I’ve been reviewing Latin, with a view to reading some old commentaries and works of scholarship. I can’t say I’m a fluent reader (yet!), but I’m enjoying the process. Speaking of which …
Reading
a book of commentary extracts on Nehemiah, I came across a Latin
expression that puzzled me. C. F. Houbigant (18th century
Biblicist) is commenting on Neh. 2:1, וְלֹא־הָיִיתִי רַע
לְפָנָיו,
“Now I had not been beforetime sad in his presence” (KJV) – “him” being the
Persian emperor. Houbigant translates et non ei displicui, “and
I had not displeased him.” His comment is Nihil erat tam obvium, quam
ut sic interpretaremur. Et prorsus me fugit, quare nodum in sirpo quaesierint
plerique interpretes. “Nothing was more obvious, than that we should
interpret it so. And it utterly escapes me, why many interpreters have
sought a knot in a bulrush.”
That
last expression, nodum in sirpo, made little sense to me and
was obviously an idiom. The Internet, however, was soon able to point me to a
useful source. In a book entitled Letters and Exercises of the
Elizabethan Schoolmaster John Conybeare (1905), the teacher is
commenting on Latin idioms,, and we find the following: “Nodum in sirpo
quaerere : To seeke a knot in a rushe. A proverbe where one maketh a
thinge difficulte or doutfull, which is verie playne to be understode, or ys
scrupulouse in a thinge without cause.” Eureka! But where does the idiom come
from? Apparently it is classical and Plautus is cited as the earliest user of it.
The
meaning, I assume, derives from the fact that a rush (or bulrush) is a straight
stem, without complication or articulation; to seek for a "knot" in
it is to overlook the plain in a search for the complex.
The
default gloss of the key word in the Nehemiah passage is "bad," with
the exact sense varying by context. If most English versions choose
"sad," it is because of the conversation that follows, in which the
emperor notices that Nehemiah is gloomy or downcast. Houbigant's translation is
certainly not obvious.
(Also, by the way, apparently John Conybeare was a forebear of the early 20th century Orientalist F. C. Conybeare.)
