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ABSTRACT
Cicero and St Jerome are often thought to belong to opposite schools of translation theory. This assumption neglects an important continuity between the two translators, namely their understanding of translation as a master–slave relationship. A far more important discursive break occurred in the work of St Augustine, who was the first to project onto translation the religious role of a fidus servus (faithful slave) in relationship to the divine word. His theorization of how truth could be revealed in both original and translated texts is radically different from our received ideas about the hierarchy of source and target. It also initiated an epistemological shift that would have a profound effect on later Christian translators. The scholar Boethius was the first to use Augustine’s model of translation with secular texts, paving the way for this eschatological theory to take precedence throughout early medieval Europe.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Leslie Agnes Taylor of the International Boethius Society, and Ken Wolf of the Claremont Colleges LAMS Symposium for allowing me to present this material and receive invaluable feedback over the last two years. I would also like to thank R.D. Fulk, Rosemarie McGerr, Paul Losensky, Shannon Gayk and Tamara Beauchamp for their advice on many iterations of this project.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Note on contributor
Ben Garceau is a scholar of late antique and medieval European literature and philosophy, with a focus on how religious and political discourses relate to understandings of language and translation over the longue durée of the Middle Ages. His work has appeared previously in PMLA; currently he is revising a book manuscript tentatively entitled “Translation and Eschatology in Early Medieval Europe”. He is a lecturer in the Humanities Core Program at the University of California, Irvine, USA.
Notes
1. See, for example, David Connolly and Aliki Bacopoulou-Halls's (Citation2011, p. 419) entry on the Greek tradition in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies. Important work is currently being done to illuminate this period (cf. McElduff and Sciarrino Citation2014), but most histories of translation and translation theory still begin with Cicero.
2. “The orator I do not divide into types, for I am looking for the perfect example. There is only one kind of perfect orator”; Oratorem genere non divido; perfectum enim quaero. Unum est autem genus perfecti (Citation1960, 355–357).
3. Siobhán McElduff takes translation theorists to task for their reductive and de-historicized use of Cicero's essay: “What [such] arguments do is to reformulate Cicero and other Roman theorizations of translation according to modern concerns of responsibility to source texts and how that responsibility is best expressed. However, these are not appropriate categories for discussing Cicero and most Roman writers on translation, who swing along a different axis, one concerned primarily with how they can make the Greek text work for themselves, the Roman translators” (Citation2013, 113).
4. The first that I have been able to locate is Terence's (Citation2001, 355) use of the phrase in the prologue to Adelphoe, line 11. Also cited in McElduff (Citation2013, 93).
5. Sed de nobis satis. Aliquando enim Aeschinem ipsum Latine dicentem audiamus. Translated by H.M. Hubbell.
6. Two late sources for this folk etymology include Justinian's Digest 1.5.4.2, and Isidore's Etymologies 9.4.43.
7. Ille tamen in ea opinione erat, ut putaret se scire, quod quisquam in domo sua sciret. Translated by Richard M. Gummere.
8. Maria Tymoczko (Citation2010, 123) also reads Horace's use of fidus here in a derogatory sense.
9. This is the reading given in the Codex Palatinus. Other early Latin translations of λόγος for the purposes of the Gospels use sermone and ratio (Tymoczko Citation2010, 130).
10. Varro (Citation1938, 380–381) distinguishes between vocabula and verba in Book 8:11 of De Lingua Latina, and Quintilian (Citation2001, 116) makes a similar distinction between nomina and verba in Book 1:4.18 of Institutio oratoria. This terminology for nouns and verbs was standardized in grammatical discourse by the time of Donatus in the fourth century CE.
11. Cf. Jerome's (Citation1845, 416) letter Ad Eustochium, in which he narrates a dream about being judged by God for loving Cicero more than Christ.
12. This is not to suggest that Jerome's adherence to the master–slave model of translation makes him any less of a Christian. The notion that the Christian church was critical of slavery as an institution, or that it was a religion of slaves (pace Nietzsche), has been quite overstated. There is very little evidence that Christianization played any role in the gradual shift from a slave economy at the beginning of the European Middle Ages. Rather, there is a great deal of evidence that Christian leaders, particularly those from wealthier backgrounds, continued to own slaves, and saw Christianity as a means to accommodate and regularize relations between masters and their property (Harper Citation2011, 209–214).
13. Aside from Augustine's tale discussed here, see Philo of Alexandria's account of the Septuagint in his Life of Moses, Book 2:5, and Josephus’ version in Antiquities of the Jews, Book 12:2. All of these ultimately stem from the apocryphal Letter of Aristeas, probably written in the second century BCE.
14. Half of the extant translations by Boethius are replacements for works previously translated a century earlier by the famous rhetor Gaius Marius Victorinus. Boethius usually shows restraint from criticizing his predecessor in his commentary on Porphyry's Isagoge, but is occasionally exasperated, saying Victorino videtur erratum (“It seems Victorinus is in error”), or Victorini culpa vel emendatio (“here Victorinus is guilty of addition”), or even that his forebear was maxime ratione caret (“wholly beyond reason”; Chadwick Citation1981, 115–118).
15. Boethius refers to this work as laboris mei primitias, “the first-fruits of my labor” (Citation1867, 5).
16. I use the term “supplementarity” here in its Derridean sense.
17. See, for example, the Rhetorica ad Herennium (Citation1954, 342).