Aspects of Translation Technique in Antiquity

nec tamen exprimi verbum e verbo necesse erit, ut interpretes indiserti solent, cum sit verbum quod idem declaret magis usitatum. Horace expresses very much the same view of translation in his Ars poetica (133): nee verbo verbum eurabis reddere fidus interpres. In other words, the translator of a literary text went about his work in a manner totally different from that of the fidus interpres, the hack translator, who produced slavish renderings of legal and business documents. As Franz Blatt once observed, talking of Latin translations from Greek, "on se trouve rarement en face d'une veritable traduction prechretienne." 1 Jerome endorses the same view as Cicero and Horace in his influential letter 57, addressed to Pammachius: