Very interesting, and about you both. I’m alive to the way Andrew thought about his translation of gentile. Sometimes a “literal” translation just won’t do, especially when a critical target word in a living language has two different messages because its usage has changed almost ninety degrees in the last 500 years. What was reasonable long ago might be much less clear to a linguistic stranger from outside the mother tongue who might read an anachronistic modern military directive into a simple children’s prayer that has remained in use to this day. The case in point is in my book on Amazon (“Allen Tice” search word), and the vexed word is “befehl” in the last poem, a translation.
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