Careful readers of this column will know that the science fiction of “Murray Leinster,” which was the pseudonym of Will F. Jenkins, has been on my mind for the past couple of issues. Another of his works has crossed my path now: the best-known of his stories, “First Contact” (1945), which deals —brilliantly—with the problems that humans will face on their initial encounter with an alien starship in interstellar space.

The first problem, of course, is figuring out how to speak with the aliens. Leinster solves this in his usual efficient way: “ ‘We’ve hooked up some machinery,’ said Tommy, ‘that amounts to a mechanical translator.’ ” After some plausible-sounding engineering talk about frequency modulation and short-wave beams, Tommy goes on to tell his captain, “We agreed on arbitrary symbols for objects, sir, and worked out relationships and verbs and so on with diagrams and pictures. We’ve a couple of thousand words that have mutual meanings. We set up an analyzer to sort out their short-wave groups, which we feed into a decoding machine. And then the coding end of the machine picks out recordings to make the wave groups we want to send back. When you’re ready to talk to the skipper of the other ship, sir, I think we’re ready.”

All very neat and clever. Communication is opened between the two ships, and Leinster can proceed to the real focus of the story—the ticklish issue of interstellar diplomacy. If this is not the first use in science fiction of that handy gadget, the electronic translating machine, it is certainly one of the earliest and best. From then on, spacefarers voyaging into alien territory in the pages of magazines like Astounding and Galaxy routinely uncorked their translating machines as needed, thus allowing them to get on to their interstellar tasks and the authors to get on to their story’s plot requirements.

All very convenient for us writers. Your protagonist comes across an alien, pulls out a device no bigger than an iPod (and how that great gadgeteer Murray Leinster would have loved iPods!) and interspecies communication becomes as easy as Pi. But it’s all a little on the glib side, too. How well, one wonders, would these marvelous translating machines work in reality? In a 2003 column that discussed the vagaries of the here-and-now translating programs (terrestrial languages only) that are available all over the Internet I had this to say:

Science fiction writers, as you know, are in the habit of equipping their spacefaring heroes with translating devices that swiftly and accurately render unfamiliar alien languages into lucid English. We have always suspected that creating such a device would be, of course, easier said than done. In Kim Stanley Robinson’s 1990 story “The Translator,” which pokes lethal fun at the concept of a translating machine, a hapless Earthman meeting with two alien species at once has one group tell him things like “Warlike viciously now descendant fat food flame death” while the other comes through the translating gizmo with sounds that can be translated, the machine says, as “1. Fish market. 2. Fish harvest. 3. Sunspots visible from a depth of 10 meters below the surface of the ocean on a calm day. 4. Traditional festival. 5. Astrological configuration in galactic core.”

What causes me now to reflect once again on the unlikelihood of our getting to understand the speech of alien beings is my stumbling across a choice example of mistranslation of a language we know very well—Latin—done not by a computer but by actual human beings, highly intelligent ones, a translation that has been bungled and rebungled for hundreds of years until we no longer can be sure of the original meaning.

In a 1953 essay by the Swiss scholar Herbert Luthy on the writings of the philosopher Montaigne I came upon a Latin phrase that was new to me and left unexplained in Luthy’s text: Hic Rhodus, hic salta. I still remember some of the Latin that I studied more than fifty years ago, and my first attempt at a translation produced “Here is Rhodes, dance here.” Which made little sense to me; but then I recalled that in Italian, a language of which I have some knowledge, the verb saltare means “to jump.” Perhaps the phrase quoted by Luthy was late Latin, I thought; late Latin was practically Italian: “Here is Rhodes, jump here.” But that seemed just as nonsensical. Off I went to my Latin dictionary. I found the verb salire, meaning “to jump,” which gave rise to a later verb, saltare, which in Latin meant “to jump repeatedly,” i.e. “to dance,” from which the Italian verb for jumping came, though Italian has a different word meaning “to dance.” (“Salire,” in Italian, has lost its old Latin meaning and now means “to climb,” by the way.) I also found the noun saltus, meaning “a leap” or “a jump.” Well, whether jump or dance, the phrase still was baffling. So my next stop was Google.

The Google link for Hic Rhodus, hic salta traced the phrase back to one of Aesop’s fables. Aesop, if he existed at all, was a Greek who lived in the sixth century bc, but the earliest texts of his fables that have come down to us are Latin versions of the first or second century ad, and in those the phrase is given as Hic Rhodus, hic saltus, which means, essentially, “Here [is] Rhodes, here [make your] jump.” The fable concerns a fellow who has returned after having been away from home for a while and begins bragging about the feats of athletic valor that he had performed while traveling. In Rhodes, he claims, he took part in a long-jump contest and made such a jump that not even an Olympic athlete could equal it. Whereupon a skeptical bystander calls his bluff, saying, and I translate freely, “All right: let’s pretend that this is Rhodes. Now jump!”

That explained the phrase, but not why Herbert Luthy had used the imperative verb salta, with its connotation of dancing, in place of the Latin noun saltus, “a jump,” that we find in our texts of Aesop. The answer, I learned, is that Karl Marx is to blame, or maybe Fried-rich Hegel.

Hegel, it seems, had used the phrase—first in Greek, and then in Latin with saltus—in the preface to his Philosophy of Right (1821). He doesn’t explain it, and in fact doesn’t seem to understand its Aesopian meaning, because he appears to think it connotes jumping over the entire island of Rhodes. He goes on to give it a German translation—Hier ist die Rose, hier tanze, meaning “Here is the rose, dance here.” Apparently the switch from “Rhodes” to “rose” involves a pun in Greek, substituting rodon (“rose”) for Rodos (“Rhodes”). The rose Hegel is talking about seems to be the symbol of the mystic order of the Rosicrucians, my source tells me, an explanation I did not find helpful.

Marx comes into the story because he is responsible for the garbled salta translation, perhaps working backward to Latin from Hegel’s pun. In a book published in 1852 he gave the phrase as Hic Rhodus, hic salta, which, since it refers to dancing rather than jumping, has no Aesopian meaning, and then in Hegel’s punning mistranslation, “Here is the rose, dance here.” Hegel, at least, seemed to know he was punning. But Marx appears to think that he is translating, although Rhodus in this context can only be the Latin name of the island off the coast of Asia Minor, not the Latin word for “rose,” which is, you will be relieved to know, rosa. Nevertheless, Marx’s essentially meaningless mistranslation of the Aesopian punchline, minus the rest of the fable, seems to have passed into philosophical discourse as a tag with the original Aesopian meaning, that is, something like “put up or shut up.”

An interesting twist now enters the tale: the possibility that phrase in its original form may not have included a reference to the island of Rhodes at all. As I noted above, the original Greek texts of Aesop’s fables have been lost for more than a thousand years. Aesop himself first is mentioned in Greek literature in the fifth century bc, more than a hundred years after he supposedly lived, but, like Homer, he is a legendary figure about whom we know nothing that can be regarded as trustworthy. Probably someone of that name did compose some fables, but other fables that we regard as the work of Aesop may well have been the work of others, and the biographical information we have about him is best thought of as fiction.

A biography of the scholar Deme-trius of Phalerius dating from the fourth century bc credits Deme-trius with having compiled a collection of “Aesopic fables,” but his book has not survived to our time. For our knowledge of the fables ascribed to Aesop we must turn to several Latin translations dating from the early days of the Roman Empire, one by a certain Babrius, another by a certain Phaedrus. And in the case of the fable of the boastful jumper, one student of the fables suggests, these early translators may have given us an inaccurate version of the Greek original.

I’ve already mentioned that the Greek name for the island of Rhodes is Rodos. But rodos, without the capital letter (and the early Greeks were very haphazard about capitalizing), is the Greek word for the long rod that pole-vaulters use to propel themselves over the bar. So the original tale may have finished with the skeptical onlooker saying, “All right: here’s a rod. Now let’s see you jump!” By using the wrong meaning for rodos, the Latin translator was forced to insert Rhodes as the site of the braggart’s exploit, and, later, Karl Marx (with some help from Hegel) added another layer of confusion by using rodon, “rose,” instead of rodos, “Rhodes” or “rod.”

If you have been having difficulty following this tangled tale, let me assure you that you are not the only one. I have taken you through it simply to show you that translating from one language to another is no easy matter. Classical Greek was still a living language in the time of Tiberius Caesar when Phaedrus was making his Latin translation of Aesop, and yet it is possible that Phaedrus misunderstood the Greek text’s use of rodos and thus brought the isle of Rhodes into the tale. Hegel, who, like all educated men in the nineteenth century, was quite at home in Latin and Greek, had not fully understood the Latin text of the proverb where it mentions Rhodes, and then had—deliberately, it seems—given it a further twist to make it read “Here is the rose, dance here,” which Marx—who surely knew the classical languages also—picked up and passed along, making it available now in transmogrified form for Herbert Luthy to baffle me with a century later. If these brilliant men couldn’t get one of Aesop’s fables straight, what luck do you think a translating machine is going to have with the poetry of Betelgeuse XIX?