O Holy Night

I wrote before that you could usually tell which version of a song was the original language, although sometimes the results were equally good.

I heard a little history of O Holy Night the other day, and decided to look up the French Minuit, chrétiens. "Unitarian minister John Sullivan Dwight" did a superlative translation: it is almost seamless, and "a thrill of hope, the weary world rejoices" is a marvelously evocative line. And Cappeau did wonders in the original.

The US wiki says "the parish priest asked Cappeau, a native of the town, to write a Christmas poem, even though the latter never showed any interest in religion, and Cappeau obliged." The French wiki says "Placide Cappeau, un négociant en vin qui était républicain, socialiste et anticlérical, prétendit lui-même l'avoir écrit ... dans la diligence qui le conduisait à Paris ..." (Placide Cappeau, a wine merchant who was republican, socialist, and anti-clerical, claimed to have written it on a trip to Paris) and goes on to explain the actual shared credit and where it was written. Interesting choice of writer, but clearly Maurice Gilles knew his man.

The guest on the program said abolitionists made the song popular in the US.

UPDATE: Fixed the "translation."