinctions, but he held aloof from High Tables.” America magazine has portrayed Martindale as a liturgical progressive, but Waugh would vehemently disagree: he was particularly sad when Martindale passed away in 1963, for among other things, it meant that there was no prominent English priest left who could refute the ill-advised reforms to the liturgy (in his opinion) that were happening at the time.
Martindale, who has been called “the British Fulton J. Sheen,” wrote on a variety of topics (spirituality, the lives of the saints, the Book of Revelation, and short story fiction), but he was particularly gifted in language. In the same year (1904), he won the Gaisford Prize for translating a portion of Vergil’s Georgics from Latin into Greek and the Chancellor’s Prize for translating Lionel Pigot Johonson’s 1889 poem “Sertorius” from English into Latin. Martindale’s 1929 The Mind of the Missal is a fine introduction to the Mass and the liturgical year while his 1932 The Words of the Missal explores the theology of the Roman Rite by tracing certain terms that are prominent in the liturgy, especially in the Propers. As Martindale explains:
The method of this book… is quite simply to take a few of the words which come often in the Missal so as to be in a certain sense “favourite” words in the Liturgy, or else, other words that we might not notice; to collect several instances of their use (for isolated instances prove little; many exercise a cumulative effect); and then, as it were, to worry them to an extent that may even appear exaggerated—but it may serve that intermediate purpose mentioned above, and crush a kind of juice of meaning out of them which should be valuable. Certainly no reader would be expected to attend to such details during Mass itself; but, having done it outside of Mass, he will find that Mass becomes full of added delight (11).
Martindale wrote the book with two hopes in mind: first, that a few readers “might identify themselves more fully with the Liturgy, and, through the Liturgy, with Mass” (192). And second, to help people be “glad and grateful that Mass is said in Latin, and not in the vernacular” (192-93). Speculating in 1932, Martindale imagines that “the ‘instructional’ part of Mass” might “some day be tolerated in the vernacular,” but he is confident that “the sacrificial part never will be” because of Latin’s distinctive qualities: it is “so much more sonorous and magnificent a language than English,” it cannot become antiquated like the old Book of Common Prayer or the King James Version, it is marvelously dignified and filled with common sense, and its words are now impervious to a change in meaning (194).
And, we may add, that words in Latin have an irreplaceable value. In an earlier book, The Creative Words of Christ, Martindale focuses on five things that Jesus Christ calls Himself (the Light, the Way, the Shepherd, the Bread, and the Life), with a focus on the things themselves and not so much the words that signify them. In Words of the Missal, however—and to use his metaphor of crushed juice—Martindale is attentive to the sweet hidden meaning of Latin terms that is all but impossible to translate.
The example that Martindale gives in his introduction is the verb succurrere, which is translated as “help” or, somewhat more pretentiously, as “succour.” There is nothing inaccurate with these renderings, but they miss the word’s etymology, which literally means “to run beneath,” “as though someone saw a person in the very act of falling, and ran with arms stretched out to catch him and hold him up.” Martindale continues:
Surely it is not merely fanciful to have “at the back of one’s mind” the full inmost meaning of that common word, and to be quite thrilled by the thought of God— whom we ask to “succour’’ us—being so full of infinite love, infinite tenderness, unlimited eagerness for our salvation that He positively runs to our rescue, arms held out, forcefully holding up our already tottering soul! (13)
Words of the Missal is filled with insights of this kind and roughly organized according to different themes: joy and gladness, sadness and consolation, fulfillment and satisfaction, newness and health, etc. There is also a chapter on the mysticism of the Missal and the difference between mystery, sacrament, and symbolism, a chapter on the lights and shades of meaning, and a chapter on the delicacies of meaning. What, pray tell, is the difference between the lights and shades of meaning and meaning’s delicacies? Buy the book and find out: it is well worth it to have such an illuminating gem on your shelf.
