Annotatio CCLV

”And the Lord God prepared an ivy [a gourd].” — Jonah 4:6

Jerome, in the translation of this passage, was noted [criticized] by very many of the ancients, because, for that which the LXX interpreters translated κολοκύνθη, that is, “a gourd,” he turned “ivy.”¹ Rufinus, in the second book of the Invectives, deriding him, says: “After the world has grown old, and all things are urged toward the end, let us write even upon the sepulchres of the ancients — that they too may know, who here read otherwise — that Jonah did not have the shade of a gourd, but of ivy; and again, when the lawgiver shall have willed [it], not even ivy, but [the shade] of a shrub.” Augustine, in the third [letter] to Jerome, jokes with an inserted fable. To each Jerome, rendering like for like, responds to Rufinus (his name being changed) thus, in the commentaries on Jonah: “Canthelius — that is, a huge ass, slow and dull, of the most ancient race of the Cornelii, or, as he himself boasts, of the stock of Asinius Pollio — is long since said, at Rome, to have accused me of sacrilege, because for ‘gourd’ I translated ‘ivy.’ He feared, forsooth, lest, if for gourds ivy should be born, he might not have whence he might occultly and darkly drink; and in very truth, in those little gourd-vessels — which the common [people] call saucomariae [drinking-cups] — the [companions] of the Apostles are wont

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to shadow forth images: whence also he took to himself a name not his own. But if vocables are so easily changed, that for ‘Cornelii, seditious tribunes,’ [one may write] ‘Aemilii, consuls’ — I wonder why it be not licit for me to translate ‘ivy’ for ‘gourd.’ But let us come to serious matters. For ‘gourd,’ or ‘ivy,’ we read in Hebrew קיקיון (kikaion), which also in the Syriac and Punic tongue is called elkeroa*. It is, moreover, a genus of shrub, or a little tree, having broad leaves in the manner of a vine-tendril, and a most dense shade, sustaining itself by its own trunk; which in Palestine grows most frequently, and especially in sandy places; and, in a wonderful manner, if thou cast the seed into the ground, it quickly, being nourished, springs up into a tree, and within a few days [that] which thou hadst seen a herb, thou findest a little tree. Whence also we, at the same time in which we were interpreting the Prophets, wished to express the name itself in the Hebrew tongue, because the Latin speech did not have this species of tree; but we feared the grammarians, lest they should find licence for caviling, and feign either beasts of India, or mountains of Boeotia, or certain portents of this sort: and so we followed the old translators, who also themselves interpreted ‘ivy,’ which in Greek is called κισσός; for they did not have whence they might say [it] otherwise.*”

These things Jerome, to Canthelius; but to Augustine, in the epistles, he writes back this passage in this manner: “In an epistle of thine of this kind thou weavest a fable. A certain [bishop], our brother and fellow-bishop, when he had appointed thy interpretation to be read in the Church over which he presides, [something] put down far otherwise than it was — inveterate in the sense and memory of all, and chanted through so many successions of ages — [and thereupon] there was made so great a tumult in the people, especially the Greeks arguing and crying out the calumny of falsity, that the Bishop (for that city was Oea) was compelled to demand the testimony of the Jews. Whether these, by unskillfulness or by malice, responded that this was [so] in the Hebrew codices which the Greeks and Latins had, and were saying, is uncertain. Why [say] more? The man was compelled to correct [it] as though a lie, wishing, after the great peril, not to remain without a congregation. Whence also it seems to us that sometimes, in some things, thou too couldst be deceived. Thou sayest that I translated something badly in the prophet Jonah, and that, by a sedition of the people crying out on account of the dissonance of one word, the Bishop almost lost his priesthood. And what that is which I badly interpreted, thou withdrawest, taking away from me the occasion of my defense — lest, whatever thou shouldst say, it be dissolved by my responding: unless perhaps, as [it was] very many years ago, the gourd comes into the midst, [thou] asserting that in those times Cornelius and Asinius Pollio [charged] that I had translated ‘ivy’ for ‘gourd,’ upon which matter, in the commentary on the prophet Jonah, we have more fully responded. I ask, at the end of the epistle, that thou compel not a resting old man, and once a veteran, to militate again, and again to be imperilled concerning [his] life. Thou, who art young, and constituted in the pontifical summit, teach the peoples, and enrich the Roman households with the new fruits of Africa: it suffices me, with a hearer and a poor little reader, to whisper in a corner of the monastery.”