Intermediate Thinking

Extract

Apologists for the Classics are apt to concentrate on the excellence of their matter and the perfection of their form. Much has been done, and notably in these latter days by Dr. Gilbert Murray and Sir Richard Livingstone, to enable English readers to appreciate the content of Greek and Latin literature by translations of the highest merit. But no translation can reproduce the perfection of the form, and nowadays there appears to be a tendency to accept this loss.

The reader of a translation may be compared with a man who flies in an aeroplane over a mountain. True, he gets the view; but without the peculiar satisfaction that comes to one who has climbed the mountain itself. The view may even be a wider one, but it is robbed of the detail that the climber has been able to enjoy at every stage of his climb. Indeed, the detail is distorted, and often false. Still, the aviator gets a splendid view, and it is pointless to minimize its splendour. All I would maintain is that it is a different view. This is recognized by the climber if he flies over the heights he has climbed, or by the man who has read the Odyssey in the original if he reads it again in ‘Butcher and Lang’.

But what of those who never get beyond the foot-hills, those from whose eyes the mountain tops, and even their lower eminences, are concealed by huge walls of rock, which none but experts can scale? These humble strivers often wonder whether they are not wasting their time in plunging about on the nursery slopes; and their instructors must often wonder too whether they are doing any good by dragging often unwilling pupils through the declensions and conjugations, and by getting them somehow or other up to the standard of the School Certificate.