The Ascetic Foundations of Western Translatology: Jerome and Augustine

Abstract

The theory of translation is one of the very few Western logoi or sciences that were not founded by Plato; an important contemporary consequence of that fact, surely, is the relatively low valuation of translation theory even in the recent hunger for theory in the humanities. The Greeks seem to have repressed the Egyptian sources of their culture; Plato, who like Pythagoras and Solon travelled in Egypt and brought back his share of Egyptian wisdom, was committed to an epistemology in which truth was received directly from the gods, not mediated by a predecessor culture.1 Translation theory was 'invented' by the Romans, anxious heirs of the Greeks, headed by Cicero in De oratore (55 B.C.) and De optimo genere oratorum (46 B.C.), and followed by Horace in the Ars poetica (c. 19-17 B.C.), Pliny the Younger in his Letter to Fuscus (c. A.D. 85), Quintilian in the Institutio Oratoria (A.D. 96?), and Aulus Gellius in his Nodes Atticae (c. A.D. 100). But only 'invented' in a sense. Productive, provocative as it is, Roman translation theory is too unfocused for our post-Christian tastes; it is difficult to read it without impatience; it is too casual, too free-spirited, too willing to give the translator free rein, for us (heirs of Jerome and Augustine and a millennium and a half of Christian civilization) to take it 'seriously'. I think it essential that we do take it seriously, that we make the effort to excavate Roman translation theory from its current preChristian vagueness; but the fact remains that Western 'translatology', the logos about translation, the logical confines into which translation in the West is to be normatively fitted the 'science' of translation that feels to us like a science because it is logical and normative begins definitively not in classical but in Christian antiquity, in the need to maintain dogmatic control over translations of the Bible. Christian translatology is instituted specifically as a branch of systematic theology a surreptitiously political branch whose function was to police the transfer of the Word of God from Hebrew and Greek text to Latin-speaking readers and listeners. This meant dogmatic control not only over the Word, the 'dogmatized' or systematically unified 'sense' or 'meaning' or semantic content of the