Styles of Translation: Hopkins’ Bibles

Hopkins was not a success in the pulpit. A chronicle of disappointment is written into his sermon book, recalling among other things the penitent who admitted in the confessional to having slept through parts of Hopkins’ homily, and, most excruciatingly, the occasion Hopkins believed he had moved his congregation to the extent “that I even saw some wiping their tears, but when the same thing happened next week I perceived that it was hot and that it was sweat they were wiping away.”¹ Such letdowns were familiar to this most idiosyncratic of preachers. The famous story told about Hopkins comparing in a sermon the munificence of the Roman Catholic Church to a milk cow whose seven teats are like the seven sacraments is of doubtful provenance, but one cannot argue with the likelihood of its fiction.² Hopkins once told his congregation that the sending of the Paraclete to the apostles at Pentecost was akin to “when one of the batsmen at the wicket” in a cricket match “has made a hit and wants to score a run, the other doubts, hangs back, or is ready to run in again, how eagerly the first will cry / Come on, come on!” (Sermons, p. 70). This conception of the Holy Spirit is more quaint than strange, as is finding the way two miracles are interlaced within the same Gospel story comparable to “when you drive a quill or straw or knitting needle through an egg, it pierces first the white, then the yolk, then the white again” (Sermons, p. 30). The same cannot be said for a training sermon Hopkins gave at the Jesuit college in North Wales in 1877. Taking for his subject the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand, Hopkins gave special notice to Christ’s seemingly routine instruction to his disciples in advance of the meal to “Make the men sit down” (Luke 9.14; Sermons, pp. 225–233). “People laughed at it prodigiously,” Hopkins observed in a note in his sermon book, “I saw some of them roll on their chairs with laughter.” The oddity of the sermon’s invocations of scripture provided particular hilarity, with the labored repetition of “Make the men sit down” causing the congregation to “roll more than ever,” and, in the end, forcing Hopkins to cut short his planned discourse (p. 233).

All this is evidence of the peculiarity Hopkins acknowledged others saw in him, even if he struggled to see it in himself. But is it anything more? At the risk of embellishing simple ingenuousness, there is, I suggest, a way in which these foibles are the outworking of something more profound, namely an assurance about the expansiveness of the Gospel. No doubt making Hopkins’ fellow students laugh all the harder in the training sermon was the fact that Christ’s instruction was rendered not only in the sacred languages of Greek and Latin, but, more improbably for his otherwise resolutely Anglophone fellow-students, Welsh (Sermons, p. 231). This perhaps confirmed a growing reputation for eccentricity, but judging from the rest of the sermon, what Hopkins seems to have hoped to illustrate, if only in a small way, is that Christ’s message speaks anew in every circumstance. The Sea of Galilee is not only “shaped something like a bean or a man’s left ear” but can also be compared—as Hopkins proceeded to do at some length—with the topography of the Vale of Clwyd (Sermons, pp. 225–226). In both literal and figurative cases the point of the translation would appear to be that the Word of God is as original and vital in nineteenth-century North Wales as in first-century Israel; however unlikely his manner of illustration, Hopkins wished to demonstrate that all can be unified in its truth. The moments in his sermons when inaptness seems almost to be cultivated, the associations deliberately far-fetched, were perhaps not wholly the product of pulpit naiveté; they may also have been tokens of a trust that there is nowhere the divine Word cannot speak. The sadness of Hopkins’ preaching career is that this confidence...