“Translation, by its very nature, is a continuous implicit commentary”

CS Lewis’s writing on theology and his fiction have attracted criticism – much of it justified, in my opinion. But his work on literature has been consistently admired. Lewis’s volume in the Oxford History of English Literature is English Literature in the Sixteenth Century: Excluding Drama (1954). It still attracts readers, in part because it is as opinionated and polemical as much of his theological writing. You may disagree with Lewis (though on this subject, unlike theology, he was formidably learned) but he is never boring.

The book has an entire chapter on translation, focused primarily on scripture. Lewis shows that many of the issues we are debating on Pray Tell were alive in the sixteenth century.

I have quoted Lewis at some length in what follows. First, though, we need his explanation for his use of ‘papist’ and ‘popish’:

I ask my readers to believe that I have at least intended to be impartial. Unfortunately the very names we have to use in describing this controversy are themselves controversial. To call the one party Catholics implicitly grants their claim; to call them Roman Catholics implicitly denies it. I shall therefore call them Papists: the word I believe, is not now used dyslogistically except in Ulster, and it is certainly not so intended here. … ‘Reformation’ is a term equally ambiguous. Reform of the Church, in some sense or other was desired by innumerable laymen and many clergy of all parties. The controversy was fought about ‘Reformation’ in a different almost a technical sense: about certain changes in doctrine and order. To call these changes ‘reformation’ again begs the question: but the word is now so deeply entrenched in historical usage that I shall continue to employ it – as a mere label, intending no petitio. (157)

Do you believe his claim to impartiality? I don’t, in part because Lewis himself was born and raised in Belfast, and also because many of his other writings display a strong anti-Catholic tendency. But that is his explanation for his terms.

Here is Lewis’s discussion about William Tyndale’s choices of words in translating scripture:

Ever since his own day Tyndale’s translation has been blamed for being tendentious. If we are thinking of his violent marginal glosses, this is fair enough; if of his peculiar renderings (congregation for ἐκκλησία, senior or elder for πρεσβύτερος, favour for χάρις, and the like), a little explanation seems to be needed. The business of a translator is to write down what he thinks the original meant. And Tyndale sincerely believed that the mighty theocracy with its cardinals, abbeys, pardons, inquisition, and treasury of grace which the word church would undoubtedly have suggested to his readers was in its very essence not only distinct from, but antagonistic to, the thing that St. Paul had in mind, whenever he used the word ἐκκλησία. You may of course disagree with his premiss: but his conclusion (that church is a false rendering of ἐκκλησία) follows from it of necessity. Thomas More, on the other hand, believed with equal sincerity that the Church of his own day was in essence the very same mystical body which St. Paul addressed; from his premiss it followed of course that church was the only correct translation.

Both renderings are equally tendentious in the sense that each presupposes a belief. In that sense all translations of scripture are tendentious: translation, by its very nature, is a continuous implicit commentary. It can become less tendentious only by becoming less of a translation. Hence when Bishop Gardiner in the Convocation of 1542 tried to stem the tide of Protestant translation he found himself driven by the logic of his position to demand that in all future versions nearly a hundred Latin words (his list included Ecclesia, Penitentia, Pontifex, Sacramentum, and Gratia) should be left Latin or only morphologically ‘Englished’. This is not popish dishonesty, and Tyndale’s renderings are not Protestant dishonesty: both follow from the nature of translation. It need hardly be added that the merely aesthetic or emotional grounds on which some moderns would prefer church to congregation would have disgusted More and Tyndale alike by their frivolity; souls were at stake. (206-207)

And here is his discussion of the Douay-Rheims translation. As you will see, Liturgiam Authenticam is hardly new.

There remains the Roman tradition, represented within our century by one work, the New Testament printed by Fogny in 1582 and translated at the English College of Douay (temporarily housed at Rheims from which this version derives its name). The work was directed by Cardinal Allen and assisted by Richard Bristow; the actual translator was Gregory Martin, (212) Lecturer in Hebrew, and sometime a scholar of St. John’s, Oxford. The Council of Trent in 1546 had pronounced the Vulgate to be the only authentic Latin version and Martin worked from it, not from the original. This, however, does not by any means remove his work from serious consideration; he had the Greek also before him, he used Geneva, and was himself used by the Authorized Version. The principles on which he proceeded are set out in the preface to the Rheims Testament: ‘We presume not in hard places to mollifie the speches or phrases, but religiously kepe them word for word and point for point, for fear of missing or restraining the sense of the holy Ghost to our phantasie’. The results of this principle led to the Protestant criticism that Papists, when at last forced to translate the scriptures, took good care to make their translation unintelligible. It was an irresistible debating point, but it misses the real problem. All parties were agreed that the Bible was the oracles of God. But if so, are we entitled to worry out the sense of apparently meaningless passages as we would do in translating Thucydides? The real sense may be beyond our mortal capacity. Any concession to what we think the human author must have meant ‘may be restraining the Holy Ghost to our phantasie’. If this line of thought is followed far enough we shall be forced to abandon the design of writing down what (we think) the sacred text means, and merely write down the English of what it actually says, whether this makes sense or no. Translators who are agreed on the oracular character of the original are thus faced with a dilemma. If you follow the one alternative you may arrive at nominal translations of scripture’ in which the originals are made to mean anything that the translator and his sect happen to believe. If you follow the other you may arrive at the idea of a magical text (like the hymn of the Salii) whose virtues are quite independent of meaning – at devotions to ‘the blessed word Mesopotamia’. Fortunately none of our translators is at either extreme; but Tyndale is nearer to the first and Rheims to the second. This does not mean that Tyndale is dishonestly periphrastic or Rheims nonsensical: both are honest and skilful attempts to solve the problem. Thus Rheims leaves many words as near the Latin as it can, writing veritie instead of ‘truth’, benignity instead of ‘kindness’, justice instead of ‘righteousness’ (which is misleading) and longanimity instead of ‘patience’ (which can be very strongly defended). (211)

Perhaps there truly is nothing new under the sun. We Catholics have been translating Latin into cod-English since the 16th century – ‘longanimity’, indeed.

Lewis’s comments on translation seem entirely right to me: ‘The business of a translator is to write down what he thinks the original meant. … all translations of scripture are tendentious: translation, by its very nature, is a continuous implicit commentary.’

And he makes a nice distinction between what the text says and what it means, a distinction some bloggers would do well to ponder: ‘we shall be forced to abandon the design of writing down what (we think) the sacred text means, and merely write down the English of what it actually says, whether this makes sense or no.’

Jonathan Day is a consultant and writer; he is also a member of the parish council of the Jesuit Church of the Immaculate Conception (Farm Street) in central London.