austraLasia #3046
A radical Gospel-informed lifestyle
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".
A radical Gospel-informed lifestyle
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".
