庆圣诞贺佳节，传喜信报佳音
Archaisms in the Liturgy
EVERY CHRISTMAS I look forward to hearing, at the Christmas midnight Mass, those familiar words to the Christmas story from St. Luke ("In those days a decree went out..."). While it may be in a different language now than the one I grew up hearing, I still wait to listen to the narrative about logistical nightmares, overbooked lodgings, panic on the night shift, and an announcement of great joy. Before and after the service, as is typical in daily Masses as well, a deacon will lead prayers from the prayerbook. On Christmas Eve, this includes the passage from Luke.
The standard text used in the Chinese Catholic liturgy comes from the readable if formal Scotus (思高) translation done by Franciscans in Hong Kong. During the prayers beforehand, however, I was surprised to encounter the following translation:
耶稣圣诞子时之经
维时责撒肋奥古斯多发令。命厥攸属帮人。报名籍上。当时祭利诺。统理叙利亚国。而兼掌册名事。国人俱归故土以报。乃若瑟达味支派人。欲往报名。携玛利亚新妇。自纳匝肋加理肋亚府。偕诣白冷如德亚郡。玛利亚时怀孕。适满产期。产厥首子。襁褓置马槽。时郊外牧童未眠。守夜护羊。乍见异光四射。各生震怖。天神倏见。谓曰。勿惊。予来报尔福音。足乐众心。救世主为尔适诞于达味郡。但见襁褓小婴。卧马槽。斯其然。告毕。多神俄见。颂声满空曰。天主受享荣福于天。良人受享太平于地。
It's not carved on a turtle shell, but it is quite far removed from standard Mandarin. The possessive pronoun 厥 (jué), for example, appears in the earliest of ancient texts, and thereafter is used as a conscious archaism. Punctuation is present, at least, although only in the form of clause division markers. I can't imagine very many of the people reading it Christmas Eve could fully make out what it means.
The book also includes three other Christmas-related scripture texts. The reading from St. John for Christmas Day resembles arguments from Confucian texts, and lacks the poetry found in other, later translations. Compare 厥始圣言已有。斯圣言。实在天主。实即天主。斯实在天主。于无始之始 with the Scotus 在起初已有圣言，圣言与天主同在，圣言就是天主。圣言在起初就与天主同在. Note how they both use 圣言 "holy word" for the Greek logos; the standard Protestant translation, apart from the use of 神 or 上帝 instead of 天主 for God, uses 道 for logos, which perhaps captures more of the subtle meaning but also invites false analogies with Taoism: 太初有道，道与神同在，道就是神，这道太初与神同在.
Furthermore, the prayer-book translation is condensed at many points to be something of a paraphrase or summary. The clause "He was in the world, and the world came to be through him," is given as 居世造世, while the modern translation gives 他已在世界上，世界原是借他造成的. Nevertheless, there is a certain flavor to the archaic Chinese that works well with some texts; the translation of Puer natus in Bethlehem, for example, fits the traditional tune nicely. And the seven Penitential Psalms printed elsewhere in the book have a simple poetic grace to them that many wordier translations lack.
I am not certain when the prayer-book's translation was done. During the efforts to translate the entire Bible into Chinese in the late 19th century, Protestant missionaries made translations into both classical and vernacular Chinese (as well as a good number of dialects). These translations were later brought together into the Union versions (Wenli, or classical, and Mandarin, or more vernacular) in the first decade after the turn of the century. The language of this new edition heavily influenced the European flavor of the vernacular language movement in the early 1920s, as exponents Hu Shi, Lu Xun, and Shen Congwen attest.
Catholics, on the other hand, had made several translations throughout their centuries in China. One, now lost, was probably in Mongolian, and others were never published. Bits and pieces were translated for use in the liturgy, but no complete Catholic translation was made until the mid-20th century. Missionaries discovered early on that in order for their scriptures to be well received by the elite, using the vernacular was out of the question, much in the same way early missioners like Matteo Ricci found they received more respect dressing as scholars than dressing as monks. So it was probably for this reason that the prayers and scripture passages were made to resemble the Confucian classics.
In the 1940s the noted legal scholar Wu Jingxiong (吴经熊) made a translation of the New Testament and Psalms into classical Chinese, for which Pope Pius XII wrote a preface. Unlike the earlier classical version, Wu made an effort to translate poetry as poetry, and prose as prose. Thus his version of John 1:1-2 is 太初有道，与天主偕。道即天主，自始与偕. He uses 道 rather than 圣言 so as to fit the lines into the meter of an ancient-style poem. 实在 likewise becomes 偕. He translates the Psalms into 4-character ancient-style lines, or the classical 5- and 7- character rhymed lines. Another classical version was started by Yan Fu (严复), translator of western philosophy and science, but his proof-of concept, the first four chapters of Mark, was rejected by church leaders who couldn't resolve whether he could perform an adequate translation as a non-Christian.
I have had the opportunity during the past few years to attend Mass at churches in several Chinese dioceses. While the basic liturgy remains the same as it is the world over, each diocese has its own peculiarities - variations in music, sung and spoken parts, and prayers before and after Mass. A few weeks after first arriving in Jilin I picked up a 圣教日课, which contained all of the texts I needed in order to follow along. Things went fine until the Pater noster, when everyone started singing in archaic Chinese. This wasn't printed in the book:
天主经: 在天我等父者，我等愿尔名见圣；尔国临格；尔旨承行于地，如于天焉。我等望尔，今日与我，我日用粮；尔免我债，如我亦免负我债者；又不我许陷于诱感，乃救我于凶恶。亚孟。
Here, too, are self-conscious archaisms like the inversion of the negative in 不我许陷于诱感, and the borrowed use of the character 见 (jiàn, to see) in place of the usual 现 (xiàn, to appear). Certainly, Christians who pray in English, "Our Father, which art in heaven," also use archaic forms, but in this case the Chinese is more like praying in Latin instead of the vernacular.
So it was no surprise that when I arrived in Beijing, my first Mass experience had all of the responses sung in - yep - Latin. In truth, despite the 天主经 above, used only in certain Mass settings, the parishes I visited in the Jilin diocese were remarkably contemporary in their language and music. They had revised their old-style prayer-book with its classical Chinese prayers into the modern spoken language and had incorporated the latest Roman rubrics. Vatican II passed the country by, but many areas are catching up nicely.
Beijing, on the other hand, still maintains the old texts, which I suppose is understandable for the four flagship churches of Bejing Catholicism. The use of Latin, on the other hand, is ironic in a religious organization that is supposed to be free from foreign influence. One would have expected the vernacular liturgy to go over well with the authorities.
Beijing currently uses a version of the 圣教日课 put out by the Tianjin diocese; the first page has an introduction entitled 诵经劝语 "An Exhortation to Prayer":
世人自生之终。必须预备。务恒诵经。思忆天主。方克寡过。缘人为善最难。若田不耕锄。恶草丛生。安望秀实哉。人居尘世。如舶客泛海。必生整备帆樯。办积粮糗。方可至欲望之处。亦犹密近敌寇。关防固守。始免受伤。是以人当诵经忆主。蒙厥宠佑。庶几远邪去恶。渐臻成德......
It's nice advice and all, but I doubt it will be persuading anyone.
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