Bees’ work
April 9, 2012, 9:41 am
Posted by Mollie Wilson O'Reilly
With all the new and unfamiliar liturgical texts in use this Easter, you might not have noticed every tweak to the Exsultet. (After all, you probably didn’t have to recite it.) But the sudden appearance of the “mother bees” at the very end probably caught your attention. If you’re curious to know what that’s all about, do check out this informative article by Rita Ferrone that we published a couple years back: “Virgil & the Vigil: The Bees Are Coming Back to the Exsultet.”
Thanks for the reminder.
In the secular world last week, there was hopeful news about bees as well. Researchers think they’ve identified the cause, or at least a cause of “colony collapse disorder”:
“A common pesticide used increasingly in recent years for crops such as corn and soybeans is the probable culprit in the destruction of honeybee colonies around the world, a study released Thursday by researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health has found.
The researchers said they found convincing evidence of the link between the pesticide known as imidacloprid and honeybees abandoning their hives, or colony collapse disorder, which they say began occurring in 2006 on a scale and scope never seen before in the history of the beekeeping industry.”
http://articles.boston.com/2012-04-06/metro/31294730_1_colony-collapse-bees-common-pesticide
Maybe 2012 will be a good year for “mother bees” in more ways than one.
Mollie, thanks so much for linking to that article. It was written back when I was more sanguine about the prospect for improvement through the translation process.
I am sorry to say, they bolixed it up. The sad reality is that the translation takes a singular (apis mater: mother bee) and makes it into the plural in English (mother bees), a proceeding that Liturgiam Authenticam specifically forbids (oh, but that was part of the crusade against inclusive language, not anything else). In short, the quest for an exact translation, the demand to keep singulars singular and not plural, seems not to have mattered one iota here. This despite the whole typological connection between the mother bee (singular) and the Blessed Virgin (singular).
Why? What could override both exactitude AND keeping the beautiful tradition embodied in this lovely text? Msgr. Bruce Harbert, executive director of ICEL during the time of this translation, told us in the post at the Pray Tell Blog, that the reason is that modern science has determined that the mother bee doesn’t produce wax.
Well. Why changing it to a plural could even possibly solve this “problem” (I don’t think it’s a problem; it’s a poem, not a scientific treatise) remains one of the unanswered questions of the current translation.
But the result, in any case, is that the symbolism of the “mother bee” as an icon of the Blessed Virgin Mary is muddled at best.
The canons for the Holy Thursday and Easter vigil liturgies are verbose, repetitious, and cloyingly obsequious. Apart from that….
If we can’t find people who know how to write decent prose, maybe we ought to just go back to the Latin. It would be easier on the ears.
1) The use of the plural by the devious translators suggests that the reference is to the Barberini bees, the symbols of the papal family which are ubiquitous in Rome. Just kidding.
2) “. . . bees were highly valued. Virgil’s poem describes their habits and praises their virtues. . . Virgil may also have been interested in describing an ideal human society using bees as a model.”
Virgil may have had second thoughts about bees since he later uses the same imagery when describing Aeneas’s first impression of Carthage, a materially successful but in Virgil’s view a far from ideal society and highly irreligious, particularly in comparison with Rome:
“Here men were dredging harbors, there they laid
The deep foundations of a theatre,
And quaried massive pillars to enhance
The future stage – as bees in early summer
In sunlight in the flowering fields
Hum at their work, and bring along the young
Full-grown to beehood; as they cram their combs
With honey, brimming all the cells with nectar,
Or take newcomers’ plunder, or like troops
Alerted, drive away the lazy drones
And labor thrives and sweet thyme scents the honey.”
Aeneid I, 428-38 (Fitzgerald)
It might be good to have a link to the actual text of the Exsultet to help the discussion. I didn’t pay much attention to it myself: I was careful to listen to our cantor’s voice but not to his words, because I knew the text would distract me and make me wince.
Thus I am shifting to a mode of participation that is primarily aesthetic (beautiful voice; beautiful and moving sight of candle lights filling the church) and disconnected from the actual words being uttered. Using my senses, but not my reason, I may be gradually preparing myself for some future day when those prayers might be said in Latin again, as suggested by Bernard. That is not what I want, but what can we do when the text of the prayers is an obstacle to praying?
There was also, last week, a Maundy Thursday entry in America’s blog criticizing the words used for consecration, see http://www.americamagazine.org/blog/entry.cfm?blog_id=1&entry_id=5037
I did not see this post and article in time for the Vigil, but I heard the bees in the Exsultet on Saturday (they rate a couple of mentions, I believe), and I am glad to have them back.
The text is available in a pdf at this site.
http://www.npm.org/Chants/proper.html
A critic, I forget which, exemplified the importance of matching the physicality of words with their meaning by contrasting the lovely phrase of Tennyson’s, “the murmuring of innumerable bees”, with the made-up horror “the murdering of innumerable beeves”.
Thanks, Jim, and don’t worry – I didn’t write the post in time for the Vigil either. ;-)
Rita, thanks for the follow up – depressing but not surprising.
As a quondam bee keeper I am delighted to get the bee back into the liturgy but there is really only one mother bee – the queen.
Ann: do you not love Yeats’s “bee loud glade” in the Lake Isle of Innisfree?
Lawrence, I know you directed this to Ann, but I want to respond because I love Yeats’ “bee-loud glade” — what a brilliant poem in every way!
I often think of it… and it ends so poignantly:
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
Paul –Yes! “bee loud” is at once a combination of abstract and concrete — a tour de force. He doesn’t *say* they’re zzzzing, but we can hear them :-)
Rita — Yes, one of the great ones.
The appeal of bees is so strong that I think we must have a bee-loving gene. I hadn’t seen a bee in my yard for many years, but recently I saw just one and was ridiculously pleased — A bee! A bee! They’re actually rather nasty little beasts :-)