Quem quaeritis?
“Whom are you looking for?” I couldn’t help but wince at this perfectly acceptable, but jarring translation from the Passion Gospel. There we go again, I thought. Yet another translator caving to “casual” in the desperate hope of being more effective!
The Latin Quem quaeritis - rendered best in English “Whom do you seek?” - radiates enormous power. Spoken by Jesus to those sent to arrest him, the phrase found its dramatic potential as the Angels’ question to the three women visiting Christ’s tomb. In Western music, the tri-fold exchange Quem Quaeritis became the generating nugget of Medieval liturgical drama:
Interrogatio. Quem quaeritis in sepulchro, o Christicolae?
Responsio. Jesum Nazarenum crucifixum, o caelicolae.
Angeli. Non est hic; surrexit, sicut praedixerat. Ite, nuntiate quia surrexit de sepulchroQuestion: Whom do ye seek in the sepulcher, O followers of Christ?
Answer: Jesus of Nazareth, the Crucified, O heavenly ones.
Angels: He is not here; he is risen, just as he foretold. Go, announce that he is risen from the sepulchre.- Translation: John Gassner, editor, Medieval and Tudor Drama.
The force of this exchange, set first to simple chant, then adorned by melismatic vocal lines, is assessed in the first volume of Howard Smither’s eloquent four-volume A History of the Oratorio:
A germ from which the visitation sepulchri dramas grew was the “Quem quaeritis,” a brief dialogue that first appears in manuscripts of the early tenth century. . . . This dialogue was performed before the mass of Easter morning. A gradual process of elaborating the “Quem quaeritis” resulted in a group of extended visitatio sepulchri dramas for Easter, as well as dramas modeled on them for the feasts of Christmas, Epiphany, and the Ascension.
Although three centuries would elapse between early liturgical utterances of Quem queritis and full-blown development of Italian oratorio (and without “continuous development from the former to the latter,” in Smither’s authoritative assessment), we still do well to remember the power of the word. The closer any translation can come to reflecting the force of the original, the better. Since English-speaking moderns (especially journalists and advertisers) have fled from the use of “whom,” and lapped up the casual construct “looking for” as a substitute for the verb “seek” - I find the combination “Whom are you looking for?” as odd as a woman dressed in a sequined top and worn-out joggers.
I wonder what kind of artistic development such a loosey-goosey translation is likely to engender in future generations.
