Tonight, I’m giving a presentation on my work to the Quaecumque Vera graduate fellowship of the St. Anselm Institute for Catholic Thought at UVA. I thought you all might be interested as well. Below my text, you’ll find a few project updates!
I’m Catherine Addington, a PhD candidate in the Spanish department. I’m currently working on my dissertation project, an English translation and critical edition of the writings of St. Rafael Arnáiz Barón. He was a Trappist oblate from Spain who died in 1938 at the age of 27, and was actually just canonized in 2009. He’s a very modern, down-to-earth, fascinating person, and I’d be happy to discuss his writings and spirituality further if you’re interested. Today, though, I want to talk less about the content of my dissertation and more about the process of writing it.
I’ve been working on my dissertation, a solitary task in its own right, under varying levels of quarantine and lockdown, and as a person who lives alone. So it’s been a good time to immerse myself in monastic life and thought. As you may know, Benedictine monastics, including the Trappists, structure their lives around two activities. Both are aimed at sanctifying the soul: ora et labora, “prayer and work.” In fact, in the Rule of Saint Benedict, prayer itself is referred to as “the work of God,” the primary task for which we are put on this earth. Prayer itself is work, and work can be prayer, if you let God accompany you in the fields or alongside the pots and pans…or at your desk. That’s usually the part where I get stuck. How can I make my work a prayer? If my dissertation is my work, how can I encounter God there and grow spiritually from it?
For me, those questions began at the very genesis of the project. I’m actually an early modernist by training. I focus on Catholic missionary literature in a Spanish colonial context, and my initial dissertation proposal surrounded the portrayal of Chinese laywomen in Spanish textual representations of the Dominican mission at Manila. In literature departments, that’s the traditional setup for an early-modern dissertation: do archival research, apply literary methods, then write a monograph that historians might want to read because that’s who cares about this sort of thing. But divine intervention doesn’t get much clearer than having an archival research project about Spain and China set to launch in the spring of 2020.
Divine Providence in the form of COVID having aggressively canceled that project, I read the signs of the times and proposed to my committee that I instead take on the project God had dropped in my lap a few years ago. Back then, I was looking for a spiritual director, and since I was hoping to work with a woman, I figured I’d go visit the only nuns around. The nun I met with that day, Sr. María Gonzalo, just so happens to be from Madrid, and just so happened to be looking for a Spanish-to-English translator for a project she was working on: you guessed it, the writings of St. Rafael. I thought I was there to get spiritual direction, but I was actually there to fulfill Sr. María’s request to God for a collaborator. What were the chances of another Spanish-to-English translator with a specialty in Catholic religious orders as discursive communities rolling through the Blue Ridge foothills? Of course I said yes, and I started working on the translation as my “side hustle” while focusing on my actual specialty back at school.
The way I came to this project being so blatantly divine, I’ve been attentive to how God is working through this dissertation right from the beginning. I now find myself approaching it through three lenses: as an academic, devotional, and spiritual project.
I’m on pretty solid ground when it comes to the academic side of things. A scholarly edition is an accepted, if uncommon, format for a literature dissertation. Translation is in many ways a very traditional scholarly enterprise: the way I see it, translation is the maximum application of the beloved literary methodology of “close reading.” If literary studies is all about analyzing the text, the reader, and their relationship, translation goes right to the heart of it by making that relationship possible. Translators assess a text’s form and content, and fix its meaning for a particular audience. It is both a scientific, analytical endeavor involving an enormous amount of linguistic and historical research as well as a totally creative, artistic exercise. There are many, many, many correct ways to translate a single sentence. Editing, similarly, is a very traditional scholarly enterprise. Framing the reader’s experience of the text through curation, organization, introduction, and footnotes involves a series of critical decisions. If interpretation and criticism are the quintessential form of a literature dissertation, my project accomplishes those goals through translation and editing respectively. It’s important to actually articulate all this because one cannot simply go around telling people you’re doing this dissertation because God told you to. (Well, “one” can’t, I certainly do.)
The devotional aspect of the project is where things get interesting. As we’ve established, this is God’s project. He made it very clear He wants to speak to the world through Rafael, and I’m a convenient tool in that project. What I’ve come to realize is that translating the writings, passing my dissertation, and publishing the book are not the sum total of that project, and in a lot of ways, that’s just the beginning. Because we run into a fundamental obstacle here: THIS BOOK IS MOST LIKELY GOING TO BE A THOUSAND PAGES LONG. Most people are not going to pick this book up off the shelves. Most Catholic bookstores are probably not going to stock this book in the first place. So if God has made it clear that He wants me to go tell everybody about Rafael, and not everybody wants to pick up an enormous book, how else can I get the word out? As with other researchers whose audience is not primarily in the academy, public scholarship is the answer. For me, that looks like meeting my audience where they are: public readings at parishes, guest spots on Catholic podcasts, commissioning Catholic artists, tweeting a lot, starting a newsletter, and even working with another publisher to adapt one of Rafael’s stories into a children’s book. (Stay tuned!)
The spiritual aspect of the project is, honestly, the simplest. On a daily basis, my work as a translator is rather monastic indeed. I meditate intensely on the meaning of every single word and phrase, ask God what He wants to speak to the world by it, pray for Rafael’s intercession over it, and commit it to paper. And then I endure the humiliating browbeatings of three rounds of editing (round 1 from the monastery, round 2 from my committee, and round 3 from my publisher), plus an endless stream of criticism from would-be editors on Twitter. I have to laugh at how loudly God is challenging me to grow in humility. After all, nobody buys a book because of the translator. My job is, in many ways, to disappear. Whatever I might think about that as a practical matter, it is true in this spiritual sense: I must decrease, even Rafael must decrease, and God must increase.
Ultimately, though, my dissertation is a spiritual project because my academic standards demand it. In order to translate a saint, I must try to spiritually rise to the occasion. If I am not striving to grow in holiness to match St. Rafael’s virtue, I honestly do not think I will be able to understand a word he’s saying. If I don’t know the God he’s writing about, I won’t be able to recognize Him and portray Him accurately. If I’m not in touch with the same Holy Spirit who inspired Rafael as he wrote, how on earth will I be able to render their collaboration faithfully? I am translating a saint, so if I want to understand him well enough to be his voice, I need to become one too.
No pressure.
So that’s what an academic project with a devotional audience and a spiritual dimension looks like for me. Ora et labora: it’s academic work, but it’s better academic work when it is also a prayer. I’m wondering what that looks like for all of you. My work engages the faith in an explicit, straightforward way because I happen to be translating a saint. But all of us, regardless of discipline or topic, are Catholics in an academic vocation, even if it’s just for these few years. How do you make a prayer of your work? How does your work challenge you to grow spiritually?
Newsletter readers: I’d love to hear your responses to those questions too!
Project Updates
Leah Libresco Sargeant is asking that friends of Catherine and fans of St. Rafael get in touch with her for secret reasons. Click here to email her.
I recently commissioned Catholic artist Annie Vaeth (aka PaperMonastery) for an illustration of St. Rafael. You can now purchase prints here.
I made a guest appearance on St. Dymphna’s Playbook, a Catholic podcast about mental health and holiness, to discuss St. Rafael’s pursuit of a monastic vocation as a chronically ill person. (Clip begins at 5:24!)
St. Rafael and I are going to be featured in Ave Maria Press’s ongoing #AveExplores: The Saints campaign! Follow them on Facebook and/or Instagram to receive all their guest posts, including mine, which is upcoming.
The monastery that originally commissioned me to translate St. Rafael, Our Lady of the Angels here in Crozet, Virginia, is welcoming two candidates for a visit soon. Please pray for these young women, and for their vocation director, as they seek God’s will for their lives.
Ora et labora
Catherine this was delightful