ARTICLES

The Translator's Vision

USF PROFESSOR ERASMO LEIVA

By John R. Dunlap

"Ever since I was a little boy, I really liked foreign languages very much," recalls University of San Francisco professor Erasmo Leiva. When his family moved to the United States from Cuba in 1959, Leiva was 12 and fluent only in Spanish. In Cuba, where his parents had settled after World War II, "my [Greek-American] mother spoke to us in English some of the time...and the fact that she spoke Greek fascinated me."

The public high school he attended in Miami was strong in languages. Leiva quickly became fluent in English, and also studied French, German, and Latin.

He then spent two years as a novice at the Trappist Monastery of the Holy Spirit in Conyers, Georgia. He left, however, "with a kind of heavy heart. My thought was, I want to finish college, I want to get an education -- but I will probably come back someday."

Instead, after "the most checkered undergraduate career," he met his future wife while working in Texas, and, after marriage, finished his BA in French at the University of St. Thomas in Houston.

The French major was "a matter of counting units" after "a semester here and a semester there," plus some college units acquired in the Trappist novitiate. "I just needed a BA so I could get into graduate school. To tell you the truth, I really wanted to do Greek and Latin -- because that's always been my great love. But I just didn't have enough units [for a degree in the classical languages]."

Graduate school became more focused. After a brief stint at Rice University, Leiva was awarded a Danforth scholarship which he took to the Institute of Liberal Arts at Emory University in Atlanta, an interdisciplinary graduate program "where I could do literature and theology at the same time."

"I had known about [the Institute] back from my monastic days at Conyers. One of the monks...was getting his doctorate there, and sometimes teachers from that program would come and lecture at the monastery [in Conyers, 20 miles from Atlanta].

"I've never been a professional philosopher or even a professional theologian -- I've always been interested in the concreteness of literature...and the theological dimensions of literature."

The interest explains Leiva's attraction to the work of the Swiss Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-1988). Leiva discovered von Balthasar by accident (he prefers to think of the encounter as "providential") during the spring of 1971, early in his graduate school career.

Browsing in the school library, he happened on von Balthasar's seven-volume theological opus Herrlichkeit ("The Glory of the Lord"). "My German wasn't yet that good...but just reading the table of contents, I couldn't believe the meeting there of all my literary interests with this theological framework within which he was discussing literature. I said [to myself], I can't believe that something like this exists. So learning German -- one of my primary reasons [for acquiring fluency in German] was to be able to read von Balthasar."

To Leiva, von Balthasar is "a theologian who refuses to turn theology into an autonomous science with laws and rules of its own, trying to approximate something like philosophy -- in a way that [the late Jesuit theologian Karl] Rahner tends to do."

Von Balthasar's theology is "a continuation of a contemplative act...revelation is not parcels of intelligible propositions [addressed to] the intellect, but rather... being approached by the living God on His own initiative and His manifestation of Himself as a Person."

There is always a response to God's revelation of Himself, which "takes many different forms: fear, awe, glory, praise, and so forth -- and theology is one of the possible responses which develop out of that contemplation of what God has shown Himself to be.

"I think this is how von Balthasar defines the theological task of a Christian -- it's more along the lines of the Eastern Fathers and the Eastern tradition, in which they never separate theology [from Scripture]."

Von Balthasar's way of doing theology is thus "to approach the Divine through parable and image rather than through abstract principle." And it was characteristic of von Balthasar to have remarked several decades ago that the best theology of the 1940s was being written by the French novelist Georges Bernanos.

At Emory, Leiva took his Ph.D. in 1975, making extensive use of von Balthasar as "the very frame of reference" for his dissertation on the Austrian religious poet Georg Trakl (1887-1914). The project involved a year's residence in Austria, "where I really learned my German."

Leiva's friends at Emory had urged him to consider translating von Balthasar for English-speakers. In a letter to the Swiss theologian, Leiva broached the topic, and "one thing led to another." It was 1976, and von Balthasar referred Leiva to Ignatius Press, a San Francisco publishing house just starting up, partly to make the works of von Balthasar available in English. Ignatius Press needed translators, and the fledgling Ignatius Institute at USF needed faculty. Leiva and his family settled in San Francisco in 1977.

Leiva's translations of von Balthasar so far include the first volume of The Glory of the Lord and such shorter works as The Threefold Garland and Heart of the World. In most of his publications, he goes by the hyphenated name Leiva-Merikakis, reflecting his Spanish-Greek heritage at the urging of Mireya, his Mexican-Lebanese wife of 29 years, who believes strongly in family continuity.

Recently, he has also published Fire of Mercy, Heart of the Word -- a lengthy meditation on the Gospel of St. Matthew. Much of Leiva's written work falls under the rubric of "spirituality."

Asked to define the term, Leiva responds slowly. "Spirituality -- in the way we see it in von Balthasar and the great Catholic authors of this century -- is really the living of the Christian mystery."

The accent, according to Leiva, is not so much "states of consciousness" or "techniques of meditation" or "becoming aware of the spirit within"; in the Catholic context, spirituality "in Biblical terms would simply be God's call to the Church and to every member of the Church to live the mystery of revelation in Christ -- that's really what 'spirituality,' I think, should be."

Leiva hesitates a moment, pointing to a retreat pamphlet. "A chill always goes up my back when I see what [spirituality] has become even in a Catholic context...on the one hand, nothing specifically bad; on the other hand, [it's] so non-specifically Christian that it's a kind of vagueness of the spirit: tune in, become aware, experience yourself in a way that you didn't know before, et cetera, et cetera -- the whole thing is so self-involved.

"Nowhere is there anything about the Cross or renunciation, much less any concept of death-to-self: nothing to do with the Gospel...nothing to do specifically with the mystery of Christ."

At best, as a substitute for the dimension of suffering in the Christian faith, there's "a kind of exemplarism [in the spirituality of progressivist Christians] eviscerating Good Friday -- you know, works of social involvement and so forth...it's not the stuff of which martyrs are made -- using 'martyr' even in the wider sense of giving one's life for something because that something is greater than you...no, it's very bourgeois -- narcissistic, apparently."

Leiva sees the same kind of trouble in the vogue for inclusive language. The deliberate avoidance, for example, of the masculine pronoun for God "has this kind of semiotic advantage: if you keep on repeating the word 'God' in this neutral way, all of a sudden, if He's not 'Father,' He is no longer the God of revelation; so it's possible then to detach the concept of the Divine from any particular history or any particular form of revelation -- or any personhood. [You can then] fill this empty concept [of divinity] with whatever happens to suit yourself.

"When that happens, not only do you not have Christianity any more; you're not even dealing with an authentic religion. ** An animist adoring a river probably has a truer concept of the Transcendent than [do] the so-called Catholics and Christians around us who have simply reduced everything to their own persons and imaginations and needs."

Leiva recalls the advice of C.S. Lewis and T.S. Eliot that "not everything spiritual is good." "The dichotomy is not between the material and the spiritual; the dichotomy is between the God of revelation and everything that opposes Him."

Inclusive language was a bone of contention in Leiva's work on another project: translating the Catechism of the Catholic Church. The initial English translation from French was "the most lackluster thing"; so Rome asked three Americans, including Leiva, to produce alternate translations. The finished product "was none of these [translations] individually -- they tried to take the best from each."

A more recent project is Leiva's translation of the memoirs of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith since 1981. The autobiographical reflection, covering the first fifty years of Ratzinger's life (1927-1977), will soon be published by Ignatius.

Leiva hopes the memoirs will counter the harsh image of Cardinal Ratzinger cultivated by some Catholic activists. "It's the story of a man who wants to be faithful to the Catholic tradition in a particularly enlightened way -- he has very good reasons for [his loyalty to the Church's tradition]...he's a man of great stability, of great intelligence, but above all of great service."

Rather like the late Father Hans Urs von Balthasar, in Leiva's view. Why is von Balthasar largely ignored today? "I often wonder why people neglect him," says Leiva. "They don't even know about him. If I were to read nothing but the Bible and von Balthasar until the day I died, I'd not be an impoverished man at all."

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