Apropos of Translation

Extract

In classics we appear to have reached the position where ‘the best translator is he who knows that all translation is impossible’. With regard to classical culture and classical education, there is an uneasy feeling that somehow the ‘legacy of Greece and the legacy of Rome’ cut less ice than they used to do. Their influence becomes more and more isolated and more and more of a strain to justify, as against modern commercial tendencies in the schools. And as the whole position of the classics does rest finally upon translation, in its broadest sense, into our own modes of thought, it seems that the fatalism into which most of the sincerest classicists are forced to-day is aptly expressed in the paradox quoted above.