An Homage to Jerome

Larbaud's involvements with translation extended throughout his life. Having produced an outstanding translation of Coleridge's Ancient Mariner while still a schoolboy, he set about learning six languages and exploring the literatures of a dozen countries. Larbaud was the first Frenchman to study or translate Samuel Butler, Chesterton, Conrad, Hardy, and Stevenson; it was he who was responsible for the French translation of Ulysses. Chronologically among his last works, the volume Sous l'invocation de Saint Jérôme opens with this essay celebrating the exemplary figure and mighty achievement of the patron saint of translators: it was Saint Jerome who translated the Bible from Greek into Latin. To Saint Jerome the Christian West owes a large part of the Vulgate, its Book. In Saint Jerome all subsequent translators have had an ancestor and a model.