ABSTRACT
As an integral part of humanist learning, translation “looks like” any other kind of reading and writing. But the many paintings of Jerome in his study are tributes to this particular form of scholarly activity. This same focus appears in a very different art form many centuries later. The contemporary translator’s study is explored in a remarkable film by the French-Israeli director Nurith Aviv, Traduire (2011), which begins with a site of translation that predates Jerome – the Isle of Pharos, where the Seventy gathered to translate the Bible from Hebrew into Greek. What clues, then, does this very deliberate emphasis on the spatial aspects of the translator’s workplace offer about the place of the translator in the world?
