Selected Dialogues of Plato: The Benjamin Jowett Translation (Modern Library Classics) - Softcover

Plato

 
9780375758409: Selected Dialogues of Plato: The Benjamin Jowett Translation (Modern Library Classics)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0375758402 ISBN 13: 9780375758409
Verlag: Random House Publishing Group, 2001

Inhaltsangabe

Benjamin Jowett's translations of Plato have long been classics in their own right. In this volume, Professor Hayden Pelliccia has revised Jowett's renderings of five key dialogues, giving us a modern Plato faithful to both Jowett's best features and Plato's own masterly style.

Gathered here are many of Plato's liveliest and richest texts. Ion takes up the question of poetry and introduces the Socratic method. Protagoras discusses poetic interpretation and shows why cross-examination is the best way to get at the truth. Phaedrus takes on the nature of rhetoric, psychology, and love, as does the famous Symposium. Finally, Apology gives us Socrates' art of persuasion put to the ultimate test--defending his own life.

Pelliccia's new Introduction to this volume clarifies its contents and addresses the challenges of translating Plato freshly and accurately. In its combination of accessibility and depth, Selected Dialogues of Plato is the ideal introduction to one of the key thinkers of all time.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Dr. Hayden Pelliccia is associate professor and chair of classics at Cornell University.

Plato (c. 428 B.C. -- 347 B.C.) was a student of Socrates. He founded the Academy in Athens, the prototype of the modern university, whose most famous member was Aristotle.

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ett's translations of Plato have long been classics in their own right. In this volume, Professor Hayden Pelliccia has revised Jowett's renderings of five key dialogues, giving us a modern Plato faithful to both Jowett's best features and Plato's own masterly style.

Gathered here are many of Plato's liveliest and richest texts. Ion takes up the question of poetry and introduces the Socratic method. Protagoras discusses poetic interpretation and shows why cross-examination is the best way to get at the truth. Phaedrus takes on the nature of rhetoric, psychology, and love, as does the famous Symposium. Finally, Apology gives us Socrates' art of persuasion put to the ultimate test--defending his own life.

Pelliccia's new Introduction to this volume clarifies its contents and addresses the challenges of translating Plato freshly and accurately. In its combination of accessibility and depth, Selected Dialogues of Plato is the ideal introduction to one of the key thinkers of all ti

Aus dem Klappentext

ett's translations of Plato have long been classics in their own right. In this volume, Professor Hayden Pelliccia has revised Jowett's renderings of five key dialogues, giving us a modern Plato faithful to both Jowett's best features and Plato's own masterly style.

Gathered here are many of Plato's liveliest and richest texts. Ion takes up the question of poetry and introduces the Socratic method. Protagoras discusses poetic interpretation and shows why cross-examination is the best way to get at the truth. Phaedrus takes on the nature of rhetoric, psychology, and love, as does the famous Symposium. Finally, Apology gives us Socrates' art of persuasion put to the ultimate test--defending his own life.

Pelliccia's new Introduction to this volume clarifies its contents and addresses the challenges of translating Plato freshly and accurately. In its combination of accessibility and depth, Selected Dialogues of Plato is the ideal introduction to one of the key thinkers of all ti

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Introduction

Having the task behind me, I can propose with some seriousness what I did not begin to guess when it still lay ahead of me: namely, that revising someone else's translations of works of Plato is not much less demanding than translating them afresh. That raises the question, Why stick with Jowett's old versions at all--why not simply produce new ones? I have consulted many of the translations produced since Jowett's, many of them up to date in every possible sense, and Jowett's, in my judgment, remain superior, in the most important respects, to them all. Jowett has a better command not just of English prose style, but of English prose styles, and that gives him a great advantage in rendering the language of a master of variation like Plato. In a work like the Symposium, to take a notable example, Plato puts on display his version of the idiosyncratic speaking styles of a group containing two dramatists of genius, plus a less original third who was ranked in antiquity as the greatest tragic poet after Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides; of the remaining four speakers, one, the drunken Alcibiades, was reckoned by his contemporaries to be the most all-around brilliant member of his generation. (The longest speech is by Socrates, on whom see below.)

Jowett's successors, especially the more recent ones, are hampered by the contemporary abhorrence of any style other than the sponta same thing as the plain style)--though Jowett may sometimes have erred too much in the other directions. Modern tastes seem to coerce modern translators into adopting one or the other of two approaches only: the uniformly casual and colloquial, or the uniformly, and dryly, literal--neither approach likely to produce a particularly happy version of Plato's more literary works, which are those preeminently on display in this edition. Jowett, in comparison, had much greater freedom than we do--when Plato's speakers soar, Jowett often succeeds remarkably well in soaring with them--and we can follow along without too much embarrassment: after all, we expect such flights in nineteenth-century writers. Furthermore, I suspect that there are many besides me who actually prefer to think and find that the speech of such personages as Plato depicts might be more stylish, subtler, richer, and more accomplished than what we are used to hearing from our own friends and selves.

The revisions I have attempted are of two kinds: first, I have incorporated scholarly advances made in the establishment and interpretation of the Greek text since Jowett's time, in which category I include changes imposed where I disagree with Jowett's interpretation or think he made a mistake (sometimes Jowett changed the order of sentences, for example; I have tended to restore the order of the original). Second, I have removed archaisms or affectations of or in Jowett's English--those thatstrike me as likely to strike my contemporaries as ridiculous or, at best, off-puttingly quaint. For example, I change Jowett's "the tale of love was on this wise" to "the tale of love was like this." "What say you to going?" becomes "What do you say to going?" "Please to see to this" becomes "Please see to this." Adjustments of this basic tendency have been made widely and deeply. For example, the opening sentence of the Symposium is rendered by Jowett "Concerning the things about which you ask to be informed I believe that I am not ill-prepared with an answer"--which manages to be both stilted and a little arch in the high Victorian Oxford manner. The Greek, on the other hand, is somewhat informal and quite intimate; we are clearly overhearing a conversation that is already in progress, and is conducted among friends; the speaker, Apollodorus, uses an idiom that, while not quite diffident, is urbanely removed from the self-assertive: "Actually, it turns out that I am quite well up on the matter you are asking about." That is a fairly radical departure from Jowett's text. It must be emphasized, however, that I have not found the need for such significant tampering to be spread evenly through the works translated here: some passages have been subjected to extensive adjustment, others have been barely touched.

At this point, a word about sex would be appropriate, or at least about sex as it connects in a translator's mind to questions of language and style. Many of the changes I have made in revising Jowett comply with changes in taste that have occurred between Jowett's time and our own, and the public discussion of sex is a matter about which tastes have changed rather dramatically. Since readers can be assumed to have an interest in this subject, it seems worth getting it out in the open.

Contemporary readers may automatically assume that since Jowett was a Victorian,
his translation of ancient Greek works largely devoted, as, for example, the Phaedrus and the Symposium are, to the joys (or at least the theoretical joys) of male homosexual love must be full of puritanical euphemisms and bowdlerizations of the frank and uninhibited original texts. Jowett is in fact not so prudish, and, more important, the originals do not even approach the lewd. When a speaker is referring unambiguously to physical sex acts--for example, a young boy's complying with the sexual initiatives of an older male suitor--Jowett says things like "the boy grants his lover this favour," which may strike us as coy. The fact of the matter is, however, that "grant a favor" is not a bad literal translation of the most characteristic Greek verb used in such contexts, charizesthai (cognate with the word from which our "charity" derives). Jowett's version, as it turns out, is misleading, but not because of any lack of literal accuracy--his infidelity to the original is rather a result of situating his literal rendition into an alien cultural context: in Greek, the association of charizesthai with sexual compliance is so common and consistent that the word is completely clear and hence completely uneu-phemistic; in the cultures of both Victorian and present-day English, to refer to sexual submission as "granting a favor" is coy. In such instances as this I have nudged the renderings in the direction of a greater frankness, without, I hope, descending into the inaccurately vulgar. I have, for example, permitted paederastia to emerge as either "pederasty" or "boy-love" instead of "the love of youths," which is too sanitized. The essential fact guiding my efforts is that those people in Plato who speak of such matters are not as a rule leering, or coy, or indecent, but consistently urbane and, in many instances, amusedly detached.

The translation of passages that treat sexual matters invites discussion of the sexual matters themselves. Many readers of the Symposium and the Phaedrus in particular may be taken aback by some of the assumptions revealed in the characters' talk. Such readers might guess that the persons there depicted by Plato constituted an isolated, specifically homosexual group, or might generalize to the conclusion that pederasty was a much more open and widespread practice in Classical Greece than in the Western world of today. Both conclusions would be largely wrong, though each contains an element of truth. The evidence certainly does suggest that the average Greek male of the Classical period would be comparatively unsurprised and unimpressed if he detected bisexual impulses in his male acquaintance or even in himself (there are very few mentions of female homosexuality in the early periods--Aristophanes' speech in the Symposium contains one of the first--while references to male homosexuality, especially with insulting intent in the writings of comic poets such as, again, Aristophanes, are innumerable). On the other hand,...

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Verlag
Random House Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2001
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0375758402
ISBN 13 
9780375758409
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
352
Kontakt zum Hersteller
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gpsr@libri.de
gpsr@libri.de

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