Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

This reading supports the view that Jerome is not really defending “sense for sense” translation, as he first seems to be doing, but “word for word.” But why would Jerome treat Greek word order as sacrosanct and not do the same for the scriptures he translated from Hebrew and Aramaic? The “Greek exception” doesn’t make a lot of sense if holiness is the dominant reason for mimicking the word order of the source.

However, Jerome may have meant something else by mysterium. He may have wanted to explain his approach to an issue that confronts every translator at some point: what to do with expressions that you don’t understand. It’s a real problem for all translators, because every utterance ever made in speech or writing has something blank or fuzzy or uncertain about it.

In ordinary speaking, listening, and reading, we cope with the gaps in various ways. An impenetrable phrase may be treated as a transmission error—a mispronunciation, a typo, a scribal glitch. We have no trouble replacing it with what we instantly guess to be the true form, and in spoken interaction we do this automatically, without noticing the corrections that we bring to what we hear. When reading, we use the context to prompt a meaning that fits. Where the context isn’t good enough to allow this, we just skip it. We skip-read all the time! Nobody knows the meanings of all the French words in Les Misérables, but that’s never stopped anyone from enjoying Hugo’s novel. However, translators are not granted the right to skip. That’s a serious constraint. It hardly arises in most kinds of language use; it’s one of the few things that sets a problem for translation that is almost unique to it.

Jerome was working with many different sources, but his main text for the Old Testament was the Greek Septuagint, translated from now lost Hebrew sources several centuries earlier. According to legend, it had been commissioned around 236 B.C.E. by Ptolemy II, the Greek-speaking ruler of Egypt, for his new library in Alexandria. He had sent men to Judea to round up learned Jews who understood the source text, then wined and dined them and set them up at Paphos (on the island of Cyprus) to get down to work. There were seventy (or seventy-two) participants in this foundational translation workshop, which is why the text they produced is called the Septuagint—a way of writing (not translating) the Greek word meaning “seventy.”

The Seventy wrote not in the language of Homer and Sophocles but in koiné, the popular spoken language of the Hellenistic cultures dotted around the Middle East. They also wrote it in a peculiar way, perhaps because koiné was their vehicular language and not completely native to them. So it would hardly be surprising if some words, phrases, and sentences in it baffled Saint Jerome seven centuries later. One telltale sign of the Seventy’s difficulty with Greek is the way they handled Hebrew words referring to Jewish religious mysteries. For example, they represented the Hebrew  as Xερoυβíµ, which is not a translation, but just the same word sounded out in a different alphabet. Jerome followed style—he wrote out approximately the same sounds in Latin script, making cherubim. English Bible translators have done the same, giving us a Hebrew masculine plural form (-im) for a concept that has stumped all translators since the third century B.C.E. In addition, the transfer of letters through three scripts and four languages has altered the sound of the word almost beyond recognition, from “kheruvím” to “cherubim.”

This way of dealing with an untranslatable by not translating it while making it pronounceable (sound translation, homophonic translation: see here) could be considered the primary, original meaning of the term literal translation. It represents a foreign word by putting in place of the letters of which it is made the corresponding letters of the script of the target language. But we do not call that literal translation nowadays—we call it transliteration. And it probably wasn’t what Jerome had in mind in the famous passage from his letter to Pammachius.

What, then, did Jerome mean by mysterium? Here’s an alternative translation of the mystery passage by a canon of Canterbury Cathedral:

For I myself not only admit but freely proclaim that in translating from the Greek (except in the case of the holy scriptures where even the order of the words is a mystery) I render sense for sense and not word for word.