Dulce Jesús mío

Following on from a recent musing [in the parish mag] , I was thinking today that languages can be difficult things to sing if you don’t speak them.  Imagine, for example, a French choir wanting to sing “We plough the fields and scatter”.  “Ow do we say zees word plough?’, they would ask.  “Ees eet ‘pluff’, like ze rough?  ‘ploff’ like ze cough? ‘ploo’, like through?  ‘ploch’, like lough? ‘ploe’ like ze dough? ‘plugh’, as in ze borough? ‘plup’, comme ze hiccough? ‘plow’, like ze bough? Or ‘plor’, like ze bought?”

 

Sensitive as French people would be about pronunciation after the rebuke from Pius X that I mentioned a couple of months ago, I think the last thing they would do, the people of this choir, would be to take a vote on it.  They, being French, and punctilious about matters of language, would find an English person and ask  (they would probably still end up pronouncing it pompyloo, but that’s because they, the French, do like to do things their own way, bless ’em.)

 

I only mention this because the other night, in another place where singists gather, exactly this hiatus of ignorance occurred in relation to the pronunciation of a foreign place-name, and unbelievably, unless you are acquainted with the peculiar ways in which English committee democracy work, a vote was taken, despite that fact that at least two people in the room knew exactly how it should be pronounced.

 

It reminded me of a similar incident years ago, with a very different choir - the pronunciation of a Latin word being decided by a show of hands.  It was a triumph of democracy over education and knowledge, and it reminded me of a very useful maxim given to me by a French part-time monk, a good friend and mentor, when I was in my formative years - “democracy is the enemy of excellence.” (If you think I’m making this all up - his name was Fr Bernard Dick, and he was pear-shaped.)

 

Language matters.  The language of a culture embodies the distinctness of that culture, and when a language dies (as Welsh very nearly did 30 years ago) a whole culture dies with it, and in that death a unique history is lost for ever.

 

One of the more enjoyable jobs that I’ve been doing on and off for the last three years is making performing editions for some singist chums of music from the period of the conquistadores.  Older members of the congregation might remember stout Cortez, who introduced Christianity and influenza to South America, and who was wont to stand upon peaks in Darien (or so Keats tells us) and survey, with his men, the wild Pacific, and have a bit of a ponder (or surmise) thereupon. One of the more interesting consequences of their trips to South America is that the Jesuits founded missions (or “reducciones”), and churches, and eventually cathedrals, and they had thoughtfully taken with them some composers and instrumentalists and singers and the tools of their trade.  The clash of Catholic Spanish culture with the ancient religions and musical cultures  of South America had unexpectedly fruitful consequences for  church music.  In large parts of Bolivia the teachings of the Jesuits sparked off a cultural revolution, and in a very short time local people, particularly children, were singing western music and playing western instruments in missions and churches.

 

Enthused by the ready acceptance of catholicism by the indigenous peoples, the composers set to work with a will.  Years behind them, their continent, Europe, had changed, and the new musical ideas of the Renaissance were beginning to take hold.  But the composers now living in South America had learnt their art in the last years of the Baroque, and that was the style of composition that they knew.  They were working with willing musicians from a completely different culture, and the exchange of ideas must have been wonderful for them, and there was a cross-fertilisation that produced an entirely new offshoot of the Baroque - old-style European church music reinvigorated by the music of a completely different, even alien, culture, an historical hiccup that has only really come to light in the last thirty years or so, mainly thanks to one man - Fr Piotr Nawrot, a Polish priest who has been transcribing much of this forgotten music.  That I was able to get my greedy hands on four volumes of Fr Nawrot’s recensions is entirely due to the efforts  of my dear friend-of-old,  Dr Viv Burr, Reader in Psychology at the University of Huddersfield, who in her spare time does the occasional two-woman recital with soprano Mandy Doyle, and who is also very good at lending people books of interesting old music and then smiling sweetly and saying “could we have, say, four duets by November?”

  

The texts of a lot of the choral music from this period are in Castilian Spanish, which is easy enough to understand and translate, but some of it is in Chiquitano, a Bolivian language from the region now known as Chiquitanía (accent on the last I, please) which is jolly difficult to pronounce or translate if you don’t have a dictionary (and as far as I know there isn’t one.)  Further, Chiquitano has undergone a spelling reform  as part of a very worthy drive by S American scholars to preserve and reinvigorate languages that live in speech but don’t have much of a written record, and reformed Chiquitano doesn’t look an awful lot like ancient Chiquitano, which might make singing the following hymn a bit of a challenge, even for the most accomplished linguist (the music, but only for v1, is in the following post.)

But first, the text.  The first two verses are in Spanish; the rest in Chiquitano.  The English translations I confess to, and no, I don't know a single word of Chiquitano, but Fr Nawrot thoughtfully provided Spanish glosses and it's those I've translated.

And this is fingers-crossed time - I've tried to use non-Ascii IPA characters on the blog before, and what I thought I'd left working happily on Sunday night had turned to garbage by Monday morning.  Your Chiquitano text should show an occasional lower-case i with a bar through it.

 

1. Dulce Jesús mío,             Sweet Jesu mine

mirad con piedad                Look with pity

mi alma perdida                  on my soul, damned                

por culpa mortal.                 by mortal sin

 

2. Llorad ojos míos,             Weep, mine eyes,

llorad sin cesar,                   weep without ceasing

a Dios ofendido                    to God, offended

con mi mal obrar.               by my wicked deeds

 

 

3. Yya1 Jesuchrixhto,         Lord Jesus Christ,

apuk1rui                         have pity on me,

ityaku  niyausus1p1           my soul damned

ninait1 sobi.                           by mortal sin

 

4. Apuk1rui,                          Have pity,

oxonx1 aemo,                       I am repentant:

chenauncup1 caima              without wishing to

n1nait1 sobi.                          I have offended thee

 

5. Asasat1 iñemo,                 Behold me -

ñonkat1 aemo,                      in thee I trust,

ache na graciax                    grant me thy grace

mo na uxia sobi.                   that I might be good

 

6. Acheityo uxhia                 and grant me

isonkobo,                               a good  death

niyasata aekat1                 thus allowing me to gaze upon thee

ta naesa ape.                         in heaven