I have two questions concerning the medieval hymn to St. John Baptist from
which Guido of Arezzo is credited (ca. 1040) with having developed the
musical DO-RE-MI, etc. musical notation from the first syllable of each
hemistich ("ut" became "DO"; "RE" from "resonare"; "MI" from "mira"; and so
on). My two questions are these:
First, I have found two versions. The most common is
Ut queant laxis resonare fibris
Mira gestorum famuli tuorum,
Solve polluti labii reatum,
Sancte Ioannes.
However, in "The Age of Faith" (Simon & Schuster 1950) by Will Durant, at
p. 898, there appears a version where the last word in line 1 ("fibris") is
rendered instead "floris." Is this a typographical error or do two
versions exist?
Second, can anyone steer me to (or provide) a faithful and fairly literal
translation into English? Alas, more than three decades of desuetude have
rendered my Latin less than serviceable. I can reconstruct most of the
text -- with Latin dictionary in hand -- from which the overall sense is
evident, but holes remain. (I have seen a few translations, but these
translations, in an apparent effort to capture the spirit and convey the
flavor of the original, have taken unjustified liberties with the actual
text.)
Thank-you in advance.
--Christopher
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