Lo Nou Testament. Traducció de Josep Melcior Prat

Lo Nou Testament. Traducció de Josep Melcior Prat, transcripció a cura
d'Antoni Coll i Casals, notes de Pere Casanellas i Bassols; estudi
introductori de Pau Alegre i Nadal, Carme Capó i Fuster, Antoni Coll i
Casals, Pere Casanellas i Bassols; glossari d'Antoni Coll i Casals, Pere
Casanellas i Bassols, revisat per Albert Rossich, Barcelona: Associació
Bíblica de Catalunya, Publicacions de l'Abadia de Montserrat, 2008 (Corpus
Biblicum Catalanicum, 38), ISBN 978-84-8415-948-3, CLXXXIV+433 pgs.

The 19th century is not only the century when a large number of formerly
spoken European vernaculars – including such that could count on an earlier
written, but interrupted tradition – are elaborated in writing, but it is
also a century marked by the intensification of Bible translations and
worldwide distribution of Christian texts in many languages. The first
tendency is strongly related to the thought of the 18th century and can in
part be interpreted as a counter-reaction to the uniformist linguistic and
cultural tendencies that spread throughout the world with the ideals of the
Enlightenment and the French Revolution; the latter tendency, also related
to the Enlightenment, has its centre of gravity in the British Bible
movement at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century, with
the foundation of the British and Foreign Bible Society in 1804 and the
ideal of making the text of the Bible accessible to as many people in the
world as possible, by preference in their respective native tongue. Both
tendencies are intensely related in many ways and lead to a fruitful
symbiosis; so, for several of the 19th century vernacular emancipation
movements, the Bible texts promoted by the British Bible Society in the
first decades of the century are the first extensive texts in prose these
movements can be built up on. A later continuation of this activity can be
observed from the 1850s onwards, with a more linguistic and less religious
motivation, when Louis Lucien Bonaparte, Napoleon's intellectual nephew,
publishes in London versions of the Gospel According to Matthew in many
European languages and dialects as a comparative basis for linguistic
description.
The Catalan New Testament published in the present edition by the Catalan
Bible Society as no. 38 of the Corpus Biblicum Catalanicum is another good
example for this connection: translated in England by a Catalan politician
and intellectual in exile during the 1820s as a commissional work for the
British and Foreign Bible Society, it was first published in London in
1832, with subsequent editions in Barcelona and Madrid. It is the second
volume published in the Corpus series, after the publication of a part of a
14th century Catalan Bible. The number 38 is due to the complete project
with the purpose of publishing a comprehensive corpus of Catalan Bibles
from the 14th up to the 20th century.
José Melchior Prat's translation is the first extensive Catalan prose text
in the 19th century, published at the beginning of the so-called Catalan
Renaixença, the literary emancipation of Catalan from the 1830s onwards,
and this is what makes it particularly important for the history of the
written Catalan Ausbau. The translator's task was not only to reproduce the
text of the New Testament in another language but to create a new discourse
tradition in that language, with only the help of some basic referential
works such as the Joseph Pau Ballot's Gramatica y apología de la Llengua
Cathalana published in 1814 and the trilingual Catalan-Spanish-Latin
dictionary by Joaquim Esteve, Josep Bellvitges and Antoni Jutglà (1803-
1805).
This creation counted on the collaboration of another Catalan, Ramon
Bussanya, who lived, as did Prat, in exile in the small Yorkshire town of
Knaresborough during the 1820s, and on revisions and comments by various
other Catalans from different regions (p. LXX), which means that the aim of
the translation was not only to create a dialect translation but to
contribute to the creation of a kind of Catalan koiné, an objective only
partially achieved due to the rather marginal position of this texts in the
Catalan 19th century and because of a certain dependence on the models that
served as a basis for the translation: apparently, the Catalan version was
translated directly from the Vulgata, but in fact six other versions
furtherly served as sources for the text (the Spanish versions by Cipriano
de Valera from 1602, by Felipe Scío from the end of the 18th century and by
Félix Torres Amat from 1823; the Italian version by Antonio Martini, the
French version by Isaac-Louis Le Maistre Sacy and, finally, the 1611 King
James Version). It seems to be Torres Amat's Spanish version that shows the
strongest influence on the Catalan text. In fact, Félix Torres Amat was not
only a kin of Prat and a famous Spanish theologian and Bible translator,
but also the fist person the British Bible Society contacted and charged of
a Catalan Bible translation, a project that never came to existence for
theological reasons: whereas the British Bible Society aimed to publish a
pure text version without footnotes and comments, the Catholic church had
ordered to publish the sacred texts generally together with references that
indicated patristic comments, and Torres Amat, even if he initially had
accepted to prepare two separate versions, an annotated one in order to
satisfy the Catholic authorities and a "pure" one in order to satisfy the
principles of the protestant Bible Society, finally decided to reject the
proposal, probably because of the anti-protestant ideology that dominated
the Spanish Catholic clergy. Anyway, the person of Torres Amat seems to be
crucial for the history of the 19th century Bible translations into Spanish
vernaculars since he is not only the contact person between Spain and the
British Bible Society on this occasion; his Spanish New Testament would
also serve as a model for the Asturian and the Galician Bible translations
published in London a few decades later by the mentioned Louis Lucien
Bonaparte[1]. Further investigation on Torres Amat and the Spanish-British
Bible connection would be an interesting task.
The present edition of the New Testament consists of three thematic
introductory chapters, a glossary containing all the words that can be
found in the text but not in present day Catalan dictionaries, a
bibliography and an annotated edition of the text Bible text.
The first introductory chapter, by Pau Alegre i Nadal, describes the life
of Joseph Melchior Prat (his name, according to present Catalan usage,
appears as Catalanised even if Prat signed as José Melchor Prat during
lifetime and probably spoke Spanish rather than Catalan, p. XXXIV), an
important Spanish politician, member of the 1808 generation and deputy at
the Cádiz Parliament; his political activity, his relationship with other
intellectuals like Capmany, Torres Amat or Puigblanch, the destiny shared
with other liberals condemned to exile from 1823 onwards, his time in
Britain, his return to Spain and his late cultural, intellectual and
political life. The information on Prat's intellectual life is not too
detailed, but it is well documented and clearly presented, even if the
relationship between some of the data on the family history and the Bible
translation seem rather secondary.
The second chapter of the introduction, by Carme Capó i Fuster,
reconstructs the historical circumstances that lead to the Bible
translation, from the creation of the British and Foreign Bible Society
until the detailed history of the British contacts to Catalan intellectuals
in order to get a Catalan translation. This chapter offers not only
interesting historical information on the Catalan-British cultural
relationship in the first half of the nineteenth century but also, in a
more general way, about the international diffusion of Bible translations
in the 19th century and its international impact on linguistic diversity.
Finally, the third part of the introduction, by Antoni Coll and Pere
Casanellas, tells us the concrete historical and linguistic background of
Prat's Bible translations – not only the one of the New Testament, but also
the project of translation of the whole Bible, fragmentarily achieved by
Prat and to be published soon as nr. 39 of the same Bible corpus series.
This chapter not only explains how it happened that Prat came to translate
the text but also reconstructs the concrete translation process and the
unification and correction of the manuscripts, with several persons
involved. The study also offers some remarks on the sources, and in some
passages it is remarkable how Prat adapts the text freely without
hesitating to prefer certain theological interpretations, as in Luke 2, 14,
where the Vulgata passage pax hominibus bonae voluntatis is translated as
"als homes bona voluntat" (as in King James "goodwill toward men") and not
as in Torres Amat's Spanish version, where it says "a los hombres de buena
voluntad", 'good will to the people' (cf. "among men with good will"). The
authors of the chapter offer very rich information, but also a few
contradictory statements, e.g. when it is said that the popular classes at
the beginning of the 19th century used to consume literature in the
autochthonous language (p. LXII), which must simply be an error, or when
after a large explanation on the sources of the translation it is stated
that the translation had been made from the Vulgata (p. XLV) and the
difference between what is said to be done and what is done really is not
made. But these are only some minor critical remarks on a generally well
written chapter with rich documentation.
The edition of the Bible text itself is presented with the complete
indication of variants from the different Catalan editions and exhaustive
critical comments on the sources. The orthography of the text has been
adapted to contemporary Catalan usage. This is of course regrettable if we
have in mind that an important part of the possible readership of this
volume will be interested in the history of the language, including
orthographic details, especially if we think that the historical importance
of this texts derives also from the fact that it contains a kind of
orthographic proposal for written Catalan. There seems to be a general
tendency that communities with a rather unstable orthographic tradition try
to show the "normality" of their language actualizing literary texts that
date from times previous to a unified orthographic codification; this might
make sense in the case of texts for a massive readership, but I do not see
any reason to modify originals in the case of an edition basically destined
to scientific purposes. The text itself is written in a rather fluent and
homogeneous Catalan. Some, but not all passages show a certain degree of
dependence on the Spanish model, and further research should determine the
position of the language of this text in the history of the Catalan
language in the nineteenth century.
The present edition of the 19th century Catalan New Testament is, apart
from the eternal editorial discussion on actualization (where I would
rather defend a conservative position against actualization), a well
elaborated volume with interesting information on the individual history of
this important text and on its position in the Catalan Renaixença of the
19th century, and we hope that further editions in the same series – such
as Prat's version of the Old Testament – will be appearing soon.

Tübingen University
Johannes Kabatek
-----------------------
[1] The Galician and the Asturian versions of the Gospel According to
Matthew were both published in London in 1861; see Johannes Kabatek, "O
príncipe Louis Lucien Bonaparte: precursor da lingüística galega", Cadernos
de Lingua 6 (1992), 5–26 and "'Estamos dando principio ahora á la gramática
asturiana' – Louis Lucien Bonaparte, Manuel Fernández de Castro y la
elaboración del asturiano escrito", Actas del I Conceyu Internacional de
Lliteratura Asturiana, Uviéu [Oviedo]: Academia de la Llingua Asturiana
2003, 23-51.