The Paris Prose

II. Relationship to the Roman and Gallican Psalters

Even without the discrepancies in verb forms, the differences between the Latin and English columns make it clear that the Paris Latin is not the source of the English prose. That source was certainly a Roman psalter, but it must have contained a good number of Gallican readings. Table I shows 21 English passages which prefer a PR reading over that used in the Paris Latin, and it should be noted that 14 of those PR readings are identical with those in Ga.(note) Of the fifteen passages which seem to prefer the Paris Latin over PR (Table II), all but three correspond either to Ga. (eight times) or to the Mozarabitic psalters (seven readings, three of which duplicate Ga.). But the firmest evidence of Gallican influence is found in the 59 passages which follow readings found in neither PR nor the Paris Latin (Table III). The readings which 35 of these passages do follow are found in Ga. Variants from many other texts are also listed in Table III, but all of those other texts follow Ga. in at least two thirds of the cases where they correspond to the Paris prose.(note) There can be no doubt, therefore, of a strong Gallican influence.

Many of the entries in Table III involve the translator's using a word clearly different in meaning from that found in PR. It is unlikely that he could have obtained the swa swa of 36:35, for example, from PR's super. But many of the parallels demonstrated in Table III would be consistent with a hypothesis that the translator worked from a relatively pure Roman text, while supplementing his translation from time to time with readings from another psalter related to Ga. Thus, the translator would find that his original uses proximi mei twice in 37:12. Unwilling for stylistic reasons to repeat neahgeburas in the second half of the English verse, he might look at his second source and see that it has qui iuxta me erant, the Gallican reading; his stylistic problem could then be solved (and with a nice etymological twist on proximi) by using þa þe me nyhst wæron. Similarly, whatever problem he may have had in rendering the idiom in PR's morte afficimur (43:22) is avoided by translating the Gallican morti affligimur instead. Many of the translations in Table III, furthermore, have the effect of merely narrowing the meaning of the PR reading, rather than violating it. Thus, the urnan of 17:13 adopts the Mozarabitic transcurrerunt without really contradicting the transierunt in PR, and the Gallican bispellum at 48:5 coexists easily with PR's similitudinem. Most significantly, there are at least ten passages in the English (Table IV) which give both Roman and non-Roman translations. Instead of choosing between the Roman maliloquam and the Gallican magniloquam at 11:4, for example, he write þa oferspræcan and þa yfelspræcan. Or, a bit more ingeniously, he integrates the variants maligna and magna of 34:26 into þa ofersprecan þe me yfel cweðað.

Continue reading with the next section, on the relationship of the translation to the arguments, or go back to the previous section on the characteristics of the translation, or return to the main menu.

Dick Stracke, Augusta College, rstracke@admin.ac.edu

Notes

Note: See 2:5, 14:1, 31:6, 34:9, 40:2. Dom Robert Weber, ed., Le Psautier Romain (Libreria Vaticana, 1953).

Note : See 7:14, 9:6,27, 10:3,4,8, 11:3-5, 13:1-3,6, 15:1,7, 16:6,10, 17:7, 18:5, 21:8, 24:1,5, 26:8, 32:12-14, 34:20, 35:2-4, 36:14, 37:5,12,13, 39:5,9,10, 40:5, 41:11, 42:2, 43:5,11, 45:9, 47:9, 50:8.

Note: See 27:7, 49:6. Mozx only: 7:14, 9:8, 18:6, 23:4, 32:21,22, 33:20, 44:2, 49:4,23.

Note: See 1:2, 34:19, 44:12; 49:4,6,23. There are also a few parallels which correspond to neither moz. nor Ga.: 5:11 (see Weber's U), 7:15 (see Weber's sigma*), 14:5 (Weber's M), 17:7 (delta), 26:7, (beta).

Note: The translator's general preference for the present tense may also be seen in the fact that he changes Latin presents and futures to English preterites in only 22 verses--a third as often as the reverse. As was the case with the present-tense forms, the majority of these new preterites do not correspond with PR or anything else: 17:9,35,43,48-49, 21:9, 25:5,6, 26:2, 29:9, 30:14, 43:6. And, as is the case with the presents, there is no significant pattern among the verses that do happen to correspond with some other text. Three of them (34:13, 43:6, 49:19) could reflect PR; four others (17:9, 43:4,9, 45:6) have parallels in moz., Ga., etc.

Note: In one other verse (33:8), a subjunctive replacing the Latin's indicative seems to be based on PR, and PR may also be the source of the changes in the person of the verbs at 8:3 and 17:45. There are a few other passages whose verbs correspond to variants elsewhere, but the list of these variants is enough to show that the English is based more on chance and the translator's habits than anything else: 9:33 (c.f. Weber's zeta M2 T2 etc.), 9:37 (c.f. Weber's gamma), 17:51 (Weber's S), 27:5 (î Ga. K*), 29:13 (alpha gamma lambda moz. Ga.), 34:15 (beta epsilon zeta2 Ga.), 35:12 (alpha beta delta epsilon moz.), 36:15 (gamma), 36:31 (H*), 50:9 (alpha). There are no parallels at all to the mood-change at 8:3 and the changes at 7:10, 9:33, 19:7, 26:13, 30:25, 33:10,14, 36:7, 37:16, 40:3,4.

Note: That is, all but 12:6, 14:5, 16:2, 17:45, 24:4, 35:13, and 43:23. Tables I-IV cover the passages for which one could reasonably infer a relationship between the English and psalters other than the Paris Latin. The likelihood that a given entry in fact belongs in the tables will range from the nearly absolute (as in Table I, 46:3, where super could hardly have generated swi e micel cyning all by itself), to the merely presumable (as in III, 40:11, where to þam þ‘t, though apparently closer to ut than to et, could nevertheless have been the translator's own invention).