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Lost in translation

Peter Phillips

Wednesday, 9th July 2008

Peter Phillips on why it is the music more than the words that makes hymns special

In his resumé Mr Mayhew missed the questionable opening lines of the fourth verse of ‘Of the father’s love begotten’ which run:

O how blest that wondrous birthday,
When the Maid the curse retrieved
so full of double meanings I can’t work them all out, but he did quote the suppressed last verse of the ‘National Anthem’:

Lord, grant that Marshal Wade
May by thy mighty aid
Victory bring.
May he sedition hush
And like a torrent rush
Rebellious Scots to crush:
God save the Queen.

All this is in a quite different league from those extreme moments in the psalms when the whole endeavour equally teeters on the edge of absurdity, but never quite goes over it:

Moab is my washpot
over Edom will I cast out my shoe

quaint, but it doesn’t make you squirm.

Equally the punctuation of the psalms, so sui generis when it works, seems to matter little when it doesn’t. Hymns don’t escape so easily.

I discover from Mr Mayhew that ‘Hark! the herald-angels sing’ should be written just so, with a hyphen between ‘herald’ and ‘angels’, when in the New English Hymnal it is missing every time the words are given. This omission in turn has given rise to a common misreading: ‘Hark the herald, angels sing’, which confusingly also makes perfect sense. Conversely the punctuation in ‘God rest you merry, gentlemen’ is correct in the New EH, but this has not stopped many people from thinking the syntax must be ‘God rest you, merry gentlemen’, and quite reasonably been perfectly happy with the result.

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Joe Camel

July 10th, 2008 3:13pm

I share your dislike of false rhymes, but they’re not found only in hymn books. Think of this couplet:

What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

And the false rhyme is only one of three objections that may be raised to that couplet. The usual meaning of “fearful” nowadays is timid, whatever it may have meant in Blake’s time. And however fearsome a tiger may be, symmetry has nothing to do with it. A butterfly or a day-old chick possesses just as much symmetry as a tiger. Any land animal has to be symmetrical, otherwise it wouldn’t be able to walk straight.

Jack Lion

July 11th, 2008 1:09pm

Dear Joe Camel:
Oh, shut up!

Hans Wildebeest

July 14th, 2008 5:04am

"What would the bigoted luminaries of the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans (Foca) do about that?"

A silly, unnecessary and ignorant comment, arguably equally 'bigoted', and unworthy of the Spectator.

Food for thought

Simon Hoggart

My favourite programme last week was France on a Plate (BBC4, Sunday) in which Dr Andrew Hussey investigated the link between gastronomy and la gloire; French glory and destiny.