Tempus Adest Flóridum

Did you know that the tune for the Victorian-era Christmas song “Good King Wenceslas” is from a much older song, from the Age of Faith (c. 1300s)? And did you know that the words to that original song are all about Spring?

Some people think (quidam putant) that the tune better fits this Spring theme. After singing it and thinking about it, I agree! See below for the color-coded* lyric and a corresponding literal translation as well.

With this piece, as with virtually all Latin, we cannot decode word-for-word the Latin meaning into an exactly-corresponding English meaning. Latin has its correct way of “signaling meanings”, and English too has its own, which is completely different. As an example in this text, with English we would want the last line to be “And let us praise the Lord from the bottom of our hearts”; last noun there in the plural, to describe how each of us has a heart we want to turn to God. But the Latin for that idea of “from the bottom of our hearts” uses “pectoris–of (our) heart” singular, with a bit of a collective notion here for our hearts–as if they were all joined as one to do this praising of the Lord. So…the point of all this is to say that it is okay to translate this Latin singular “of our heart” into an English plural “of our hearts”, because we can see the two languages handle those differently when expressing the same general meaning. One more time: we are not decoding when we translate–we are expressing the same meaning between the different conventions of phrasing (and morphology, etc., etc.).

One last thought on this time of year, and a word from the title of this Latin song, before I go: in English our word “Lent” comes from the Old English term for the “lengthening” days of Spring. However, in Spanish they use a spring phrase not for Lent but rather for the Easter season–Pascua Florida (…which is the season when the Spaniards discovered modern Florida, by the way!). Flóridum/Flórida is the adjective “flowery” in Latin, and I wish Old English Catholics had named Easter after Spring the way the Spanish did, and not Lent! But blessed Lent to you all, and may it and Easter be valde flórida wherever you are!

* Key for Latin Case-Colors: