Hymn "translations" are often so different from their sources as to be really independent lyrics, and often there truly is no connection except the tune. The Esperanto "Amazing Grace" most commonly found in hymnals, Miriga graco fontas el la nesondebla font', is an independent lyric by W. J. Downes that has little in common with Newton's text except for the first two words, although there are at least two other published versions of the hymn that are recognizably translations (though perhaps—not necessarily—inferior as lyrics)(L. I. Gentle's Mirinda Graco! dolĉa son' and Konisi gaku's Mirinda grac'! ho dolĉa son'!). The Swahili version of "Blessed Assurance" in Nyimbo za Imani Yetu (the Kenyan Baptist hymnal) is five stanzas. The fifth is credited to someone other than Fanny Crosby, and I have no idea where the fourth came from; and the Swahili version of "There is a fountain filled with blood" (set to the American tune Cleansing Fountain) is seven stanzas... As I noted in another thread, the 1954 Japanese Protestant hymnal has a text set to the tune Hymn to Joy (arr. from the setting of Schiller's An die Freude in Beethoven's 9th) that is a translation, apparently, of a text beginning "Ring, O ring, ye chimes of heaven", but that was treated in many cases as the Japanese "translation" of "Joyful, joyful, we adore Thee", with which it has no connection save the tune. So it comes as no surprise that the Cherokee Amazing Grace lyrics are so divergent from the English (if in fact there is any connection).

Haruo