03 April 2007

Old Lutheran Quote of the Day

O my God, my rock and tower,
Grant in Your death I trust,
Knowing death has lost its power
Since You crushed it in the dust.
Savior, let Your agony
Ever help and comfort me;
When I die, be my protection,
Light and life and resurrection.

Johann Heermann
LSB 421:5

9 comments:

Susan said...

We sang this in choir as a second stanza to "On My Heart," and it goes very nicely there too.

But I do miss the Gen 3:15 allusion that was in TLH: "since Thou trod'st him in the dust." "Crushed" just doesn't make that connection to the prophecy.

William Weedon said...

It DOES work perfectly for that too! We sing "On my Heart" to close each Lenten liturgy, and we definitely struggled with the new words to that too. But I think we finally learned them. It was hard, though, because we'd been singing it the old way for so many years and everyone had it memorized. I agree that it is a pity to lose the "trod'st him" - aside from the Gen 3:15 allusion (which I guess the dust sort of calls to mind anyway), it's just super cool word! :)

Anonymous said...

Or . . .

"He will crush your head,
and you will strike his heel . . ."

. . . might also have been going through a hymn committe's mind.

:)

Susan said...

Sorry, Jon, but if that's what was going through y'all's minds, I wish you could've been a little clearer. There's not one single reference in that hymn stanza to feet or heels or heads. You guys managed to excise them all. "Treading" is "crushing with the feet." Even the pronouns "his" and "him" in the TLH version imply something that would have a head to be crushed or trod'st.

As for "crushing" bringing to mind Gen 3:15, I checked different translations. NAS, ESV, NKJV, and RSV all say "bruise." NIV is the only one that says "crush." "Crushing death" is kinda a vague and esoteric idea. If even just the pronouns had been left (in LSB) to personify death, in connection with the noun "dust" there would've been SOMEthing to bring to mind the proto-evangelium. But what's there in LSB now just ain't enough to do it without the TLH background. When you have "trod'st" and "him" and "dust" all in the space of two lines, it was there for anybody who wanted to see it. But not anymore.

Anonymous said...

Susan, are you suggesting that "trodd'st" somehow brings to mind Gen. 3:15? Via which translation would anybody connect that word with Gen. 3:15? None that I can find. Surely you must have noticed that, too, when you did your translation study.

"Him" was changed to "it" (I'm guessing) because it was thought that death is better referred to as an "it" rather than a "him." You can disagree with that decision (which I'm guessing that you will), but I'm just trying to be transparent as to how and why (according to my recollection) this decision was made.

Speaking of transparency, I'm surprised you didn't notice this HUGE problem with this stanza when it was on the CoW Web site for well over a year for folks to pick at. You could have done your picking much more profitably then than now. Or maybe you did, and the committee still wanted to get rid of "trodd'st" and so didn't take your suggestion to keep it. It's one thing to complain about something; it's quite another to complain and then present a workable solution/alternative. Do you have a workable alternative that would get rid of the archaic word "trodd'st" but do better than "crushed"?

In the larger context, this stanza underwent a very MILD updating of the language. While I would agree that "crushed" does not convey the imagery of the feet as well as "trodd'st," the allusion to Gen. 3:15 is not lost entirely, as you seem to suggest.

So start keeping a list. Seriously. I know it may sound a bit premature ,but these are the kinds of translation issues that will go into the formation of the next book for the next generation. You can be sure that some of the translation "problems" with LW fed into the thinking of LSB. We tried to "fix" as many as we could see. The "problems" with LSB (which I like to think are fewer than LW) will also need to be "fixed" in the next hymnal, D.v.

Maybe you'll even "lucky" enough to be on the committee that gets to make those popular decisions. :)

Susan said...

>>are you suggesting that "trodd'st" somehow brings to mind Gen. 3:15?<<

It brings to mind "feet."

And yes, I made the suggestions at the right time and to the right committee, once upon a long time ago.

Eric Phillips said...

viekerhaus,

You could've just changed "Thou trod'st" to "You trod." Except... I'll bet there was a mandate to keep the thees and thous while getting rid of howlers such as "wert," "hadst," and "trodst." Is that right?

That's a bad quandary.

Eric Phillips said...

Wait, hold on.... I just noticed that "Thou" DID get changed to "You." So why didn't "trod'st" just turn into "trod"?

Anonymous said...

>Wait, hold on.... I just noticed that "Thou" DID
>get changed to "You." So why didn't "trod'st" just
>turn into "trod"?

You're right. "Trod" might have been a possible solution. I'm guessing, however, that the preterite of "tread" (i.e. "trod") itself sounded archaic, although certainly not obsolete.

I suspect more than anything else, though, that the committee was drawn to "crushed" because of the NIV's translation of Gen. 3:15, which (for better or for worse) has been ringing in our ears for over 20 years now. And then there is also Rom 16:20: "The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet"; not to mention a number of other instances in a variety of translations that use "crush" in relation to feet. So, "crush" probably seemed pretty reasonable at the time. (I think it still does, BTW.) :)

Now, check this out! I was looking at the German on this, and there is absolutely nothing there about "treading," "crushing" or even "dust." Roughly translated, Heermann's German says:

"Let me trust in your death,
O my God and confidence!
Let me firmly build on it,
That I not taste death!
Let your deathly anguish
Continually enliven me powerfully;
Lord, let your death give me
Resurrection, salvation, and life!

So take that up with TLH, LW, or LSB! Even the venerable 1912 ELHB didn't get this translated "right"! IOW, we've been singing this "wrong" for over 100 years!!

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to hymn "translations." I think it's more accurate to call them "renderings."