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The Penguinification of Plato1
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2009
Extract
‘Translations (like wives) are seldom faithful if they are in the least attractive.’ In an age of translations (I say nothing of unfaithful wives), Roy Campbell's mot is a salutary reminder that attractiveness in a version may conceal gross infidelity to the content and meaning of the original; and that even if by some miracle a translator should succeed in reconciling the demands of readability and accuracy, his work is necessarily ‘at best an echo’ of the ancient text, or—to use Platonic language—a copy reproducing its model only imperfectly.
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- Copyright © The Classical Association 1975
References
page 19 note 2 Poetry Review, 06/07 1949.Google Scholar
page 19 note 3 Borrow, George, The Bible in SpainGoogle Scholar, ch. 25: ‘Translation is at best an echo.’
page 25 note 1 See CQ xxiii (1973), 232–44, esp. 237.Google Scholar
page 26 note 1 Aristotle, De Anima (Cambridge, 1907), vii.Google Scholar
page 27 note 1 See my BICS Suppl. 28 (1972), note 119.Google Scholar
page 27 note 2 The Dialogues of Plato, i (3rd ed., Oxford, 1892), p. xxii.Google Scholar
page 28 note 1 Op. cit. xvi–xvii.