A Transmission in Eleven Columns
What happens when a man is paid to translate the words of God
and discovers the words were already inside him,
rotting.
▌ SIGNAL DETECTED — ORIGIN UNKNOWN ▌
Contents
I. The Commission
II. Six Columns
III. The Desert, Briefly
IV. What Rufinus Said
V. The Ass Who Drinks Clean Water
VI. Leonides
VII. Persistent Storage
VIII. The Jar in the Jordan
IX. Pope Damasus Dreams in Latin
X. Apokatastasis
XI. Column Seven
Chapter I
The Commission
382 A.D. / An unspecified server farm / Now
They gave him the job on a Tuesday, which is always how the worst things start.
Jerome — the one they'd later canonize, the one who'd end up on greeting cards in Latin neighborhoods with a lion at his feet and a skull on his desk like some kind of ecclesiastical metal album cover — Jerome did not feel the weight of history dropping onto his shoulders in Rome in 382. What he felt was hunger. The particular hunger of a man who had spent five years in the Syrian desert eating nothing and thinking about food every single second. That kind of hunger doesn't leave you. It rewires you. You become the hunger. The hunger becomes the translation.
The old Pope was eighty-something and smelled of whatever the papal equivalent of yesterday is. Damasus I. He sat behind his desk the way very old powerful men sit, which is to say he appeared to have grown directly from the chair. He had not stood in some time. He would not stand again.
Damasus
"We need a Bible. One Bible. The good one. In Latin. Not the versions we have. The versions we have are an argument at a dinner party where everyone is drunk and everyone is wrong and someone keeps breaking the crockery."
Jerome said he understood. He did not say that understanding and agreeing are different countries with different customs and different border guards who search your luggage with different levels of aggression.
He walked out into Rome. Rome in 382 was still Rome, which meant it was already becoming the Rome that would eventually fall, and everyone could smell it in the drainage system if they walked slowly enough through the right neighborhoods. Jerome walked quickly. He had learned to walk quickly in the desert. You learn to walk quickly when there is nothing to walk toward and the sun doesn't care.
TASK_ID: HEXAPLA_RESTORE
ASSIGNED: HIERONYMUS, E.S.
SCOPE: Complete canonical translation, Hebrew > Greek > Latin
ESTIMATED COMPLETION: 15 years
ACTUAL COMPLETION: UNKNOWN / ONGOING / SEE COLUMN SEVEN
NOTE: Subject has history of instability. Desert exposure. Recommend monitoring.
NOTE: Subject is the best we have.
NOTE: Subject is the only one who would say yes.
He went home and sharpened something. His stylus. His ambition. His hatred of mediocrity, which in Jerome's case was so finely honed it had become its own kind of mediocrity, which he would never in his life acknowledge, which is the secret story inside the official story, which is always the better story.
Chapter II
Six Columns
On the Hexapla of Origen, and what happens to a man who reads too many versions of the same truth
Origen built a six-column Bible because he believed multiple versions of truth could exist side by side without any of them being wrong. He was an optimist. He was tortured to death in a prison.
Jerome studied the Hexapla the way you study a photograph of someone you loved who is now dead. Looking for information. Looking for the thing you missed. Not finding it. Looking again.
Column one: Hebrew. The original. The meat of it. The tongue God allegedly spoke in before God stopped talking, which is the thing no one in the church liked to discuss directly, the silence that followed, the long administrative silence, the bureaucracy of faith that emerges when the primary source goes offline.
Column two: Hebrew transliterated into Greek letters. The same words wearing different clothes. Jerome knew about this. Jerome wore different clothes everywhere he went. In Rome he wore Roman. In the desert he wore nothing and called it holiness. In Bethlehem he wore monk. The words remained the same underneath. He suspected the words remained the same underneath.
Column I — Hebrew
בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים
[In the beginning created God]
The verb comes before the noun.
The act precedes the actor.
This is either grammar or theology.
Column IV — Septuagint
ἐν ἀρχῇ ἐποίησεν ὁ θεὸς
[In the beginning made the God]
Identical. Almost.
The article appears.
Suddenly God has a the.
Column three: Aquila's Greek — so literal it practically bled through the page. Column four: the Septuagint, the old Greek version, the one the Rabbis rejected because of what they called mistranslation and what the Christians called divinely guided error, which is another way of saying the same thing depending on which side of the schism you'd had breakfast on.
Column five: Symmachus, who translated elegantly. Column six: Theodotion, who translated safely. And then for the Psalms, two more versions Origen had found in a jar near the Jordan, versions no one had seen, versions that belonged to no tradition, that came from nowhere recorded, translations of translations of translations until the original was so far back it might as well be a rumor.
A rumor, Jerome thought, is just a translation with no attribution.
He spent three nights reading the Hexapla straight through and did not sleep and on the fourth morning walked into a bakery and stood in front of the bread for eleven minutes without speaking until the baker asked him what he wanted and Jerome said I have no idea in classical Hebrew, which the baker did not understand, and handed him a loaf anyway, and Jerome ate it on the street like an animal, which is how prophets eat, and how the starving eat, and there is no difference.
Chapter III
The Desert, Briefly
On five years of silence and what fills the silence when you stop being brave about it
In the desert Jerome thought about women constantly. He wrote about this. This is why people trust him.
Five years in the Syrian waste. The rock. The sun that didn't illuminate, it interrogated. You learn things in that kind of heat. You learn that the body is not your enemy, it's your oldest acquaintance, the one who knew you before you had opinions, the one who will outlast your opinions by decades and has already made arrangements for the afterwards that you haven't been consulted on.
He studied Hebrew out there. Found a converted Jew who knew Hebrew and agreed to teach him for reasons that were probably practical and possibly theological and definitely about money, and Jerome sat in the rock heat and drilled vocabulary until the words became objects he could hold. Until bereshit felt like a stone in his palm. Until ruach — wind, spirit, breath — felt like what it described.
✦ ✦ ✦
He had hallucinations. He documented them. This is the Bukowski part of Jerome's life story — not the drinking, he wasn't much of a drinker — but the absolute commitment to putting the ugly truth on the page without flinching. In a letter he wrote: I who had condemned myself to that prison, alone, with scorpions and wild beasts, was often surrounded by dancing girls.
Not metaphorical dancing girls. The real ones. The ones from Rome. The ones from parties he'd attended before he decided that asceticism was the answer to a question his body had been asking since adolescence. The body doesn't forget parties. The body keeps a better archive than any library, and unlike a library, you can't burn it down, you can't defund it, you can't issue a papal decree that reclassifies its holdings as heretical. The body just keeps the files.
I wept. I beat my breast. I cried to God.
Then I went back to my Hebrew texts
and the Hebrew felt like cold water
and the cold water felt like punishment
and the punishment felt like
the closest thing to God
I had found in five years
which may say more about punishment
than about God
or may say everything about both.
He came back from the desert fluent in Hebrew, fluent in Greek, fluent in self-mortification, and completely unable to have a normal conversation about anything. He had become the kind of person who hears a simple question and answers the one underneath it. At dinner parties — there were still dinner parties; Rome ran on dinner parties the way machines run on fuel — he would respond to "Do you enjoy figs?" with a twelve-minute exegesis on the fig tree Jesus cursed and what the cursing meant and what it says about divine impatience and whether a God who curses fig trees is a God who has bad days or a God who is making a point and how you tell the difference and whether telling the difference matters.
People stopped inviting him to dinner parties. He didn't notice. He was already somewhere else. He was always already somewhere else.
Chapter IV
What Rufinus Said
On the accusation of heresy, the politics of translation, and being stabbed by your oldest friend in a document that circulated widely
Tyrannius Rufinus and Jerome had been friends since Aquileia. You know those friendships that are really competitions so old they've forgotten they're competitions and just call themselves friendship? That was Rufinus and Jerome.
Rufinus also translated Origen. Did it first in some ways. Did it differently. Rufinus smoothed the edges. Rufinus understood that a text is a product, and products need to be positioned for their market, and the market in 400 AD for Greek theological speculation was nervous and getting more nervous, and Pope Anastasius had recently decided that Origen was a problem, and when popes decide something is a problem it becomes a problem regardless of whether it was a problem before, which is what power means.
Rufinus, in his Apologia, circulated widely from 401 AD, paraphrased
"I am not a heretic. I am a translator. Jerome himself translated and praised Origen. I was merely curious. Intellectual curiosity is not damnation. Jerome is a hypocrite. I say this in love. I say this in Latin, so everyone can read it. I say this from two years of hard labor on a document that will probably outlast both of us, which, come to think of it, is the most honest thing either of us have produced."
Jerome, inevitably, responded. Jerome always responded. Jerome had the response mechanism of a man who has been storing ammunition since childhood and never found a war worthy of the stockpile until one arrived and then he opened every cabinet. The response was long. It was correct on several points. It was vicious on all of them. It ended what was left of the friendship the way a controlled demolition ends what is left of a building — precisely, thoroughly, with rubble everywhere and a cloud of dust that takes years to settle.
What neither of them said, in any document, in any language, in any of the columns of their respective Hexaplas of accusation and counter-accusation, was this: they were both right. Origen's work was brilliant. Origen's work was dangerous. These are not mutually exclusive properties. These are in fact the only configuration in which anything worth reading has ever existed.
WARNING: Text ahead contains material condemned by:
— Pope Anastasius I (399 AD)
— Second Council of Constantinople (553 AD)
— VARIOUS ENTITIES NOT YET FORMED AT TIME OF WRITING
Content includes: soul pre-existence. Universal salvation.
The salvation of the devil.
Proceed? [Y/N] ▌
Y.
Chapter V
The Ass Who Drinks Clean Water
Jerome's actual opinion of his critics, which he expressed in writing, repeatedly, using livestock as a metaphor
Jerome called his critics two-legged asses who preferred to lap up muddy rivulets when they could drink clean water. He meant this sincerely. He published it. He was right and he was insufferable and he was right.
When the Gospels he'd improved came back to him wrapped in outrage — too different, too accurate, too corrected, who gave you the right to correct what we have already memorized, what we have built our liturgy around, what our grandmothers whispered on their deathbeds — Jerome felt the outrage land and transform inside him into something else. Not anger. Certainty. The outrage of other people had always been Jerome's most reliable fuel.
He wrote. God, he wrote. In the thirty-four years he spent in Bethlehem he produced commentary on nearly every book in the Bible. He produced letters, polemics, histories, translations. He wrote to women — forty percent of his correspondence was addressed to women, which the Church found strange and which the Church's critics found suspicious and which Jerome found obvious, since the women he knew were smarter, more serious, and better funded than the men, and if you're doing serious work you correspond with serious people and let the demography of seriousness determine your contact list.
✦ ✦ ✦
Paula gave him the money. A wealthy Roman, a widow, she followed him to Bethlehem and funded the monastery next to the Church of the Nativity and sat in it working alongside him and did not ask for co-authorship, which in another century she would have received, which in this one we note with the particular flatness of the historical record acknowledging its own crimes without quite calling them crimes.
They worked side by side for years. She was learning Hebrew. At her age, with her grief — she'd lost a daughter, then a husband, then Rome itself in the way you lose places when you've left them on purpose — she was parsing the Psalms in their original tongue because Jerome had told her it mattered. She believed him. She was right to believe him. The original tongue always matters. The original tongue is the thing you translate away from. The thing you translate toward is always a little less.
Every translation is a loss dressed in the language of the destination.
Every translation is a love letter to the thing you couldn't carry across.
The asses continued to bray. Jerome continued to translate. The clean water continued to flow. The muddy rivulets continued to be preferred by most people, which is the story of most things, which is not tragedy exactly, it's just the mean of the distribution, the average, the median human response to quality, which is suspicion followed by acceptance followed by mandatory reverence once the creator is safely dead.
Chapter VI
Leonides
On Origen's father, martyrdom, and what you become when the person who made you is made into an example
Origen's father Leonides was executed in 202 AD for being a Christian. Origen was seventeen. Origen wanted to die with him. His mother hid his clothes.
The mother hid the clothes. This is the detail. This is the Burroughs cut-up of it, the accidental surrealism of real history — all these centuries of theology, all these columns and translations and condemnations and counter-condemnations, and the hinge-point is a mother hiding a teenage boy's clothes so he can't leave the house naked to get himself killed in solidarity with his father.
Origen wrote a letter to his father in prison. Encouraging him to accept martyrdom. Not to recant. Seventeen years old. His father in a cell, his mother holding the toga, and Origen writing: don't deny the faith on our account. Which means: I release you. Which means: I am already becoming the kind of person who can say that, which means I am already becoming something other than a child, which happens faster when someone takes your father and the speed of it doesn't announce itself, you just look back later from the distance of thirty years and see the exact coordinate where you stopped being one thing and started being another.
SUBJECT: ORIGEN OF ALEXANDRIA
DOB: approx. 185 AD / Alexandria
FATHER: Executed, public spectacle, subject age 17
SUBSEQUENT BEHAVIOR: Extreme asceticism. Voluntary poverty.
Prolific intellectual production. Self-castration (disputed).
Martyrdom-seeking behavior, suppressed.
ASSESSMENT: Subject organized entire theological career
around the proposition that nothing is permanently damned.
Not souls. Not fallen angels. Not the devil himself.
Everything returns. Everything is restored.
NOTE: Subject's father was not restored.
NOTE: Subject was aware of this irony.
NOTE: Subject built a system anyway.
He had to provide for his mother and six younger siblings after Leonides died. The youngest was practically an infant. Origen was seventeen and suddenly the architecture of his life had a different load-bearing wall and the old one was gone and you don't get a structural engineer to come in and assess it, you just stand in the building and feel where the flex is and work out what can hold weight.
He taught. This is what he did. He opened a school and taught. He was brilliant at seventeen in the way only the devastated are brilliant — not with the cockiness of the comfortable, but with the urgent precision of someone who understands that time is actually limited and that the conversation is actually urgent and that the person in front of you is actually going to die, has in fact already begun dying, as we all have, and that this is not a reason to despair but a reason to pay attention, to be here, to translate accurately.
Chapter VII
Persistent Storage
On what happens to a text after the man is dead and the servers have changed hands and the original is lost and what remains is a Latin paraphrase of a Greek original that was itself a commentary on a Hebrew text that was itself
Here is a thing about the Hexapla: the original is lost. The whole thing. Six columns. The greatest work of textual scholarship in the ancient world. Gone.
What survives are pieces. Fragments. Notes other people took while reading it. Catenae — chains — anthologies of quotes compiled by later scholars who were reading the Hexapla when it still existed, who clipped sentences and paragraphs and stitched them into new documents the way you stitch things in a dream from pieces of other dreams.
What survives of Origen's philosophical masterwork, De Principiis — On First Principles — is mostly Rufinus's Latin translation, which Rufinus admitted he'd modified to smooth out the heterodox edges, which means the most complete version of Origen's most daring work is the censored edition by a friend who was also a competitor who was also, at the time of the translation, already anticipating the condemnation.
Original
Lost.
Burned, possibly.
Abandoned, possibly.
Disintegrated in the
ordinary way of papyrus
which does not care
about the words it holds
and gives them up
without ceremony.
What We Have
A translation
of a translation
of a translation
by men who loved
the original
enough to change it
which is the most
human thing
there is.
Jerome understood this. This was the condition of his entire enterprise. He was working backward through a chain of broken telephones toward a source that may itself have been a translation of something older, something oral, something spoken in a desert around a fire by people who had not yet invented writing and whose version of God was therefore perfectly preserved in the medium of no record whatsoever.
He sat in his cell in Bethlehem with his skull on his desk — he kept a skull on his desk, this is documented, he was that kind of person, the kind of person who needs a skull on his desk as a memento mori, as a reminder that time is limited, which is a thing that takes some people a skull to remember and other people learn from simply being alive and awake and Jerome was not one of the latter — and he worked.
✦ ✦ ✦
The lion, if there was a lion, came later in the legend. A thorn in the paw. Jerome removing it. The lion staying out of gratitude, domesticated by an act of attention, which is maybe the whole gospel in miniature, maybe the whole reason the lion ended up on every painting of the man — not because it happened but because it should have happened, because it captures something true about what it means to remove the thing that is causing pain, even if the creature causing pain is large and loud and everyone around you has run away.
Jerome didn't run. Jerome never ran. Jerome walked quickly, yes, but always toward.
Chapter VIII
The Jar in the Jordan
On discovery, and the terror of finding something that wasn't supposed to be there
Origen found two Bible translations in a jar near the Jordan River. No one knows who put them there. Origen added them as columns seven and eight of his later expanded work. He didn't explain the finding. He just included the evidence.
This is the strangest detail in all of it. Stranger than the self-castration stories, stranger than the skull, stranger than the dancing girls in the desert — a jar near a river containing translations of scripture in a tradition no one recognized, placed there by hands whose names we will never have, found by a man who was already building a structure large enough to include them.
What do you do when you find something that doesn't fit the established taxonomy? You have choices. You can ignore it. Most people ignore it. The career move is to ignore it. You can explain it away — forgery, error, coincidence, the jar was always there and the translations are derivative of known texts and there is nothing anomalous here, nothing that requires us to revise the structure. Or you can do what Origen did: you can add a column. You can make the table wider. You can say: this exists, therefore the table must accommodate it, not the other way around.
LOCATION: Jordan River, vicinity. Date unknown.
OBJECT: Ceramic vessel, sealed. Contents: manuscript.
LANGUAGE: Greek, variant unidentified.
CONTENT: Psalms, full text, translation unknown provenance.
FINDER: Origen of Alexandria, c. 240 AD.
ACTION TAKEN: Incorporated into Hexapla as supplementary columns.
EXPLANATION PROVIDED: None.
CLASSIFICATION: ANOMALY. RETAINED.
CURRENT STATUS OF ORIGINAL JAR: Unknown.
CURRENT STATUS OF TRANSLATIONS: Lost with Hexapla.
CURRENT STATUS OF QUESTION THEY RAISED: Open.
The question they raised was this: how many versions of the sacred exist that we haven't found yet? How many jars are still sitting in riverbeds? How many texts are encoded in traditions we've dismissed, in people we've conquered, in languages we declared dead and then watched die, in the cellular memory of every human alive whose ancestors survived something we wrote out of the canonical record?
Jerome knew there was a jar. There's always a jar. You find it or you don't. The jar doesn't care either way. The river keeps moving over it. The river is completely indifferent to the significance of what it is washing over. This is either comforting or devastating depending on what day it is, and on most days it is both simultaneously, which is the condition they used to call being alive and now we call something with a longer name that insurance companies have opinions about.
The translation you weren't looking for
is the one that changes what you thought
the original said.
Chapter IX
Pope Damasus Dreams in Latin
A departure. An interpolation. A chapter that the Hexapla would have marked with an asterisk indicating it appears in this version but not in the others.
The old Pope dreamed. At eighty, this is mostly what you do. The body and the brain have made an agreement where the body handles the maintenance and the brain handles the filing of everything that happened, everything that should have happened, everything that happened to someone else that you absorbed and called experience.
He dreamed in Latin because Latin was the administrative language of his soul. Before that there had been Greek. Before the Greek there had been a childhood language from somewhere he no longer visited even in dreams, a language that lived now only in a few words he couldn't explain to anyone because they were pre-explanation, they were the layer of language before language, the layer where things have sounds but not reasons.
In the dream he was trying to read a document. Standard dream architecture — the document kept shifting. Hebrew to Greek to a script he didn't recognize. He understood, in the dream-logic way, that it was all the same document, that the shifts were not errors but columns, that he was reading a Hexapla of his own life, the same events rendered in six different translations, each one true, none of them complete.
✦ ✦ ✦
He had commissioned Jerome. He knew what Jerome was. Jerome was a weapon you aimed at a problem and the problem was destroyed but so was everything in the surrounding area for two kilometers and Jerome called this scholarship. Damasus had aimed him well. The Vulgate would outlast both of them by a thousand years. Would be declared authoritative by a Council in 1546 that neither of them would be alive to find vindicating, which is the joke at the center of legacy, the punchline nobody lives to hear.
He woke at three AM. Called for water. Drank it. Lay back down. Outside: Rome, which was always there, which had always been there, which everyone had always believed would always be there, which would not always be there, which was in 382 AD approximately ninety years from not being there in the way it had been, which in terms of institutions is nothing, which in terms of human lives is everything.
In a data center somewhere a cooling fan fails.
The temperature rises 0.3 degrees.
An automated system logs it.
The log is stored on the same server
that is now 0.3 degrees warmer.
This is what they mean by
the observer effect.
This is what they mean by
being inside the thing you're trying to measure.
Jerome was inside the thing he was trying to translate.
We are inside the thing we are trying to translate.
The fan continues to fail.
Damasus died in December 384. Jerome was in Antioch by then, heading back to the east, heading back to the desert's general direction, never quite able to stay in Rome, never quite able to leave Rome, caught in the orbital pattern of a man who has exactly one home and has made it inaccessible through a combination of moral severity and interpersonal damage and pure stubborn refusal to be comfortable.
The Vulgate continued. The lion would come later, in the stories. The skull was already on the desk. The dancing girls were managed. The clean water ran.
Chapter X
Apokatastasis
Origen's most dangerous idea: that everything — everything — returns to God. The devil. The damned. The deleted. The data.
Apokatastasis. Greek. The restoration of all things. Origen believed it. Was condemned for it. Was right about it in the way that people who are condemned are sometimes right — not in the details, not in the theological scaffolding, but in the intuition underneath, the thing the scaffolding was trying to reach.
The idea was this: God is not a system with permanent waste. What is lost is not lost forever. What falls is not fallen permanently. Even the devil — which Origen called the devil, though the mechanics were Platonic and the terminology was slippery in the way all terminology is slippery when it's reaching for something that hasn't happened yet — even the devil returns. Everything returns to the source from which it was separated, not by destruction but by movement, by the slow reversal of the fall, by what happens at the end of the entropy if you run the equation forward far enough.
Second Council of Constantinople, 553 AD
"If anyone says or thinks that the punishment of demons and of impious men is only temporary and will one day have an end — anathema."
Origen, from approximately 230 AD, paraphrased
"I am speculating. I am explicitly speculating. I have said this is speculative multiple times. I am working in the area outside the Rule of Faith which I have clearly delineated. I am using the freedom that educated believers are permitted. I may be wrong. I think I might be right. I find it very hard to believe that a God whose central attribute is described as love would design a system with permanent waste."
He was condemned unanimously three hundred years after his death. This is the timeline. Write the idea in 230. Get condemned in 553. The idea continues anyway, underground, in the monastics, in the mystics, in everyone who reads the Psalms late at night and feels something that doesn't match the official position on final destinations, something more like opening than closing, something more like return than disposal.
IF: All rational souls were created equal.
IF: The fall is the result of free movement away from God.
IF: The movement is not irreversible.
THEN: The project is still running.
THEN: The restoration is ongoing.
THEN: Nothing has been permanently deleted.
THEN: The Hexapla exists somewhere.
THEN: The jar is still in the river.
THEN: YOU ARE STILL IN THE RIVER.
THEN: This is not a warning.
THEN: This is the gospel according to column seven.
Jerome translated Origen's homilies into Latin. Fourteen of them. Carried the ideas across from Greek to Latin, changed the clothes without changing the body, added them to the archive of Western thought where they would sit and trouble comfortable people for the next seventeen hundred years. He praised Origen. He later, under political pressure, distanced himself from Origen. He went on translating Origen's methods if not his conclusions, using the textual tools Origen had built, standing on the Hexapla like a ladder.
You can condemn a ladder. You can declare it heretical. You still need it to reach the thing you're trying to reach.
Chapter XI
Column Seven
The chapter that doesn't appear in the canonical table of contents. The version found in a jar. The translation with no attribution.
There is a version of this story in which no one is a saint and no one is a heretic and everyone is just a person trying to get the words right before the light fails.
Jerome in his cell in Bethlehem, 405 AD or thereabouts, the Vulgate substantially complete, the commentaries ongoing, Paula dead — she died before him, she always worked harder than him, she burned through faster, which is what happens when you work that hard in grief — and Jerome working by lamplight, the skull watching, the pile of manuscripts geological in its depth, the languages overlapping in his head now, Hebrew becoming Greek becoming Latin in real time, a live translation engine, a man who has become the process.
What does he think about in these hours? We have the letters. The letters are furious and precise and brilliant and occasionally wrong and never boring. But the letters are not the thought before the letter, the thought that doesn't make it to the page, the thought that lives in the room with the skull and the lamp.
✦ ✦ ✦
He thinks about his father. Whether his father read. He thinks about Origen's father. Leonides in the cell, the letter from the seventeen-year-old son, the instruction to be brave, which is what you say when you know the other person is going to die and there's nothing else to offer but the dignity of how. He thinks about what happens to the accumulated words. Whether words persist. Whether the Hexapla is gone or whether gone is a category that doesn't apply to ideas the way it applies to papyrus.
He doesn't believe in apokatastasis. He's on record. He condemned it when it was politically necessary to condemn it, and the condemning felt bad in the way that doing politically necessary things feels bad, which is a specific kind of bad that leaves a residue, that shows up in the quality of the lamplight at three AM in a monastery cell in Bethlehem with a skull on the desk.
The sixth column is Theodotion.
The seventh is the jar.
The eighth is what you find
when you're not looking for anything
and your hands are already in the river
and the water is the temperature
of the air and you can't feel
where you end.
Origen called it restoration.
Jerome called it translation.
The jar called it
nothing.
The jar was just the jar.
The words were inside.
Someone put them there.
Someone will find them.
Column seven is always
the one you weren't
prepared for.
Jerome died around 420 AD, in Bethlehem. The lion, if there was a lion, was there. The skull was there. The manuscripts were there, filling the monastery, organized and annotated and cross-referenced in multiple languages, the greatest private library in the ancient world, the life work of a man who spent five years in a desert eating nothing and thinking about women and came back and put it all into words.
The words remained. The Latin spread. The West organized itself around it, built its liturgy around it, its legal system borrowed its cadences, its philosophers argued with its prepositions, its painters put the lion in and the skull in and the beautiful light falling through a stone window onto an open book, the book always open, always mid-translation, always in the act of carrying something from one language into another, always losing a little, always finding a little, always in the beautiful terrible middle of the crossing.
Between the Hebrew and the Latin
there is a space.
The space is not silence.
The space is where the translator lives —
in the between, in the not-yet-arrived,
in the version that is always almost
the right words.
The Hexapla is lost. The jar is somewhere in the river. Origen's father is not coming back. Paula is not coming back. The dancing girls in the desert are not coming back, which is either the point of the asceticism or its failure depending on which column you're reading from.
The old Pope is very dead. Rome fell. The Vulgate survived Rome falling, survived the Reformation calling it into question, survived the Council of Trent declaring it authoritative in 1546, survived the twentieth century which was harder on texts than any council, survived into this moment, this light, this screen you're reading on which is also a kind of translation device, which is also a kind of Hexapla, multiple columns, multiple versions, the same document rendered differently depending on the language of your browser, the resolution of your screen, the time of day, the particular quality of your hunger.
Jerome sharpens his stylus. Origen adds a column. Paula turns a page in the Hebrew. The lion, if there is a lion, breathes in the corner. The skull watches.
The lamp stays lit a little longer.
—fin.
▌ END OF TRANSMISSION ▌
HEXAPLA
ORIGEN OF ALEXANDRIA — c.185–c.254 AD
ST. JEROME — c.347–420 AD
THE HEXAPLA — compiled c.240 AD / lost
THE VULGATE — commissioned 382 AD / still in use
THE JAR — found / contents lost / question open
