Catholic Public Domain Version (CPDV)

History

In 2009, when many new Catholic translations into English were working from the Hebrew and Greek texts, another kind of translation appeared: the Catholic Public Domain Version (CPDV), a new English translation of the Clementine Vulgate. The work was done by Ronald L. Conte Jr., its sole translator and editor. By Conte’s own account, he began the translation on 14 March 2004 and finished it on 28 March 2009, after a little more than five years of work. The CPDV’s own presentation describes it as a translation of the Latin Vulgate that uses Challoner’s revision of the Douay-Rheims as its guide.

The main Latin text used was the 1914 edition of the Sixto-Clementine Vulgate, prepared by P. Michael Hetzenauer. Other editions of the Vulgate were consulted as well, among them Carolus Vercellone’s edition (1861), Leander van Ess’s edition (1822–1824) — which allows the 1590, 1592, 1593 and 1598 printings of the Vulgate of Sixtus V and Clement VIII to be compared — and the Tweedale edition, published in London in 2005. The CPDV’s own documentation also records that the Desclée edition of 1885 was consulted.

Bishop Richard Challoner’s English played a different part: it was not the Latin starting text, but it served as a guide for the English translation. Conte explains that his version is not simply an update of the Douay-Rheims: it is a new translation made from the Vulgate, drawing on Challoner’s language and resources to steer the English. The original Douay-Rheims was also frequently consulted. The CPDV thus keeps a particularly close relationship with the Catholic English tradition: it starts again from the Vulgate, as the original Douay-Rheims did, but produces a new translation at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

There is, then, a kind of textual kinship that runs across centuries. The original Douay-Rheims began with the New Testament published at Rheims in 1582, and its Old Testament was published at Douai in 1609–1610. In the eighteenth century that translation was extensively revised by Richard Challoner; it is this revised form that became the traditional Douay-Rheims in English. More than two centuries after Challoner’s revision — and more than four centuries after the original Douay-Rheims was begun — Conte went back to the Vulgate as his starting text and produced a new English translation, with Challoner as his literary guide.

The name Catholic Public Domain Version also describes Conte’s intention literally. The translation was placed in the public domain in perpetuity, with no copyright, trademark or other legal restriction imposed by the author himself. The edition’s statement sums up that intention in a deliberately paradoxical formula: “The only restriction is that there can be no restriction.” No one may claim copyright over the CPDV itself, register its name as a trademark, or impose copyright on a new version based on or derived from it.

This allows the CPDV not only to be reproduced, but also to be edited, republished, incorporated into other works, revised, or used as the basis for a new translation. Conte even summed up that openness in a phrase that reads almost as an invitation to new translators: “no one is forbidden to do it better!” The CPDV was conceived, then, not only as a Catholic translation of the Vulgate, but as a translation deliberately free of editorial exclusivity.

Curiosities

Open Esther 1 and the editions part company at once. The Vulgate and the Douay-Rheims open with the reign of Assuerus and the feast at Susa; this edition opens with Mordecai’s dream, “In the second year of the reign of Artaxerxes the great” — which the others print much later, at 11:2. The feast does not arrive until chapter 3.

The Greek colophon moves the other way. The Vulgate puts it at 11:1, at the head of the appended chapters; here it closes the book, as verse 14 of chapter 15, and the whole book runs to fifteen chapters rather than sixteen. The order is not an artefact of the digitisation: sacredbible.org prints Esther this way.

In this site’s comparison, passages are lined up by the Vulgate’s numbering, and this edition’s column shows where the passage sits in it. Open Esther 11:1 and the colophon appears side by side with the Latin, with a note at the head of the column: “Est 15:14 in this version”.

Sources

• Version Information — the translator’s statement of source texts, method and public-domain terms
• My Bible translation — Conte’s own account of the five years of translation, from 14 March 2004 to 28 March 2009
• The Book of Esther — Esther as the edition itself prints it, in fifteen chapters
• The Sacred Bible: Catholic Public Domain Version — the edition on its original site