23 February 2011

Prayers from the New Translation of the Missal

The USCCB has posted the first prayers we will hear prayed from the new translation of the Missal:

First Sunday in Advent 2011

+ Collect +

Grant your faithful, we pray, almighty God,
the resolve to run forth to meet your Christ
with righteous deeds at his coming,
so that, gathered at his right hand,
they may be worthy to possess the heavenly kingdom.
Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,
who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever.

+ Prayer over the Offerings +

Accept, we pray, O Lord, these offerings we make,
gathered from among your gifts to us,
and may what you grant us to celebrate devoutly here below,
gain for us the prize of eternal redemption.
Through Christ our Lord.

+ Prayer after Communion +

May these mysteries, O Lord,
in which we have participated,
profit us, we pray,
for even now, as we walk amid passing things,
you teach us by them
to love the things of heaven
and hold fast to what endures.
Through Christ our Lord.

These are much better theologically than the 1973 translations. . .but they are a little clumsy.   The first three lines of the Collect are pretty bad, actually.

Better:

Grant your faithful, we pray, almighty God,
the resolve to run forth with righteous deeds
to meet your Christ at his coming. . .

The bishops needed a poet on their translation staff!  :-)


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6 comments:

  1. Maybe you should volunteer for the Liturgy of the Hours translation.

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  2. Yes, some of the preces are clumsy. They weren't as clumsy in 2008... but between then and now there was quite a bit of tweaking.

    The problem with "the resolve to run forth to meet your Christ / with righteous deeds at his coming" is that it switches back and forth between us and Christ. Yours is a good fix; there are others that would work just as well.

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  3. I could help fix the English, but I'd be useless with the actual translation.

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  4. Annie4:34 PM

    It's almost word salad. I can understand it, after some work, because of my education, but I worry about children and the uneducated. Could I diagram those sentences? No way!

    And I definitely prefer "We ask this through Christ our Lord" to "Through Christ our Lord." Why the fragments? And why say "we pray" at awkward times? Is that really necessary? You are praying, so it's obvious you're praying, do you really need to say "we pray"?

    I'm excited about getting some of the biblical and Patristic allusions back, but I have a feeling I'll never understand or be able to memorize some of these prayers. I actually have several from the 1974 missal committed to memory. They have a noble simplicity to them.

    Annie

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  5. Why did they even have to mess with it in the first place.....what was wrong with the tridentine right?

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  6. Why did they mess with it in the first place? What was wrong with the tridentine right?

    ReplyDelete