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Friday 5 December 2008

Lost in translation

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

Finally one acknowledges the tactful amendments of modern editors and smiles at the odd blue word. What stick in my throat as I try to sing them are those tiresome, uncorrectable solecisms, the misrhymes. To me they are like consecutive octaves in the music, only much more frequent. We are told that they are often caused by vowel shifts over time, but I don’t believe it. No vowel shift can justify ‘home’ rhyming with ‘come’ — when were these words ever pronounced ‘hum’ or ‘comb’? They are simply evidence of the substandard workmanship of so many of our hymns.

O for a closer walk with God,
A calm and heavenly frame;
A light to shine upon the road
That leads me to the Lamb.

The lame? And what about the last verse of the same ‘Hark the Herald’, replete with dodgy imagery, where every rhyme is wrong:

Come, Desire of nations, come,
Fix in us they humble home;
Rise, the woman’s conquering Seed,
Bruise in us the serpent’s head;
Now display they saving power,
Ruined nature now restore,
Now in mystic union join
Thine to ours, and ours to thine.

That last pair might just be vowel shift, though I don’t recommend anyone singing the resulting mummerset in public where I come from.

The majority of hymns, even among those contained in the New English Hymnal, are little more than purveyors of sentimental images, struggling to sound dignified and significant. The reason why these old hymns are still popular has little to do with the quality, or lack of it, in the forced rhymes and fluctuating punctuation of the poetry, but with the quality of the music, which was also written over several centuries while obeying much stricter rules of composition than the poetry. It is the music which gives traditional hymnody its edge over current evangelical styles, in which the music is standardly just as ghastly as the texts. Meanwhile the psalms don’t really need music at all, whether the translation be ancient or modern.

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