St Jerome is best known for his translation of the Old Testament directly from Hebrew into Latin and not via Greek via the Septuagint. He had originally revised parts of the Latin translation of the Septuagint but had concluded that there were sufficient errors of commission and omission in the various variants, deriving both from clerical errors in the process of copying and from errors in the original manuscripts, as to justify producing a new translation. He was aware that this was a sensitive project, which could and did meet sharp criticism and opposition. The Septuagint with its associated story that the translation into Greek of the five books attributed to Moses had been produced by seventy (or seventy-two translators in some sources, six from each of the twelve tribes of Israel), was regarded as divinely inspired and not to be tampered with. Jerome had to tread carefully, despite diplomacy not always being his strong point, explaining at length the nature of the corrections and changes that he wished to make. He was accused of distorting the original. In answer to this, Jerome wrote about his translation techniques, about literal translation and translation, which communicates the essence of the original message; fascinating reading for a modern translator to read about his wrestling with the same problems as we face when navigating between the extremes of barely comprehensible literal translation to elegant paraphrase radically departing from the original. Jerome’s translations eventually became part of the Catholic Church’s approved translation of the Old Testament, the Vulgate, together with large parts of the New Testament translated by another unknown translator from Greek into Latin.

It is important when considering Jerome’s work as a translator not to lose sight of the religious background in which he worked. Jerome would have wanted to emphasise parts of the Old Testament which could be related or interpreted as anticipating the coming of the Messiah. There were also sharp divisions on practical questions, for example, the value of austerity and chastity, in the church, which was now becoming a more centralised organisation rather than scattered clandestine groups. This affected his reading of the texts he was translating and undoubtedly the language choices he sometimes made although he often explains them in the many commentaries to biblical texts that he wrote.

We can obtain a flavour of Jerome’s not so diplomatic approach when reading his retort to criticism of a revision of a Latin translation from the Greek. His critics were contemptible characters, “asses with two legs” who preferred to lap up muddy rivulets rather than drink the pellucid fountain of the original Greek, who were attacking his presumption in flouting competition and tampering with the inspired words of the Gospels. They were so stupid that they did not realise he was correcting not the Lord’s sayings, but the manifest faultiness of the Latin codices. To silence them he would blow a trumpet in their ears, since a lyre would make no impression on asses.¹

We should probably not look to St Jerome for advice on customer care.

St Jerome on translation

“I have translated the noblest speeches of the two most eloquent of the Attic orators, the speeches which Æschines and Demosthenes delivered one against the other; but I have rendered them not as a translator but as an orator, keeping the sense but altering the form by adapting both the metaphors and the words to suit our own idiom. I have not deemed it necessary to render word for word but I have reproduced the general style and emphasis. I have not supposed myself bound to pay the words out one by one to the reader but only to give him an equivalent in value. Again at the close of his task he says, I shall be well satisfied if my rendering is found, as I trust it will be, true to this standard. In making it I have utilized all the excellences of the originals, I mean the sentiments, the forms of expression and the arrangement of the topics, while I have followed the actual wording only so far as I could do so without offending our notions of taste. If all that I have written is not to be found in the Greek, I have at any rate striven to make it correspond with it. Horace too, an acute and learned writer, in his Art of Poetry gives the same advice to the skilled translator:—

And care not with overanxious thought
To render word for word.

Terence has translated Menander; Plautus and Cæcilius the old comic poets. Do they ever stick at words? Do they not rather in their versions think first of preserving the beauty and charm of their originals? What men like you call fidelity in transcription, the learned term pestilent minuteness. Such were my teachers about twenty years ago; and even then I was the victim of a similar error to that which is now imputed to me, though indeed I never imagined that you would charge me with it. In translating the Chronicle of Eusebius of Cæsarea into Latin, I made among others the following prefatory observations: It is difficult in following lines laid down by others not sometimes to diverge from them, and it is hard to preserve in a translation the charm of expressions which in another language are most felicitous. Each particular word conveys a meaning of its own, and possibly I have no equivalent by which to render it, and if I make a circuit to reach my goal, I have to go many miles to cover a short distance. To these difficulties must be added the windings of hyperbata, differences in the use of cases, divergencies of metaphor; and last of all the peculiar and if I may so call it, inbred character of the language. If I render word for word, the result will sound uncouth, and if compelled by necessity I alter anything in the order or wording, I shall seem to have departed from the function of a translator. And after a long discussion which it would be tedious to follow out here, I added what follows:— If any one imagines that translation does not impair the charm of style, let him render Homer word for word into Latin, nay I will go farther still and say, let him render it into Latin prose, and the result will be that the order of the words will seem ridiculous and the most eloquent of poets scarcely articulate”. ²  

¹ Letter 57, especially paragraph 5, translation in W.H. Fremantle, G. Lewis and W.G. Martley. “From Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers”, second series, vol. 6, edited by Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co. 1893.

² Letter 27:1 quoted on p.89 of “Jerome. His Life, Writings and Controversies” by J.N.D. Kelly, London 1975 which is otherwise my main source for the information in the above paragraphs.

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