He’s the patron saint of translators, but I don’t know much about him. Perhaps it’s better that way – as a church father he seems a less than sympathetic character. And yet, above all, he’s a colleague. Always sympathetic as an icon: in his image, the familiar home office has a magical quality. The housecat by his desk is a lion. Jerome extracted a thorn from the lion’s paw; ever since, the tame lion served him, the Bible’s first translator. That much I know.
My favorite depiction of St. Jerome is a small etching by Rembrandt from 1648. In the center foreground, the only fully-realized thing in the picture, is a gnarled old pollard willow. On the right, sketched in beneath its only bough, Jerome hunches over his work, oblivious. Hair tousled, legs seeming wrapped around chair legs, glasses sliding to the end of his nose. A broad-brimmed, summery hat lies in the sun by his side. But the stacks of books in front of him are in shadow, obscured by hatched lines, a thicket of ink, as though Jerome’s wild scribblings were spreading past the page. The skull atop the books is barely identifiable, made mundane by its use as a paperweight: a forgotten memento mori. The desk itself is nearly impossible to make out: a branch, nothing more, the papers are peeling bark, the skull a tree gnarl.
On the left, the lion’s head looks out from behind the tree. Eyes closed, so it seems at first glance: the bliss of a cat at rest. But his eyes are open, alert; he gazes past the edge of the picture. He has thoughts of his own. And yet it is this absent gaze that shows the concord, the bond between him and his master: Were Jerome to look up from his work, he would gaze in the same direction. But he’d see only the tree trunk in front of his nose. Jerome in his cozy corner, sheltered from distractions. On the picture’s edge his lion, gaze roaming like his own mind’s eye.
This pairing with an animal is the essence of Jerome (at least the Jerome of iconography), what allows me, the heathen, to like him. But while St. Francis’ love of animals seems (again, in my naïve heathen eyes) to go along with a love of humanity, Jerome seems like someone who gets on better with animals than people. Which might even be a point in his favor.
An animal is the Other as such, that which is foreign to the human. Jerome’s lion is that Other, that foreignness in magical form. Only a sorcerer has a wild animal as his servant; that’s an older than Christian image. The witch’s cat, the wizard’s raven, the shaman’s wolf – in truth a spirit, a demon: Who is serving whom? This is the familiar. A paradox: the foreign is the familiar, the familiar is foreign. But this is the very logic of the image. The lion serves Jerome the abbot as a beast of burden, a herder of donkeys. He serves Jerome the translator though his sheer presence, by being foreign. Or does Jerome serve him? There is such harmony between them that the question seems irrelevant.
And so Jerome lives in peace with the Other – who has remained so utterly foreign. He has mastered what can’t be mastered. He has domesticated the lion, and he himself has run wild. His desk is overgrown and he hasn’t even noticed: Everything feels so familiar. Bit by bit, he’s submerged in the landscape. A good translator, they say, is invisible.