Well, but one would also expect a translation produced by the Church and offered as a translation into English would contain actual English. This translation fails on that count as well.
When one serves a lector and has to pick his way through the Yoda-speak they offer for the psalms, well, to paraphrase far better folk than I, when I die I'll go to heaven, 'cause I've served my time in linguistic hell.
**Well, but one would also expect a translation produced by the Church and offered as a translation into English would contain actual English. This translation fails on that count as well.
When one serves a lector and has to pick his way through the Yoda-speak they offer for the psalms, well, to paraphrase far better folk than I, when I die I’ll go to heaven, ‘cause I’ve served my time in linguistic hell.**
Agree with both your posts. I hate what the NAB does to the Psalms, and our more modern music director even sings more corrupted texts.
I have learned just to bow my head and pray.
(And thank God that I found a 1966 Jerusalem Bible in a second hand book store!)
Congregations are perhaps best served by the happy accident that the words of the NAB so utterly lack music that they tend to pass in one ear and out the other and leave no trace on the memory.
The NAB is awful. When I lived in NY, the pastor of my church was one of the scholars who had worked on this. He began every homily with “it is commonly misunderstood” and went on to describe how every miracle or even teaching was simply a translation error by prior translators.
The poor man. It had destroyed his faith, and he ruined a lot of souls, too, no doubt. But I think that years before he had gotten into Biblical criticism, from what I knew about his history, he had actually believed and even when I knew him, I think he would occasionally have flashes where he wanted to believe. He was an arrogant, stubborn man in a lot of ways, and hated Cardinal O’Connor and Catholic moral teaching. He did love good liturgy and music, however, but he was mentally and spiritually more of an Episcopalian than anything else. Liturgy was aesthetically attractive but devoid of any doctrinal content and I doubt that he thought anything really happened at the Consecration. And I attribute it all to Higher Biblical Criticism.