Since the beginning of Advent, I've been reciting the Liturgy of the Hours in Latin, having obtained from Paxbooks, the Vatican's publisher, a copy of the Liturgia Horarum. I am not fluent in Latin by any means; and it has been a learning process. Typically I will sight-read a paragraph in Latin, translate it in my head, and correct my poor translation against the English language version of the Liturgy of the Hours, which has a more or less perfect correspondence with the Latin, although there are some minor layout differences. This has worked well for the Antiphons, Psalter, the Proper of the Seasons, the Proper of the Saints, and the Readings.
But where it hasn't worked is with the hymns. The Liturgia Horarum has in it the ancient Latin hymns, and the Liturgy of the Hours has more modern English hymns. What I've been in need of is a Latin-English hymnal that has all the old Latin hymns in it, with a good side by side English translation.
Thanks to the site MusicaSacra, I have now found what I needed -- a PDF copy of The Hymns of the Breviary and Missal, a 1922 work by Fr. Matthew Britt, O.S.B., which not only has a side by side translation of the hymns, but a Latin first-line index. It is also set up along the church calendar (granted, it is the old Tridentine calendar, and not the calendar of Vatican II, but that is only a minor problem as I can find the major feasts, solemnities, and memorials easily enough). It also gives, for each hymn, a history of the hymn and a history of the various translations of it. All in all, a rather remarkable work. They also have republished it in book form, and I will put it on my list of Catholic books to buy. As the site notes, it does not contain the music for the hymns, but as I recite the hymns and do not sing them, this is not a problem for me, and the book meets my current liturgical needs just about perfectly.
In reading it, though, I confess to becoming a little angry. The old Latin hymns are of great antiquity; some of them being written by St. Ambrose himself in the fourth century. They are in beautiful, poetic Latin, and more importantly, are profoundly theological in their character. There is none of the mawkish sentimentality or artificially dumbed-down personality that so many modern hymns have.
The ancient hymns are like a grove of thousand-year old oak trees that have been bulldozed in order to put up a McDonald's. I feel a little like Treebeard the Ent surveying the damage done by Saruman when I consider some of the liturgical reforms of the 1960s. No serious person could consider a hymn like Te Lucis Ante Terminum or the Pange Lingua against, say, "Here, I am Lord" and consider the substituting of the latter for the former to be anything other than a sickening act of vandalism -- the musical equivalent of the madness of Laszlo Toth. Once again, I look at the 1960s generation and can only say "What were you thinking?"
I read the old hymns, and I weep for my birthright, which was traded, like Esau's, for a bowl of lentils.
UPDATE: OK, to be fair, the English hymns in the Liturgy of the Hours don't feature the warblings of the St. Louis Jesuits, and the English hymns in it are fairly staid. But I sincerely wish that more of the ancient Latin hymns would find their way back into the Mass.