Thanks for the great work on The Swag. As a contribution to our thinking of what it means to translate, I offer the following from L. Alonso Schökel SJ in his introduction to his commentary on the Book of Job. I wish the translators of our Liturgical texts would have followed the principles outlined:

‘Fidelity is not literalism, nor paraphrase, but rather an asymptotic attempt [i.e., one that gets closer and closer to the original without ever actually touching it] to recreate a text as close as possible to the original text.

This complex task requires the capacity to re-create a new text, with new semantic fields [the words of the new language having their own history and connections with other words in the language], unknown symbolic openings [openings into the symbolic world that cannot be identical with those of the original language], and original linguistic structures.

It is precisely here that we find the ‘betrayal’(tradimento) inherent in every translation (traduzione).

Between the delicate penetration of the original text and the emergence of the translated text is inserted the work of the translator which requires creative method and inspiration, discipline and improvisation.

It is certainly an ideal never to be put aside to translate the poetry of Job “without adding anything or taking anything away, while conserving as much as possible the shape of the original and its finesse (Luis de Léon)”.’

Michael Fallon