ROME: 6 April 2012 --
Good
Friday is an opportunity for a brief reflection on an
all-embracing theme likely to occupy Salesians and the
Salesian Family
for the next 8 years! But first, a brief correction on
yesterday's
item (Fr Eli Cruz's series of studies on Salesian saints). The
brief
lines he places at the bottom of Fr Liberatore's poem in the
first of
the series (All for Love)
reads: This work is
dedicated to my novice master, Fr Alfred Cogliandro, himself
a worthy candidate for the Cause of Sainthood.
Those words are not Fr Liberatore's but Eli's. That is much
clearer in
the second and third volumes, where they are repeated outside
the
context of the poem. My apologies for the error.
Some readers may have received a notification of the GC27
central theme/topic which offered them the phrase Evangelical radicality.
It would not have come from the official translators for
English. We
can coin many words in English with great ease: 'economer' for
instance, since we are accustomed to the root 'econ-' and we
have a
variety of available suffixes like -ist, -er ...,, but
you won't find
it in the OED or Webster's for that matter. Google it and
you'll find
mainly Salesian references. That tells us something. So
'radicality'
can be coined easily enough - and found here and there in
online
dictionaries but rarely if ever in printed ones.
A little history and some
linguistics always helps
The Italian term radicalità
evangelica
has gained popularity through the current Pope's use of it
(his use of
it when he is speaking Italian or when he is being translated
into
Italian), so a first 'port of call' after a dictionary would
be the
Vatican website to discover how things are being handled there
in
English. Having had something to do with translators in the
Vatican
from time to time, I know that their results vary, sometimes
depending
on the time they are allowed to do the task - if a translation
has to
be arrived at within a few hours, it offers little time for
the very
kind of study being expressed here, and the easiest solution
is to aim
for what linguists call calques, or loan translations, where
you press
a word or phrase from another language into service, keeping
to its
overall form. That way, radicalità
evangelica can masquerade as evangelical radicality,
and economo as economer.
But you can only get away with that sort of thing for a while.
The end
result of adopting calques as the easy way out is 'vaticanese'
and
episodes of 'lost in translation'.
You may find an earlier Vatican reference than 1999 (I have
found a 1994 reference well outside Vatican circles), but the
1999 Instrumentum Laboris
for the European Bishop's Synod is available in Italian and
English on the Vatican site, where in no. 54, it speaks of "l'amore reciprico vissuto con
radicalità evangelica". The English version
translates this as: "love
for one another, lived as the Gospel teaches",
and here one notes that the group responsible for the
traslation (it
was a group) stood back a bit from the typically abstract form
that
characterises Italian. But surprise, surprise, and pleasantly
so, I
discovered that the 'peritus' on the Salesian side who worked
as part
of the group preparing this translation, was none other than
the
official current Salesian translator for English in Rome.
Let's move onto 2001, and Pope John Paul's Novo Millennio Ineunte,
no. 51: "...alcuni aspetti
della radicalità evangelica...", translated
this time (not by the same translators) as "certain aspects of the Gospel's
radical message". We have two examples, thus far, of
the way English best handles radicalità and its ilk (by which I
mean many -ità
type nouns): one by avoiding the term altogether and taking
other paths
to its underlying meaning, the other by turning it into an
adjective
and going on from there.
By the time we get to Pope Benedict, who has frequently used
the Italian radicalità
evangelica in reference to Catholic Action (siate profeti di
radicalità evangelica),
as well as to priesthood and religious life (the latter to be
found in
his address to young women religious in Madrid at WYD),
official
Vatican translations have Gospel
radicalism as their regular translation of the
term. But this raised a number of questions even in
Italian. The Messaggero di
S. Antonio (Padova), a well-respected Catholic
Italian magazine, queried the use of radicalismo evangelico as a paraphrase of radicalità evangelica,
and while we can't simply transfer that discussion to English,
it might suggest that Gospel
radicalism does
run into difficulties in the current climate of religious
intolerance
and certain political debates, be they in Europe or elsewhere.
It is
used, I find, in the Decree recognising the Neocatechetical
Way as it
appears in English translation (also 2008).
With all this in mind, the version of the Rector Major's
letter of
invitation (not the convocation letter - that is yet to come)
for GC27
as found on sdb.org, renders "Testimoni della radicalità evangelica"
as "Witnesses to a radical
Gospel-informed lifestyle".
This is understood more clearly reading the whole letter which
is at
pains to point out that this all-embracing idea is to be seen
as "a
practical formulation of Don Bosco's plan of life".
As these letters will undoubtedly be translated into the 17
languages
of our Region, or at least into six or seven of them, would it
be
possible, please, to ask that you send me the translated
version (for
SDL)? You will necessarily be working from the official
Italian
original, not from the English, and other languages will have
other
issues than those which are important to English. I have just
finished
reading a lengthy but informative discussion of 'Strategies
and Problems
in Japanese Translation of Christian Terminology' (Japan
Mission
Journal). That's one step before we even get to Salesian
terminology!
To paraphrase Gilbert and Sullivan: "The translator's lot is
not an easy one".
