Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

I beg you to believe I did it both because many things appeared to me to be inappropriate for people in courtly circles with respect to the customs and standards of our day, and on the advice of some of my friends who saw fit for me to free myself from the usual punctiliousness of translators, precisely because [this book] doesn’t deal with material where such persnickety observance is necessary.[53]

These twin justifications for “free” translation—literal translation just isn’t appropriate for the target audience and isn’t suited to the original, either—were familiar themes in the sixteenth century, as they had been for many centuries already. In fact, few commentators on translation have ever come out in favor of a literal or word-for-word style. Literal translation is precisely what translators in the broad Western tradition don’t do. But if literal translation is not a widespread practice, why do so many translators feel a need to shoot it down—often with overwhelming force? Octavio Paz, the Mexican poet and man of letters, stated the standard view in more recent times: No digo que la traducción literal sea imposible, sino que no es una traducción: “I’m not saying a literal translation is impossible, only that it’s not a translation.”[54]

How back far does it go? There are references to the issue in the writings of Cicero (106–43 B.C.E.) and Horace (65–8B.C.E.), but a long sentence written by Saint Jerome, the first translator of the Bible into Latin and subsequently the patron saint of translators, can be taken as the first full formulation of the lopsided dispute between “literal” and “free.” In 346 C.E., when he was near the end of his labors, Jerome wrote a letter to his friend Pammachius to counter the criticisms that had been made of the translations he had done so far. Jerome said this about how he had gone about his task:

Ego enim non solum fateor, sed libera voce profiteor me in interpretatione Graecorum absque scripturis sanctis ubi et verborum ordo mysterium est non verbum e verbo sed sensum exprimere de sensu.

A provisional translation would give the following sense: “Thus I not only confess but of my own free voice proclaim that apart from translations of sacred scriptures from the Greek, where even the order of the words is a mysterium, I express not the word for the word but the sense for the sense.”

Jerome’s expression verbum e verbo, “the word … for the word,” can be considered synonymous with “literal” translation, and his sensum exprimere de sensu, “to express the sense for the sense,” corresponds to the idea of “free” translation. He proclaims that he doesn’t do “literal” except when translating “sacred scriptures from the Greek.” That seems clear until you realize that the exception clause drives a cart and horses through the main claim, because what Jerome did throughout his long life was to translate sacred scripture, more than half of which he translated from Greek.

Jerome also says he abandons sense-for-sense translation not just when translating scripture from Greek but specifically ubi et verborum ordo mysterium est, in those places “where even the order of the words is a mysterium.” As the meaning of the word mysterium is uncertain, there’s no final agreement as to what Jerome was really talking about. At the root of Western arguments about how best to translate lies a mystery word that nobody is quite sure how to translate.

In late Latin written by Christians, mysterium most often means a holy sacrament. Jerome’s sentence therefore seems to recommend sticking to the exact order of the words of the Greek New Testament because its word order is sacred. Louis Kelly understands Jerome to be saying:

Not only do I admit, but I proclaim at the top of my voice, that in translating from Greek, except from Sacred Scripture, where even the order of the words is of God’s doing, I have not translated word for word, but sense for sense.[55]