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ST. JEROME AND THE LETTER TO PAMMACHIUS

Translation History - Zsófia Gombar

Students:

Isabel Silva, 158454

Ariana Machado, 161061

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Who was St. Jerome?

His full name is Eusebius Hieronymus.
He was born circa 342 to a wealthy family in Dalmatia and was brought to Rome at a young age to learn grammar and logic.
Jerome became a hermit for a brief period, traveling around ancient Europe and the Middle East.
He returned to Rome, where he translated and wrote several texts under Pope Damasus I, including his famed Vulgate translation of the Bible.
Damasus died in 384, and criticism against Jerome’s translations intensified. He wrote his letter to Pammachius in 395 as a rebuttal to the criticism.
He settled in Bethlehem, building a monastery where he lived until his death in 420.

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St. Jerome’s opinion on translation

In some of his writings, Jerome explains some of the troubles faced by the translator, especially when it comes to finding meaning, equivalent and rhetorical figures from the original text to the translated one:

Different languages have different grammatical systems, and a word in a language doesn’t always have a direct translation in the other.
Word-for-word translations often lack the style present in the original text.
The modification of some words is not important if the overall meaning of the sentence has been kept.

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“What is more beautiful than the canticle of Deuteronomy and Isaiah, what more dignified than Solomon, or more perfect than Job. Now these, as Josephus and Origen point out, all frame their poetry in hexameters and pentameters. When we read them in Greek, they have a particular sound, and when in Latin, they do not hang together. If there is anybody who does not believe that the power of a language is changed in translation, let him translate Homer literally into Latin—or rather, let him translate Homer into prose. Then he will see a laughable bit of work, and the greatest of poets scarcely able to speak.”

From the Preface to Chronicles of Eusebius 1–2 (380), translated by L. G. Kelly

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St. Jerome’s Letter to Pammachius

On 395 AD., Jerome was accused of falsification and of being careless for not delivering a literal translation from Greek to Latin of a letter.
After this accusation, Jerome proceeds to write a letter to Pammachius where he defends himself and explains his methods as a translator.
Sense-for-Sense VS Word-for-Word translation.
On this letter, Jerome also takes time to write about some of the troubles faced by translators which can cause problems to the translation process.

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“For I myself not only admit but freely proclaim that translating from the Greek (except in the case of the holy scriptures where even the order of words is a mystery) I render sense for sense and not word for word.”
“In translating the chronicle of Eusebius of Cesarea into Latin, I made among other the following prefatory observations: ‘[...] it is hard to preserve in a translation the charm of expressions which in another language are more felicitous. Each particular word conveys a meaning of its own, and possibly I have no equivalent by which to render it [...]’”.

Letter LVII. To Pammachius on the Best Method of Translating. 395 AD.

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References

WHATLEY, E. Gordon. THOMPSON, Anne B. UPCHURCH, Robert K. St. 2004. ”Jerome: Introduction”, in Saints' Lives in Middle English Collections. Kalamazoo, Michigan. Medieval Institute Publications. (accessible at https://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/whatley-saints-lives-in-middle-english-collections-st-jerome-introduction)
’Saint Jerome’ (Last updated on September 19,2023). Encyclopaedia Britannica. Available at: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Saint-Jerome (accessed on October 2023).
“Letter LVII. To Pammachius on the Best Method of Translation”. English translation by W.H. Fremantle, from A Select Library of Nicene and post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church edited by Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, second series, vol. 6 (New York, 1893). (accessible at https://www.bible-researcher.com/jerome.pammachius.html)