Translation and a Sober Assessment

The great modern labour of Orthodox hymnography has been translation — the rendering of the vast Byzantine corpus into English and the other languages of a worldwide Church — and it is a labour full of hard choices, because Byzantine hymnody binds word to melody and meter in ways no translation can fully carry. This closing file treats the work of translation and offers a sober assessment of Orthodox hymnography as theology, as poetry, and as a living tradition.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Byzantine hymnography)

The Modern Task: Translation

For most of its history Orthodox hymnography lived in a few liturgical languages — Greek, then Church Slavonic, Georgian, Arabic, Romanian, and the others into which the Byzantine rite was received as it spread. The twentieth and twenty-first centuries added a new and enormous task: the translation of the whole corpus into the languages of the diaspora and the mission, above all English, as the Orthodox Church became genuinely worldwide and gathered converts and the children of immigrants who did not know the old liturgical tongues (see Orthodoxy in America: The English Liturgy Movement). This has been one of the great labours of modern Orthodoxy, and it is largely the work of a handful of gifted translators. In English, the foundational renderings include Isabel Florence Hapgood’s Service Book (1906), the Festal Menaion (1969) and Lenten Triodion (1978) of Mother Mary and Archimandrite Kallistos Ware, the vast liturgical output of Holy Transfiguration Monastery (Boston), and the widely loved translations of Archimandrite Ephrem (Lash), whose versions of the canons, the kontakia of Romanos, and the Akathist have shaped how English-speaking Orthodox hear their own hymnody (Ware and Mary, The Lenten Triodion, Faber, 1978; Lash, anastasis.org.uk; Hapgood, Service Book of the Holy Orthodox-Catholic Apostolic Church, 1906). To translate the hymns is to make the tradition’s sung theology available to a Church that now prays in dozens of languages, and it is work still very much in progress.

Why Byzantine Hymnody Resists Translation

Translation of hymnography is harder than translation of prose, for reasons intrinsic to the form. Byzantine hymns are not free verse but metrical compositions bound to melody: the troparia of a canon are composed to be sung to the meter and tune of their irmos, syllable answering syllable, and the prosomoia (model-melody hymns) are written to fit an existing tune exactly (see The Troparion, Kontakion, Canon). A translation that preserves the meaning almost never preserves the meter, and so cannot be sung to the original melody; a translation that preserves the meter, to be singable, must take liberties with the sense. The translator must therefore choose what to sacrifice — and the great translations differ precisely in that choice. Much of the finest English hymnography (the Ware translations, Lash) is made for reading and for a flexible chant rather than for the strict metrical singing of the Greek, accepting that the acrostics, the wordplay, the isosyllabic meter, and the exact melodic fit are largely untranslatable and choosing to carry the theology and the poetry of image instead (Lash, prefaces to his translations; and see St. Romanos: Metre, Music and Performance). Other efforts — the composition of new English melodies, or the adaptation of Byzantine and Slavic chant to English words — attempt to recover the sung dimension, with results that are still developing. The honest assessment is that no translation fully carries a Byzantine hymn: the chairetismoi of the Akathist rhyme and alliterate in Greek in ways English can only gesture at; the alphabetic acrostic simply cannot cross into another alphabet. What survives translation is the theology, the imagery, and much of the rhetorical power; what is lost is the marriage of word to Greek sound and melody that was, for the original poets, inseparable from the whole.

The New Composition

Alongside translation, the modern period still composes. The akathist, as we have seen, remains a living genre, and new akathists continue to be written — to newly glorified saints, to local patrons, and in wholly new registers like the Glory to God for All Things (see Glory to God for All Things and Akathist Saturday and the Genre). New services and canons are composed for saints glorified in our own time — for St. Silouan, St. Sophrony, St. John of Shanghai, the New Martyrs of the twentieth century — often in the traditional forms and in the old languages, then translated. The tradition is not closed. But it is worth noting soberly that the great creative forms — the kontakion of Romanos, the canon of John of Damascus — are no longer being newly invented; what the modern Church composes, it composes within the inherited forms, and its largest creative energy has gone into translation rather than into new genres. This is not decline so much as a different phase: an age of transmission and diffusion rather than of formal invention.

A Sober Assessment

What, finally, is to be said of Orthodox hymnography as a whole? Three judgements, offered soberly and from within the Church (METHODOLOGY §4.1).

First, its glory is real and is theological. The claim with which this collection began — that in the Orthodox Church theology is sung, that the dogma of the councils lives in the troparia and canons, that praise is the native form of theological knowing — is not a pious exaggeration but a plain description of how the Orthodox faith is actually held and transmitted (see Hymnography as Dogma Sung). The hymnography is one of the supreme achievements of Eastern Christian civilization, and in its greatest works — the Paschal canon, the Great Canon, the Akathist, the Hymn of Kassiani — it reaches a fusion of doctrine, poetry, and prayer that has few equals in any tradition.

Second, its history is more tangled and more human than pious accounts allow, and this collection has tried to show that honestly. The most beloved hymn in the tradition is of genuinely unknown authorship; the ascription of the Octoechos to John of Damascus is a tradition the scholarship corrects; the bride-show of Kassia is later legend; the date of the oldest Marian prayer is disputed; even the modern Glory to God for All Things is misattributed as often as not. None of this diminishes the hymns; it locates them truthfully, as the work of a living Church transmitting an anonymous, organically-grown corpus by custom rather than by document. To love the hymnography rightly is to love it as it is, tangled provenance and all, not as a set of tidy attributions.

Third, the tradition faces real modern challenges and it is right to name them: the sheer difficulty of translation, the risk that hymnody sung in a language or a chant the people do not follow becomes background rather than the sung theology it is meant to be, the uneven quality of some modern composition, and the labour of making so vast a corpus genuinely available and understood in the languages of a worldwide Church. These are not reasons for pessimism — the tradition has met greater challenges — but they are the honest work of the present age. The final word, though, belongs to the hymns themselves: whatever the puzzles of their authorship and the difficulties of their transmission, they remain what they were made to be — the Church’s own confession of her faith, sung; and to study them, as this collection has tried to do, is finally to be sent back to sing them (see Hymnography as Theology).

References

The Lenten Triodion, trans. Mother Mary and Archimandrite Kallistos Ware (London: Faber & Faber, 1978); The Festal Menaion, trans. the same (London: Faber & Faber, 1969). (The foundational English translations of the movable and festal hymnody.)
Lash, Archimandrite Ephrem. Translations of the canons, the kontakia of Romanos, and the Akathist. anastasis.org.uk; On the Life of Christ: Kontakia (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1995). (The modern English versions and the translator’s choices.)
Hapgood, Isabel Florence. Service Book of the Holy Orthodox-Catholic Apostolic Church. 1906 and later editions. (The pioneering English service book.)
Holy Transfiguration Monastery, Boston. Liturgical translations (the Pentekostarion, the funeral idiomela, the Menaion, and others). (The largest body of English liturgical translation.)
METHODOLOGY.md §4.1, this repository. (The confessional standpoint of the assessment.)