![]() ![]() Perhaps, though, his contemporaries were less conscientious than he was. He thought hard about the relationship between Latin and Greek. ![]() Or was there? Cicero himself was a brilliant translator, particularly of Plato. But there seems to have been no point in sticking up for most contemporary translations of Greek books. He defends Latin as a language, and has a few positive-sounding things to say about the Latin literary tradition, even though he seems tacitly to accept its inferiority to Greek literature. The discussion is interesting in part because Cicero frankly acknowledges just how bad a lot of translations were in his day. He describes intellectuals who scorn to read philosophy in their native language, yet have no problem with Greek literary texts translated word-for-word ( ad verbum e Graecis expressas) into Latin. Here Cicero discusses a few of the problems involved with writing a philosophical work in the Roman world one of these is the Romans’ inferiority complex when it came to Classical Greek. ![]() Yet if you are interested in translation, you probably want to read the first few pages of Book One at the very least. Cicero’s De Finibus Malorum et Bonorum (“On the Ends of Good and Evil”) is a true classic – a text that many people own but few ever bother to read. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |