[In this excerpt from a work originally published in French in 1946, Larbaud discusses the inventive effort that Jerome invested in his translation of the Vulgate.]

Hieronymopolis is encircled by two concentric lines of fortifications: one low, much damaged, almost collapsed: Jerome's revision of the Itala,¹ one of the first Latin versions of the Bible; the other tall, thick, powerful, awe-inspiring: the Vulgate. Two high towers overlook these walls: the Gallican Psalter and the Roman Psalter. It is generally through them, from without, that one approaches Jerome's achievement: these towers and ramparts, visible from afar, at the same time announce and hide the city. All the critics and scholars who have studied Jerome have said that his "masterwork," his greatest title to glory, laus praecipua,² was the Vulgate. And this opinion, often accepted with too much docility, is the reason why the personal works of Jerome have been neglected in favor of his work as a translator. "In conclusion, his most important work was the translation of the Scriptures, an immense task rather than a work of genius," writes the French author quoted above. An "immense task" and "a work of genius" one ought rather to call it; and one should also define the words "his most important work." The importance of the Vulgate has no need of demonstration; it is one of our civilization's cornerstones, and both St Peter's in Rome and New York's skyscrapers partly rest on it. One might object that this role could have devolved on the Itala—whether reviewed by Jerome or not—in the absence of his Vulgate. But in that case, the Catholic Church would have a Book less faithful to the original texts, and less well translated, of the great classics of Hebrew literature; one may also wonder whether such an anthology would have had the same success and the same influence (particularly from a linguistic standpoint) as Jerome's Vulgate. However, this so to speak practical or secondary importance of Jerome's "main work" must not prevent us from seeing the intrinsic value of his original work. There exists here a deliberate neglect, and its unfairness is of the same order as for example paying attention to Charles Baudelaire only insofar as he was the translator of Edgar Allan Poe. Whoever reads something of Jerome's own realizes at once that in the Vulgate he has before him a great book or rather a great body of literature translated by a great writer.

And that the Vulgate is truly a work of genius is confirmed by the qualities we discern there: that solidity, that grandeur, that majestic simplicity of style and expression. And the crumbs from this feast in which the Orient was served to the West have nourished and will continue to nourish generation upon generation of readers, writers, and poets to come. Would the Itala or Vetus Romana have been capable of doing the same? At any rate, it is in the wellsprings of Jerome's Vulgate that various literatures have found their inspiration, and, for our specific part, Bossuet, Racine and Claudel are all steeped in the vitalizing glow of those deep and living waters.

One must also take into account the prodigious inventive effort behind such a creation, and consider as well how the translator, having little by little, in his own works, got beyond the rules of rhetoric, the literary twists and conceits that he inherited from his masters, and forging constantly ahead—like Cervantes—toward greater freedom and simplicity, ended up by inventing a syntax, a style, an idiom, both popular and noble, that Latin—so different from the Latin of his Letters—which heralds the Romance languages, and which surely played a large role in their formation; or that "ecclesiastical interpretation which is intended," Jerome declares, "not for the prattling students of philosophers, nor for a few disciples, but for mankind as a whole" (Letter XLIX).

A greater effort, this, than the one needed to lift the bronze sphere in Athens! Particularly if one considers the distaste that Jerome had to overcome at the start of his exegetic career: a sort of horror when confronted by the language, the form, the novelty of Scriptural writing, whether he read the Septuagint or the Hebrew text. We too feel some of that surprise when we switch suddenly from the Greek classics to the Bible. Let us give it a try. Even if we have almost completely forgotten our Greek, let us take in the Septuagint a passage that is familiar to us thanks to various translations in one or several modern languages: a chapter from Job or Esther, or from the Song of Songs, for instance. We shall have little trouble understanding it; but how odd, we say to ourselves, for whom "Greek" is the Greek of Demosthenes or Thucydides. How strange, outlandish, scandalous this Greek is! Unheard-of constructions, juxtapositions serving in lieu of logical deductions, an endless phosphorescence of images, the magical and splendid desolation of some unknown ocean bottom: a new planet with its craters, its crevices, its valleys, suddenly visible to the naked eye, and with their earthen color that is not of this earth—the moon only a hundred yards away! Now we begin to have a faint idea of what Jerome must have felt when he was still imbued with Donatus' lessons and Cicero's and Quintillian's prose. But the day was to come when this strangeness would cease to shock him, and when he would see the beauty in this simplicity; the day when he would formulate his admirable and celebrated judgment of St Paul as a writer, a judgment worthy of Paul himself, and which concludes thus: ". sed quocumque respexeris, fulmina sunt."³

Notes

¹ According to modern specialists (A. D'Alès in his work on Novatius) one ought not to say the Itala but the Romana or Vetus Romana. It is this version, made or received in Rome in the third century, that Jerome calls Vulgata, the name subsequently given to his own version.

² A. Ficarra, preface to Florilegium Hieronymianum, published on the occasion of Jerome's fifteenth centenary (1920).

³" … but wherever you turn, there are flashes of lightning." (Tr. note.)