Found in translation

Christ is risen!

The Pious Reader undoubtedly noticed that, to paraphrase Winnie-the-Pooh, my English is not well. I am not a native speaker of the mother tongue of William Stafford and Kurt Vonnegut and often struggle to understand or express with the eloquence of Milton and Byron. I am OK with the English of Beowulf but much more comfortable with the Old East Slavic of the Izbornik of Sviatoslav. So, when I first heard the English phrase “the translation of a saint’s relics,” it was not in the context of Speculum Sacerdotale or W. Marshall’s translation of the Defense of Peace or even H. David’s Fitzrovians. Of course, it was easy to understand what it meant, but the phrase sounded a bit odd - like a pretentious way of saying the transfer or the moving of. The corresponding Russian phrase is more direct; it is unimaginatively the carrying-over of the relics from one town to another - a literal translation of the Latin translatus, the past participle of transferre. (And in the case of such carryings-over of holy relics by Venetian and French crusaders from Constantinople to Western Europe in 1204, the usual terms used are looting and pillaging.)