VML wrote:please can they be Beatitudes, not Happitudes... Surely blessed and happy are very different words, Benedict and Felix in all their forms are not the same.
Quite a hard word to translate, I think. The Greek is
makarios, and in Latin it's not
benedictus or
felix but
beatus. Maybe it's hard to translate because English just doesn't have enough different words for this area of meaning.
Happy corresponds best to
felix, I suppose – perhaps because both carry overtones of good fortune (I think the ‘hap’ in
happy is the same as in
happen). And
blessed conjures up the same meaning as
benedictus, involving an action of God rather than a condition of the individual. So with these two words not exactly fitting the bill, there doesn’t seem to be another word that comes closer in English to the sense of ‘you are on the right path’ which seems to me what the beatitudes are about.
I wonder whether French might have the same problem. It looks as though you can have
heureux or
bienheureux or
béni (and the translation used in the French Missal opts for
heureux). I don’t know whether there’s a difference in meaning between
heureux and
bienheureux, though. So maybe there’s more room for manoeuvre in French.
So if you have to choose between the English words my gut feeling is that
blessed is a little closer to the meaning (because being on the right path is something that comes about only with God’s help?) but that
happy is a simpler and more direct word that maybe succeeds better in speaking to and from the heart. I’m the co-author of a setting of these words, and we opted for
happy after thinking about both choices, though without spelling it all out quite like this!
This looks good:
http://www.incommunion.org/Blessed1.htm