Jerome on Translation

Jerome to Vincentius and Gallienus: Greetings

It is a venerable custom that scholars should keep their talents in trim as it were by taking unfinished Greek works and completing them in Latin or—a harder challenge—translating famous Greek poems into Latin verse. Cicero, for instance, not only produced word-for-word translations of entire Platonic dialogues but a Roman Aratus in Latin hexameters. Then he set himself the amusing task of translating Xenophon’s Oeconomicus. But here he met so many problems and snags, and his torrent of glorious eloquence flows with such murky choppiness that readers unaware they are reading a translation refuse to believe it is the work of Cicero.

That, of course, is precisely the point. It is difficult, when you are following in another man’s footsteps, to keep from going astray somewhere. And it is extremely difficult to preserve in translation the particular verbal felicities of a foreign language. The original meaning, for instance, may be conveyed in a single word—a word which has no single Latin equivalent. If the translator tries to catch the full meaning, he must resort to lengthy paraphrase. To these difficulties must be added the problems of word-order, differences in case and rhetorical figures, and finally, the native genius of the language itself. If I translate word for word, the result is ludicrous; if I am forced to change the words or rearrange them, it will look as though I had failed in my duty as a translator.

So, my dear Vincentius and Gallienus, I beg you, if you find signs of haste and confusion, to read this work rather as friends than critics. It was, as you know, dictated with great speed, and it is a difficult and complex task to translate the Holy Scriptures. The Greek Septuagint, after all, lacks the flavor of the Hebrew original. This failure was, in fact, the motive which led Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion to publish their own—utterly different, it seems—versions of the same work; if Aquila strove for literal accuracy, Symmachus tried to render the meaning, and Theodotion attempted to keep fairly close to the older versions. As for the anonymous authors of the Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh versions, I can only say that their differences are so remarkable that their anonymity is clearly merited.

But the upshot is that the Scriptures in translation seem less polished, less impressive, than they actually are. Men of literary taste, for instance, are often unaware that the Scriptures have been translated from Hebrew, and because they look to the surface rather than the substance, they recoil, shocked by the ugliness of the style—until they discover the physical beauty concealed as it were beneath the beggar’s rags of the rendering. What, after all, could be more musical than a Psalter which, like Horace in Latin and Pindar in Greek, moves at times in iambics, now echoes Alcaeus or Sappho, now the trimeters of tragedy? What more beautiful than a canticle of Deuteronomy or Isaiah, more majestic than Solomon or more perfect than Job? All of these are currently available, done into hexameters and pentameters, Latin and Greek, by Josephus and Origen respectively. But read aloud in Greek, they sound foreign; in Latin, they fail to leave a lasting mark on the mind and memory. And for obvious reasons. If anyone imagines that the beauty of a language is not lost in translation, let him translate Homer word for word into Latin; better yet, let him translate Homer into Greek prose. The absurdity of the syntax is immediately apparent, and the most eloquent poet of all time is reduced to a stammering fool.

My point? Why, that it is not surprising if the translator of Eusebius offends, if his language is clotted with rough consonants and gaping vowels, or knotty with the compression of the subject matter. Men of great learning, after all, toiled to create this book, and we, as translators, confront the apposite problems (problems, I have argued, inherent in translation). History, after all, is complex, historical names are unfamiliar and barbarous, there are matters of which Latins know nothing, untranslatable rhythms, a text so crammed with critical marks that it is almost harder to make out the order than to get an idea of the meaning. . . . I am not unaware, of course, that there are many readers who take persistent pleasure in deprecating everything and that they will vent their spleen on this work too. They will find fault with the dates, change the order, carp at the contents, and, as usual, ascribe the carelessness of the copyists to the author and translator.