From the Jan/Feb, 2012 issue of Touchstone
What Is Man? by Anthony Esolen

What Is Man?

Anthony Esolen on What Raskolnikov Knew & Translators Have Lost

In an otherwise splendid work, the Catholics recently charged with translating the Mass from Latin into English dropped a word of tremendous mystery. On Ash Wednesday, when the priest marks the foreheads of the faithful with ashes, he says, echoing the words of God to Adam after the Fall, “Remember, man, that thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return.” At least, that is what the priest said when I was a boy. But in the meantime, the word man, in its inclusive sense, has come to be regarded as offensive to women. So the new translators blinked. The crucial word . . .


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