Emphasis

You may know the Vatican recently gave its approval to a revised English translation of the mass, though we likely won’t be using it for at least two or three years.  Find more info on the new translation – and the translation itself – at the USCCB website.  Find more info on the struggles (theological, political and otherwise) to get it completed here.

Anyway, I was thinking about one of the more obvious changes this morning – responding to the presider’s “The Lord be with you,” we are used to saying “And also with you.”  This will be changed to a more literal translation from the Latin, and will be “And with your spirit.”

There are, more or less, two methods of translations: a literal approach, where one tries to get a word-for-word equivalency, and even word order, punctuation, and capitalization can be important.  A more dynamic approach tries to preserve meaning while making the language more accessible and understandable.  The first english translations (in the 1970’s) took a more dynamic approach, where lately the mandate has been that translations be as literal as possible.

Here (finally) is the point I was pondering this morning – translation methods aside for the moment, translation words on a page from Latin to other words on a page in English can’t really account too well for spoken emphasis.  Music has all sorts of symbols, dots, and other markings to help establish emphasis – languages have punctuation, but it only helps a bit.

For instance – “And with your spirit.”  In this case, which word is emphasized changes drastically the meaning of what is said, and in fact changes what the presider meant by “The Lord be with you.”

If the congregation were to emphasize AND – this seems to say that we the congregation are reminding the presider that that the Lord is with him too, as if he had forgotten.

If WITH is emphasized, well, I’m not entirely sure what that might mean, compared to other prepositions, like “by, near, in,” etc.).  Let’s move on.

If YOUR is emphasized, a stronger emphasis is placed on reminding – or even commissioning – the Lord to be with the presider’s spirit.  Or it may sound as if we’re alerting the presider that he misspoke – you said “The Lord be with you” when you meant something a little different, including our spirit out here.

If SPIRIT is emphasized, that seems to imply the Lord has been with the presider in some other way, and now we, the congregation wish the Lord to be with his spirit.  It also implies that the presider’s wish specifically neglected our spirit, and wished the Lord to be with us in some other way.

And, in any case, does the response imply we the congregation (or as individuals) don’t have this “spirit” at all, or don’t need the Lord to be with it, or what exactly?  Is there any way to determine from the original Latin – by word order, or anything – if any stress was implied in the original?

Was the original English translation “And also with you” trying to avoid these problems, or was it just as faulty?

Granted, I’m a little prone to over-analysis of such things, but this seems important, especially considering that period of teaching and catechesis we’re all supposed to embark on before jumping in with the new phrases.  Musically too – for instance, musical stresses should line up with spoken stresses – but what if we can’t tell where they fall?

I tried to keep this brief, I hope you all caught my gist here.  What about emphasis?  What say you?