Inculturation as Elephant

“Isn’t it strange to identify foreign as in Latin, and foreign as in otherworldly?” So asks Claire Mathieu in an online discussion on translations of the Catholic liturgy. ¹ She was reacting to a short text (Pym 2011) in which I tried to make contemporary translation theory speak to American Catholics, some of whom are regularly up in arms at the relatively literalist Vatican doctrine of Liturgiam authenticam (Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments 2001). This part of the discussion concerned my knee-jerk use of the term “foreign”, corresponding to my unthinking assumption that translation necessarily works on a text that is from somewhere else. Mathieu comments: “I am struck by the repeated use of the word ‘foreign’: ‘explain the foreign’… ‘bring the reader into the foreign textual world’”. Strange, indeed. Why should she be so struck? First, I deduce, because the Latin language is not wholly foreign to regular users of the Catholic liturgy in the United States, where Latin phrases are bandied about within the English and many users of the texts are assumed to have a grasp of the basics. And second, as Mathieu notes in her aforementioned question, the relative distance of that Latin, as a language that is not wholly home yet not altogether foreign, actively functions in the liturgy, through borrowing and syntactic calque, to create a sense of the “other-worldly”, a higher place, the sacred, a status to which both individual and congregation might aspire. This is indeed a strange identification: the partly foreign language, normally held in a geo-linguistically horizontal relation and/or as a relation across time, works here as a higher place, in a spiritually vertical relation. The function of the foreign is not the unease of the traveller or the unheimlich that alienates in a negative way—rather, here, it provides occasion for aspiration.